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Google is testing expiring emails in the new Gmail

techcrunch.com

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Re: Google is testing expiring emails in the new Gmail

#161

Post by jraph »

caiw wrote: post #34
TremendousJudge wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

email was killed by spam, current email is sadly a walking zombie that's getting eaten by maggots

I have very little problem with spam; server-side filtering and client-side filtering make it nearly a non-issue for me. Email was no more killed by spam than online discussion threads were.

Spam is still an issue. When you set up a new mail server, you are likely to be filtered by big providers because they will consider you as spam. I've personally had issues with Microsoft and a local provider. This makes self hosting or running a small email provider hazardous, which is problematic. I never had issues with Google and Yahoo though.

I guess spam and spam filters also have an ecological impact even if spams don't end up in our inbox.

And there are false positives too. Because of spam, we are likely to miss a legitimate message one day or another.

And I regularly see phishing on my professional inbox.

So spam is still an issue even if it is hidden, for several reasons.

Re: Google is testing expiring emails in the new Gmail

#163

Post by dang »

iagooar wrote: post #126
matthewaveryusa wrote: post #7

What a bunch of hype garbage this is. If you send something in plaintext to a server it's already game over. If Google was serious about privacy it would pgp-encrypt everything so only the client, client-side can decrypt it, just like what protonmail does. pfff, 'self destructing emails', what a heaping pile of razzle dazzle no-ops that is -- this is more likely subliminal advertisement for the new mission impossible…

Sorry, but you clearly have no idea what you are talking about. What you are saying just sounds like a parrot repeating something without a thought.

Personal attacks are a bannable offence, regardless of how ignorant another comment may be. Please don't post like that here.

If you post a reply to a wrong comment, please explain how it's wrong while remaining civil. Then we all learn something, and you don't damage the community.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Google is testing expiring emails in the new Gmail

#164

Post by Widdershin »

sirclueless wrote: post #94
Froyoh wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should be able to copy by disabling JavaScript

The typical way to avoid this particular problem is only to load the content via JavaScript while copy/paste are presumed disabled.

What's to stop you from removing the event listeners disabling copy and paste through the console/dev tools?

Re: Google is testing expiring emails in the new Gmail

#165

Post by benrbray »

euyyn wrote: post #138
bad_user wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not having improvements is a feature. Yes, please leave email the way it is, because it works fine. It’s one of the few things that does. The only feature I want is end to end encryption. Google will never make encryption easy on their own because they’ve got perverse incentives not to.

It works fine for some definition of "fine".

What's wrong with it?

Re: Google is testing expiring emails in the new Gmail

#166

Post by eadmund »

simplicio wrote: post #14

Seems annoying. No one would rely on this to keep actual sensitive info private, since you can just screen shot it. On the other hand, part of the point of Gmail is that it makes your emails easily searchable, so you can quickly dig up info from old mail rather than have to make a note of said info in some sepearate program/notebook/whatever. But if emails are going to randomly be disappearing, it could really crippl…

> On the other hand, part of the point of Gmail is that it makes your emails easily searchable, so you can quickly dig up info from old mail rather than have to make a note of said info in some sepearate program/notebook/whatever.

It's slightly off-topic, but I've found since I switched to notmuch that offline search is much faster than online search. I can dig through my trove of gigabytes of email in fractions of a second: queries feel as though they're instantaneous.

This is a case where free software has caught up to & exceeded Google. It's pretty wonderful!

Re: Google is testing expiring emails in the new Gmail

#167

Post by kome »

vatueil wrote: post #159
sp332 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Paypal still sends me someone else's email because they signed up with myemail@gmail.com whereas I signed up with my.email@gmail.com. Apparently there's some way to make an account there where the email is considered secondary and they just never verify it.

That's a problem with PayPal, not Gmail. You can't register "myemail" if someone else has already registered "my.email", so PayPal must not have verified the address (unless you accidentally clicked the verification link yourself). There was an article posted recently that complained about how Netflix lets people create multiple accounts using dot variations of the same Gmail address, and plenty of people pointed out…

Well, it's Google that behaves in non-standard way. Let's say that the user verified the email by mistake: the error and misunderstanding is created by google nonstandard particles, not PayPal.

Re: Google is testing expiring emails in the new Gmail

#168

Post by matte_black »

Widdershin wrote: post #164
sirclueless wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The typical way to avoid this particular problem is only to load the content via JavaScript while copy/paste are presumed disabled.

What's to stop you from removing the event listeners disabling copy and paste through the console/dev tools?

You could use that CSS rendered font someone made a while ago to make it into an uncopyable text.

Re: Google is testing expiring emails in the new Gmail

#169

Post by inopinatus »

e12e wrote: post #95
harshulpandav wrote: post #28

"On the recipient’s side, the person was using the existing version of Gmail and received a link to view the confidential email. The recipient had to log into their Google account once again to view the content." IMO this is an open invitation to phishers.

Oh, so Gmail is finally moving away from email. Guess it was a question of time.

If anything it sounds closer in outline to djb's proposed Internet Mail 2000 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Mail_2000) in which initial storage is the responsibility of the sender, not the recipient, thereby making spam much more expensive.

This implementation, however - especially centralized tracking & policy enforcement, and HTTP as the delivery substrate instead of some properly designed protocol - typify everything I dislike about Google's product design choices. And if the open invitation to phishing wasn't bad enough, expiring messages sound to me like a built-for-purpose gaslighting tool.

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