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

121–130 of 220 posts

Re: What happened, Gmail?

#121

Post by coldtea »

heavenlyblue wrote: post #111
mseebach wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 p…

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

The difference is (a) those messages started to measure in the hundreds or thousands per day, not 5 of them at most like in the eighties, (b) people started using it for all kinds of work collaboration and organization. Not just some academics exchanging ideas.

Re: What happened, Gmail?

#122

Post by ReverseCold »

pmlnr wrote: post #95
nasredin wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One more stupid design: Deleting an email in a thread: Find a small button. Click. Find "delete". It is in the middle of the list. This is just simply stupid. Click. BTW you should delete your email. IIRC after 6 month (?) the government doesn't need a warrant to access it.

> the government Which country?

https://www.aclu.org/youre-not-gonna-need-warrant

Re: What happened, Gmail?

#123

Post by loup-vaillant »

Yetanfou wrote: post #76
loup-vaillant wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Spam can be removed by objective filters, Those "objective filters" prevent me from sending email from home (I have to relay through a non-residential IP). I receive about a dozen spam email per day (with occasional surges and lapses). My server accepts everything, and a simple local filter from my mail user agent (Evolution or Thunderbird, mainly) let few through, and false positives are very rare. I'm not sure wh…

A dozen spam messages per day? Lucky you. I did a tally on yesterday's harvest on my server and found the following: - 57 rejected messages designated as spam by SpamAssassin - 137 greylisted messages, most of which will end up being spam as those addresses which I communicate with regularly will be in the whitelist. - 181 connection attempts blocked at the gate due to protocol violations (most of them due to fake HE…

Ah, 8 people. If we remove the protocol violations, we get (57 + 137 + 144) / 8 = 42 spam message per person per day. Between 3 and 4 times my amount. I may be lucky, but frankly that doesn't sound extraordinary.

I also get no more than 1-2 spam message per week in my inbox.

Re: What happened, Gmail?

#124

Post by mikeash »

heavenlyblue wrote: post #111
mseebach wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 p…

Being spam free was revolutionary when Gmail was new. It also revolutionized email by offering enough space that you could actually keep an archive. When most providers offered maybe 10MB, Gmail offered 1GB.

If those don’t sound revolutionary today, it’s only because Gmail revolutionized things so hard that everyone had to jump on board.

Re: What happened, Gmail?

#125

Post by bromuro »

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.

Yes I can’t tolerate Material Design anymore, especially on iOS it is so frustrating. Too bad there’s no good alternatives to Google Maps because it’s the only Material app on my iPhone.

Beside this, the loading indicator in material design gives me ... anxiety. its animation is so uneven ... (like the windows 10 indicator which is even worse. i can’t believe this kind of irregular animations have been so widely accepted)

Re: What happened, Gmail?

#126

Post by tgb »

The author's experience with GMail seems to be the opposite of mine. The new features for disappearing/unprintable/etc. emails sound like they're just going to cause annoyances while Gmail sorting things into promotions and updates is absolutely fantastic. And I use the "forums" tab too. This is the "good method for telling users what they need to read" that the author wants - that's what Primary is. This is the way to help manage the number of emails you get. This is the efficient way to categorize and sort the emails that you get. It's really not Google's fault that you've got 6gb of emails in the promotion and updates tabs without realizing it - they've been prominently showing you the new emails you've received in those tabs every time for years now.

Here's the feature I keep wishing for in Google: when I attach a file, it should let me rename the file. I want to store it on my compute with a name that's meaningful for me and to send it to someone with a name that's meaningful for them. Eg: I want to have cv_google.pdf for my copy of my CV that I'm sending to Google for a job application but I want to have them receive it as cv_tgb.pdf to know that it's from "tgb". Similarly, when I download a file I want to be able to rename it.

Re: What happened, Gmail?

#127

Post by conradk »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #101
StavrosK wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I second Fastmail. Great company, great service, super fast (much faster than Gmail), and the import process is trivial. I've been a happy user for years and recommend them to everyone. Seriously, migration is as easy as pointing your MX records to them and running their import tool. It takes ten minutes (I thought switching off Gmail would take ages, but no, literal ten minutes).

This is phenomenal to hear (import process ease). Can’t wait for them to support multiple labels.

That would be great indeed!

I think the problem here is that this is a Gmail-specific, non-standard feature, meaning there is no specification that allows to implement this in a reliable, cross-client way.

However, Fastmail is working on something similar with JMAP.

I found this earlier HN comment to be really interesting: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16372835

Re: What happened, Gmail?

#129

Post by shaklee3 »

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…

Gmail is the only one that displays it as an email. All other clients and servers will just see it as a link. That's how they handle the self-destruction.

Re: What happened, Gmail?

#130

Post by heavenlyblue »

mikeash wrote: post #124
heavenlyblue wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 p…

Being spam free was revolutionary when Gmail was new. It also revolutionized email by offering enough space that you could actually keep an archive. When most providers offered maybe 10MB, Gmail offered 1GB. If those don’t sound revolutionary today, it’s only because Gmail revolutionized things so hard that everyone had to jump on board.

You're only seeing it from one perspective: from the perspective of a single non-power user - yes, Gmail made the difference.

But in terms of proper e-mail usage: be it through MS Exchange, University campuses, corporate servers - they made no difference. Everyone already had enough space there anyway, and spam filters worked - as they had enough email volume to detect attack. And they still use these systems.

Post reply on HN