Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

What happened, Gmail?

uxplanet.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 220 posts

Re: What happened, Gmail?

#81

Post by amoshi »

Jaruzel wrote: post #55
pmlnr wrote: post #32

Email was meant to be kept simple, and Google is making this exponentially hard with every single "design" iteration. Get off Gmail - it'll break your email. The article has very good points, especially when it touches the issue of "hidden" mail, like the promotions tab: there are labels and tabs. There should be only one system, and no, don't hide things from the user at this level. When there's 17k mails in promoti…

> Things like unprintable email is a bad joke. Unprintable? What if I connect to Gmail with mutt? It gives the sense of a false security. I'm not a GMail user, but can someone explains how this 'security' feature works? If a GMail user creates a 'secure' email and sends it to a non-GMail recipient (so it goes over SMTP/TLS), how is the DRM enforced at the other end. I know MS Outlook has DRM features.. but are they c…

If you for example send an expiring email, the recipient will receive an email with a link to some online storage where this expiration will be enforced, the email itself won't contain the content.

Re: What happened, Gmail?

#82

Post by mseebach »

Jaruzel wrote: post #55
pmlnr wrote: post #32

Email was meant to be kept simple, and Google is making this exponentially hard with every single "design" iteration. Get off Gmail - it'll break your email. The article has very good points, especially when it touches the issue of "hidden" mail, like the promotions tab: there are labels and tabs. There should be only one system, and no, don't hide things from the user at this level. When there's 17k mails in promoti…

> Things like unprintable email is a bad joke. Unprintable? What if I connect to Gmail with mutt? It gives the sense of a false security. I'm not a GMail user, but can someone explains how this 'security' feature works? If a GMail user creates a 'secure' email and sends it to a non-GMail recipient (so it goes over SMTP/TLS), how is the DRM enforced at the other end. I know MS Outlook has DRM features.. but are they c…

It's not "secure" and it's not "enforced", at least not in the strict senses of those words. It's a protection against accidents and carelessness, sensitive information being reply-all'd around in long threads that people aren't reading anymore, the accidental forward to an external party.

Many organisations for whom this is an attractive feature, have long had policies around emailing sensitive information, instead links are emailed, and securing access to the information is handled by the application. If the link is forwarded to the wrong person, all they can see is a login screen.

Re: What happened, Gmail?

#83

Post by erichurkman »

pmlnr wrote: post #46
TheDong wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their imap gateway is nonstandard to say the least. The labels vs folders thing is already a mess, but it also speaks a protocol that is just different enough from regular imap that most clients (e.g. thunderbird) have a different implementation with quirks for google-imap. Using those clients is sub-standard with google's imap implementation, and switching between them is more painful due to how each one handles goo…

This is true, I'm well aware of this, but at least there's still a choice. Unfortunately nothing is truly stopping Google to pull a Slack move and close the gateways... unless the amount of IMAP/SMTP users are significantly higher, than we know, or that those users are tech influencers Google don't dare to loose.

I would wager that G Suite users will keep IMAP/SMTP alive via Outlook and other enterprise deployments.

Re: What happened, Gmail?

#84

Post by Waterluvian »

pmlnr wrote: post #32

Email was meant to be kept simple, and Google is making this exponentially hard with every single "design" iteration. Get off Gmail - it'll break your email. The article has very good points, especially when it touches the issue of "hidden" mail, like the promotions tab: there are labels and tabs. There should be only one system, and no, don't hide things from the user at this level. When there's 17k mails in promoti…

If I want to take my 20GB of email out of Gmail and put it elsewhere for the next 15 years without having to think about it, where do I go?

Re: What happened, Gmail?

#85

Post by mseebach »

pmlnr wrote: post #32

Email was meant to be kept simple, and Google is making this exponentially hard with every single "design" iteration. Get off Gmail - it'll break your email. The article has very good points, especially when it touches the issue of "hidden" mail, like the promotions tab: there are labels and tabs. There should be only one system, and no, don't hide things from the user at this level. When there's 17k mails in promoti…

> Email was meant to be

Email isn't a religion and originalism isn't a meaningful framework for analysis.

Email started as a simple answer to a simple question, and has evolved from there to answer increasing hard questions. The original inventors totally failed to anticipate many important realities about email (most significantly, spam, but also encryption and signing), and email has evolved to deal with that.

You're free to keep using email as you believe it should be used, but you have no right to insist that other people hold back in adopting new ways of doing things that they feel suits them better.

Re: What happened, Gmail?

#86

Post by Gigablah »

pferde wrote: post #72
verletx64 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many things are we supposed to do as people? Everybody touts options spanning every domain going from email to mobile devices and it's like, oh it's just a bit of configuration/tweaking for a few hours and then you're good to go. So yeah, hand holding is good, because to be honest, I don't get up on a Saturday morning and say "oh boy I can't wait to setup my email filters, right after I tweak my Arch Linux instal…

I kind of get what you are saying - there are lot of things we should not be caring about and let automation take care of. But in my opinion, what is and is not important to someone is something deeply personal, and I find it scary that someone would want to relinquish control particularly over that. I see it as "can someone tie my shoelaces for me please?" level of non-responsibility. And it scares me.

The important question here is — why do we still put up with the archaic busywork of tying shoelaces?

I loved driving stick shift, but I’m not sorry to see it go either.

Re: What happened, Gmail?

#87

Post by zitterbewegung »

Waterluvian wrote: post #84
pmlnr wrote: post #32

Email was meant to be kept simple, and Google is making this exponentially hard with every single "design" iteration. Get off Gmail - it'll break your email. The article has very good points, especially when it touches the issue of "hidden" mail, like the promotions tab: there are labels and tabs. There should be only one system, and no, don't hide things from the user at this level. When there's 17k mails in promoti…

If I want to take my 20GB of email out of Gmail and put it elsewhere for the next 15 years without having to think about it, where do I go?

I would use fastmail https://www.fastmail.com/pricing/

I used to use it for awhile. Then I got some AWS credit so I setup Amazon Work Mail.

Re: What happened, Gmail?

#88

Post by ghaff »

pmlnr wrote: post #32

Email was meant to be kept simple, and Google is making this exponentially hard with every single "design" iteration. Get off Gmail - it'll break your email. The article has very good points, especially when it touches the issue of "hidden" mail, like the promotions tab: there are labels and tabs. There should be only one system, and no, don't hide things from the user at this level. When there's 17k mails in promoti…

I agree that things like unprintability probably give a false sense of security. But as far as how email is “supposed” to be I used an email system in the late eighties or so that had security features like that. They meant more then because it was originally a centralized terminal based system. Not everything was Unix.

Re: What happened, Gmail?

#89

Post by swiley »

pferde wrote: post #3

Among "needed innovations", the post lists: "A good method for telling users what’s important to read and what can wait for later." To me, it's downright scary that someone would want Google telling them what is important in their own mailbox. Personal responsibility bad, Hand-holding good, apparently.

This sort of thing is how we ended up with facebook’s ability to mass manipulate people.

Re: What happened, Gmail?

#90

Post by swiley »

rangewookie wrote: post #60

I created an account to comment on the good experience I was having with the update. I did a side-by-side comparison of the old UI and the new UI and I've changed my stance. The old one is a better "email" UI, but google is trying to mature the email experience. A big problem here is that email showing it's age. Google is eager to hide less common tools behind menus. They want to delete all of the old "manual" button…

I don’t seem why people prefer instant messengers, email does everything they can do.
Post reply on HN