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Basecamp’s founders are trying to start an email rebellion

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Re: Basecamp’s founders are trying to start an email rebellion

#61

Post by bad_user »

thayne wrote: post #55
bad_user wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Using your own domain has the same problem. If you ever stop paying for that domain, or lose it for some other reason, someone else could purchase it and start impersonating your email.

It's not the same thing, because by paying for it you have a binding contract and can switch providers too. If you don't pay for it, then you don't have a claim on that email address, as the terms of use can change at a moment's notice.

If paying for it is a problem, then pay it in advance for 10 years and setup automatic renewal. Also leave a digital will. You probably want to do that anyway.

Re: Basecamp’s founders are trying to start an email rebellion

#62

Post by elliottinvent »

upofadown wrote: post #8

>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.

I guess the "spy pixel" image URLs would all be unique, so by comparing the mail that was sent to different recipients you could reveal which were trackers and which were not. No idea if that's what they're doing.

Re: Basecamp’s founders are trying to start an email rebellion

#63

Post by stephenhuey »

bad_user wrote: post #42
hombre_fatal wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You can use a custom domain with FastMail, and they aren’t reading your mail to target ads at you.

Re: Basecamp’s founders are trying to start an email rebellion

#64

Post by exhaze »

bad_user wrote: post #61
thayne wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using your own domain has the same problem. If you ever stop paying for that domain, or lose it for some other reason, someone else could purchase it and start impersonating your email.

It's not the same thing, because by paying for it you have a binding contract and can switch providers too. If you don't pay for it, then you don't have a claim on that email address, as the terms of use can change at a moment's notice. If paying for it is a problem, then pay it in advance for 10 years and setup automatic renewal. Also leave a digital will. You probably want to do that anyway.

So you mean to say "email done your own uncompromising way"?

Re: Basecamp’s founders are trying to start an email rebellion

#65

Post by WrtCdEvrydy »

tobr wrote: post #44
baking wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Strip all params, hope for the best?

Re: Basecamp’s founders are trying to start an email rebellion

#66

Post by thayne »

bad_user wrote: post #61
thayne wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using your own domain has the same problem. If you ever stop paying for that domain, or lose it for some other reason, someone else could purchase it and start impersonating your email.

It's not the same thing, because by paying for it you have a binding contract and can switch providers too. If you don't pay for it, then you don't have a claim on that email address, as the terms of use can change at a moment's notice. If paying for it is a problem, then pay it in advance for 10 years and setup automatic renewal. Also leave a digital will. You probably want to do that anyway.

How is that not the same thing as paying for an email account with fastmail?

Re: Basecamp’s founders are trying to start an email rebellion

#68

Post by ordinaryradical »

I admire rethinking tools like this, but I think that in practice most people are better off not having a preordained organizational system built into how they interact with their email. For novices I'm sure it's useful but if you are tech-literate you probably prefer something that gets out of your way and lets you systematize according to your own mental model.

If you're a gmail user and you haven't found something like this yet, you owe it to yourself to give this a shot:

https://www.boxysuite.com

Re: Basecamp’s founders are trying to start an email rebellion

#69

Post by heavymark »

They mentioned that Gmail, Apple, and others don't do anything to stop you from getting emailed from people you don't want to hear from, but this new tool does. I've only gotten a probably less than 10 spam messages in the past decade, they all go into Spam. I check spam every once in a while for the occasional time there is a false positive, but otherwise requires no action from me. Vs basecamp approach which is more akin to having every first time email sender go to a spam folder (screener), where I have to manually approve or deny it. Unless I'm missing something that sounds like an incredible amount of work, vs the spam feature of Gmail and others. Yes you only have to do it once per sender, but most all the spam in my spam folder is always from unique email addresses so would be a nightmare with this tool. And even if they still have a seperate spam system, then all the normal emails I'd have to manually approve. Eek. And they are asking you to switch to a "hey" email which is a major ask for most of us who maybe have had our emails for a decade or more. And that email address could go away at anytime if the system fails since hard to imagine hey.com existing in a decade.

Re: Basecamp’s founders are trying to start an email rebellion

#70

Post by bad_user »

stephenhuey wrote: post #63
bad_user wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You can use a custom domain with FastMail, and they aren’t reading your mail to target ads at you.

Yes, I am aware, I'm a Fastmail customer.

> they aren’t reading your mail to target ads at you

Neither does Google ;-)

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