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Mining my mailbox for top email service providers

obem.be

51–60 of 110 posts

Re: Mining my mailbox for top email service providers

#51
post #23

I must admit that I was a bit shocked when I realized that the author had used javascript for this task. At first I assumed that he was scripting some webmail interface but then I saw that he was using 'emailjs-imap-client'. I understand that people use what they're familiar with and there seems to be a vibrant ecosystem for JS outside of the browser but it'll never not be weird seeing it take over what would once ha…

As as a hardcore Perler and JS eng of 20 years - yes, Perl or Python would've been the best tool for the job. Perl in particular due to its regex readability.

Re: Mining my mailbox for top email service providers

#52
post #23

I must admit that I was a bit shocked when I realized that the author had used javascript for this task. At first I assumed that he was scripting some webmail interface but then I saw that he was using 'emailjs-imap-client'. I understand that people use what they're familiar with and there seems to be a vibrant ecosystem for JS outside of the browser but it'll never not be weird seeing it take over what would once ha…

Isn't JavaScript much faster than Python these days?

Re: Mining my mailbox for top email service providers

#53
post #23

I must admit that I was a bit shocked when I realized that the author had used javascript for this task. At first I assumed that he was scripting some webmail interface but then I saw that he was using 'emailjs-imap-client'. I understand that people use what they're familiar with and there seems to be a vibrant ecosystem for JS outside of the browser but it'll never not be weird seeing it take over what would once ha…

Isn't JavaScript much faster than Python these days?

Was Python faster than javascript a long time ago? I'm not super old and javascript has always been way faster in my mind, but it's fine. Python has many great libraries for doing heavy computations very quickly.

Re: Mining my mailbox for top email service providers

#54

It's interesting that this is missing a lot of major enterprise marketing email providers. The author clearly isn't subscribing to things like Best Buy's weekly deal email, or Target cart reminders.

It's missing basically every major email marketing provider.

* Salesforce * IBM * Contact Contact * Campaign Monitor * HubSpot * ActiveCampaign

etc etc

Re: Mining my mailbox for top email service providers

#55
post #23

I must admit that I was a bit shocked when I realized that the author had used javascript for this task. At first I assumed that he was scripting some webmail interface but then I saw that he was using 'emailjs-imap-client'. I understand that people use what they're familiar with and there seems to be a vibrant ecosystem for JS outside of the browser but it'll never not be weird seeing it take over what would once ha…

Javascript is quite neat today. I play a lot with map/reduce and async/await and it's great.

Re: Mining my mailbox for top email service providers

#56
post #45

I know the results are biased given it's a sample from OP inbox but I'm surprised not so see https://postmarkapp.com/ here. I thought they were pretty popular.

I've never heard of them before this comment. Maybe they're popular only in certain regions.

Re: Mining my mailbox for top email service providers

#57
I had actually just tweeted about my woes dealing with email going to spam for no good reason from my GSuite account.

https://twitter.com/dustywes/status/1228733404826333185?s=21

I’m planning on doing a more thorough write-up on my solution (it’s convoluted), but my tl;dr is that email seems woefully broken at the moment. Hope my experience can be helpful for others dealing with the same issue.

Re: Mining my mailbox for top email service providers

#58
post #23

I must admit that I was a bit shocked when I realized that the author had used javascript for this task. At first I assumed that he was scripting some webmail interface but then I saw that he was using 'emailjs-imap-client'. I understand that people use what they're familiar with and there seems to be a vibrant ecosystem for JS outside of the browser but it'll never not be weird seeing it take over what would once ha…

It always annoys me when some general purpose utility or script is written in JavaScript because I refuse to install node on my computer.

Re: Mining my mailbox for top email service providers

#59
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chrome sandboxes fetch requests from extensions and tells the user what permissions the app is requesting, so it’s not actually that bad (barring bugs in the sandbox)

What do you mean with "sandboxes fetch requests"? That's not a valid countermeasure at all... The grandparent was worried about the extension stealing his email's contents.

Absolutely. If the extension injects JavaScript into the page to examine the email it can run a fetch in the context of that page.

I think the app store should warn that a page can send data to any website if it has permission to modify any page.

Re: Mining my mailbox for top email service providers

#60
post #18
post #4

Deliverability is a big marketing/selling point for all these providers & important selection criteria for their customers. So it'd be very interesting to see what % of emails for each provider landed in Inbox vs Promotions/Spam/Junk folder.

> So it'd be very interesting to see what % of emails for each provider landed in Inbox vs Promotions/Spam/Junk folder. Are those percentages really a good measure of deliverability? I mean, a significant portion of “one million dollars for you” scams in my Gmail spam folder are from @gmail.com addresses; that doesn’t say anything about gmail.com to gmail.com deliverability.

Gmail is somewhat a special case because email services are kinda forced to accept inbound Gmail, even though it's quite a large source of scams and phishing attempts today. But for others, they'll still readily get blacklisted for a little while here and there.

I was thinking about spam as I read the post too, since this is a problem I get to deal with almost daily. Marketo has a terrible signal-to-noise ratio and it can often end up blackholed on my network with nary a user noticing. Sendgrid is my next least-favorite email-as-a-service, and in fact I happened to have this article open in one tab and in another tab I had this morning's automated reports from some of my spam software showing that a pile of inbound messages from Sendgrid had tried to land at a list of nonexistent mailboxes -- someone was rolling through "andy@", "barbara@", "vijay@", "kenneth@", etc.

I have had very little trouble with Mailgun in this regard, so far, but that may only be because the spammers haven't fully adopted them yet.

As a sysadmin on the receiving side, I really loathe these services, they make my job significantly harder and more time consuming than it used to be.

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