I switched to https://mailinabox.email a while back and really loving it. You rely on using a mail client rather than a webapp, but I’ve enjoyed having the control.
I thought MIAB provided a web client as well?
Basecamp’s founders are trying to start an email rebellion
41–50 of 219 posts
Re: Basecamp’s founders are trying to start an email rebellion
#42I’m disappointed in Hey so far. It’s a closed system (no IMAP). They are charging a premium price for it over Fastmail or Google Gsuite. There is no calendar. No ability to import old emails into it. Seems like they could have just released a mail app sitting on top of Fastmail and had more/better features from day one.
We need to stop using Fastmail as the go-to example of email done right. They recycle your email address once you stop paying. A great black hat technique is to gather up all Fastmail addresses you can find in the wild and poll them to see when they're available again. Then launch social engineering attacks from them to impersonate the previous user. I found this out the hard way. Amateur hour. At least DHH has said…
In my book "email done right" is using email addresses on your own domain.
Using @fastmail.com makes no sense to me. If being locked into somebody else's domain is acceptable, then Gmail is a better deal.
And if you still insist on using somebody else's domain, then all bets are off after you stop using that account. First of all because the service provider can always change their policies. Just like how when Yahoo announced in 2013 out of the blue that they'll start recycling usernames.
Fastmail is a paid service, you own that username for as long as you keep paying. The notion that you can take up resources, for free, for all eternity, is only sustainable for big companies like Google. And given how crowded @gmail.com is, I wouldn't put it past them to start recycling in a couple of years.
Re: Basecamp’s founders are trying to start an email rebellion
#43OMG, "The Screener" is something I've always wanted.
There's a lot to love about this.
Something I am nervous about is using a @hey.com email. Similarly to domain, it's a world-visible and sticky, but unlike domains, it isn't portable, the only options are: pay Basecamp forever, or lose access. gulp
Re: Basecamp’s founders are trying to start an email rebellion
#44>Most of the Basecamp team's recent rebelliousness, and seemingly the initial reason for building Hey, has to do with spy pixels. How can you tell the difference between a "spy pixel" and an image? Whatever criteria you use can be worked around. Email clients should not allow emails to initiate outgoing network connections... period ... and most of the good ones don't by default.
Seems like a simple correlation of size of the image vs. length of the url. Small images with long urls are suspect. Not sure what the work around would be. Edit: Also white/invisible pixels. Maybe number of visible/non-white pixels vs. url length.
How do you know image size and percentage of white or transparent pixels without loading the image?
Re: Basecamp’s founders are trying to start an email rebellion
#45I’m disappointed in Hey so far. It’s a closed system (no IMAP). They are charging a premium price for it over Fastmail or Google Gsuite. There is no calendar. No ability to import old emails into it. Seems like they could have just released a mail app sitting on top of Fastmail and had more/better features from day one.
I don't get how they can complain about Google stifling innovation in an open system since 2004 and then close off their counter-offering by not offering IMAP. I'm gonna stick with running my own mail server to get around Gmail. It's $5 a month, has a calendar, I can use any mail app I want to, I could import old emails if I cared to. I'm also sure I could get the "tracking pixel name-n-shame" feature they're so exci…
I use runbox.com and am very happy with it tbh, basically has everything you seem to be looking for (but you don't have to self-host which I never want to do for email).
Re: Basecamp’s founders are trying to start an email rebellion
#46While I am looking forward to their upcoming new service, you can't call it "to start a rebellion" when your protocol/approach is closed: To use Hey! you need to use the web client or their own apps. If other providers would follow that rebellion, we would have many many additional walled gardens.
> you can't call it "to start a rebellion" when your protocol/approach is closed
Why not? Those seem like mutually exclusive issues to me. I get that you might like their rebellion to be open, but nothing mandates it.
Re: Basecamp’s founders are trying to start an email rebellion
#47>Most of the Basecamp team's recent rebelliousness, and seemingly the initial reason for building Hey, has to do with spy pixels. How can you tell the difference between a "spy pixel" and an image? Whatever criteria you use can be worked around. Email clients should not allow emails to initiate outgoing network connections... period ... and most of the good ones don't by default.
All of the suggestions in this thread are good, but there are others. I spent a couple years working on this at messagecontrol.com to build an enterprise email tracker blocker, and I'm sure they have continued to enhance it since I left.
Re: Basecamp’s founders are trying to start an email rebellion
#48I like to have the same UI for all of my email accounts and the idea of yet another email address that is tied to a very unique workflow seems undesirable to me.
This could have been interesting if I could use it with arbitrary IMAP/SMTP accounts, but I have no idea how well their additional features could be mapped back to ordinary IMAP folders.
Re: Basecamp’s founders are trying to start an email rebellion
#49OMG, "The Screener" is something I've always wanted. There's a lot to love about this. Something I am nervous about is using a @hey.com email. Similarly to domain, it's a world-visible and sticky, but unlike domains, it isn't portable, the only options are: pay Basecamp forever, or lose access. gulp
Per the FAQ: if you paid for at least a year, you can then cancel and have your @hey.com forward all emails to another address of your choosing, forever.
Re: Basecamp’s founders are trying to start an email rebellion
#50I’m disappointed in Hey so far. It’s a closed system (no IMAP). They are charging a premium price for it over Fastmail or Google Gsuite. There is no calendar. No ability to import old emails into it. Seems like they could have just released a mail app sitting on top of Fastmail and had more/better features from day one.
We need to stop using Fastmail as the go-to example of email done right. They recycle your email address once you stop paying. A great black hat technique is to gather up all Fastmail addresses you can find in the wild and poll them to see when they're available again. Then launch social engineering attacks from them to impersonate the previous user. I found this out the hard way. Amateur hour. At least DHH has said…
Ok, so compare to protonmail or tutanota. The point is the price is high compared to other paid email providers. If you want to revolutionize email, you're not going to do it with a proprietary system that costs > $8 a month.