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What happened, Gmail?

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Re: What happened, Gmail?

#111

Post by heavenlyblue »

mseebach wrote: post #85
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'…

> increasing hard questions

Over the past, what... 30 years? - e-mail remains what it had been in the first place: a protocol for exchanging messages.

You're still sending text. You're still attaching links to your messages if you'd like to send a large file. You're still trying to keep concise in your comm.

What have evolved, exactly? Sans encryption - that's not really a "hard question". Gmail's a great spam-free platform, but it doesn't add anything revolutionary.

Re: What happened, Gmail?

#112

Post by cdubzzz »

Waterluvian wrote: post #103
peatmoss wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might also consider registering a vanity domain to go with your Fastmail (or other) subscription. It’ll allow you to keep your email address even if Fastmail gets evil / bad in the future. When I bought my domain, it was before Gmail was as ubiquitous as it is today. My email was hosted by a mom and pop ISP. Then I moved to Gmail and later to Fastmail. Having my own domain is inexpensive, fun, and lets me maintai…

Good advice. I assume I can forward my Gmail because that address has been my address for as long as gmail has existed. This is just like cell numbers. You attach one to everything in your life and transitioning is near impossible. Glad the government forced free number transfer. If only emails worked the same way.

I had a bit of concern about this as well when I moved off Gmail after 12 years. I did not import my mail in to my new service (ProtonMail) and can really only recall one or two times I’ve had to look at the Gmail archive in the past two years.

I think that, similar to cell phone numbers, people get very attached to these contact points and changing them creates anxiety. I happen to have changed both email address and phone number (after five years) recently and I think it makes sense to do once in a while. Otherwise these things become seemingly permenant identifiers and I have enough of those already (:

Re: What happened, Gmail?

#113

Post by moltar »

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?

FastMail

Re: What happened, Gmail?

#114

Post by peatmoss »

Waterluvian wrote: post #103
peatmoss wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might also consider registering a vanity domain to go with your Fastmail (or other) subscription. It’ll allow you to keep your email address even if Fastmail gets evil / bad in the future. When I bought my domain, it was before Gmail was as ubiquitous as it is today. My email was hosted by a mom and pop ISP. Then I moved to Gmail and later to Fastmail. Having my own domain is inexpensive, fun, and lets me maintai…

Good advice. I assume I can forward my Gmail because that address has been my address for as long as gmail has existed. This is just like cell numbers. You attach one to everything in your life and transitioning is near impossible. Glad the government forced free number transfer. If only emails worked the same way.

Yes, I’d forward emails until you can get everyone trained over to using your new email address. I’ve done that in the past with mostly inactive emails that I got through professional or academic associations. Presumably Gmail still makes auto-forwarding reasonably easy.

Re: What happened, Gmail?

#115

Post by arkitaip »

0x00000000 wrote: post #105
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 Funny when you look at Chrome where they don't protect saved passwords to avoid giving users a "false sense of security and encouraging dangerous behavior"[1], which seems to be a valid argument here too [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6166886

It used to be that you had to use Chrome's dev tools to inspect a password field and change it to a text field to see someone's password. These days not even that is required as the password is plainly visible as a element attribute called data-initial-value.

Re: What happened, Gmail?

#116

Post by rrdharan »

benrbray wrote: post #110
dvfjsdhgfv wrote: post #70

What about sorting e-mails? By size, for example?

I think that's a very uncommon use case and I can't think of a time I've ever wanted to do that. I've sorted by "has-attachment" but why would you need to sort by size?

Well it becomes important when your .PST file is about to hit the 2GB limit and you need to find large attachments to delete.

https://www.lifewire.com/outlook-pst-files-size-limit-117334...

(NB: I’m being facetious, and agree with you - this, 15ish years ago, is really the last time I remember needing to sort by size)

Re: What happened, Gmail?

#117

Post by heavenlyblue »

jasode wrote: post #78
cup-of-tea wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like he's talking about a very specific use of email. I can't be the only person who actually writes letters to people using email and not expecting anything to end up on their "todo list".

>I can't be the only person who actually writes letters to people using email and not expecting anything to end up on their "todo list". Many like you definitely exist but your "pure 100% communications only" usage isn't what the Gmail enhancements (that many dislike) were trying to solve. The blog author, Avi Ashkenazi, wrote: >From a business perspective I understand that there are more people using Gmail than Cale…

The issue with this approach is that quite frankly - email by itself should be just like our water supply.

Better water exists, but it's not much better than the usual one. You can use water for many things, but it doesn't matter whose supply you're using.

E-mail must be kept that way: there's nothing to invent in terms of email itself. You can only invent on top of it. It's just like HTTP: HTTP/2 exists, but it doesn't change the idea of HTTP, it only evolves it.

Re: What happened, Gmail?

#118

Post by hshehehjdjdjd »

0x00000000 wrote: post #105
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 Funny when you look at Chrome where they don't protect saved passwords to avoid giving users a "false sense of security and encouraging dangerous behavior"[1], which seems to be a valid argument here too [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6166886

What possible protection could you have in a non-master password scenario? If you’ve decided that you don’t want the user to have to enter a password, it’s game over from a perspective of trying to keep the password from being retrieved by an attacker with local execution. Even with a master password, you’re only safe until you enter it, then the attacker has that info as well.

Re: What happened, Gmail?

#119

Post by coldtea »

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…

>Filtering on Gmail is outrageous, especially when you compare it to Sieve. No option to match on custom header, seriously?

What percentage of users would even know what a custom header is, much less ever attempt to match one?

Is that what one would call a basic feature lacking from Gmail, for its lack to guarantee a "seriously?"?

Re: What happened, Gmail?

#120

Post by rocky1138 »

nukeop wrote: post #7

Material Design is one of the worst things that ever happened to the design of websites, not only Google's but everyone's, since now so many are trying to copy it. I have no idea why anyone would want to see it anywhere.

I came here to say the same thing. I read this and my eyes rolled so far they almost did an entire rotation:

> Google are the creators of one of the best design systems every created in tech, Material Design.

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