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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

#151
The UI is cool, but this really should be client software, not a service.

I'd rather keep my current mail host — half the price, unlimited domains/mailboxes/storage (instead the limit is on the number of outgoing mails per day), based in Switzerland instead of the USA.

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

#152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which provider is this? Sounds like what I'm looking for.

Mailbox.org They are based in berlin, price scales with storage usage iirc

I also use them. Their plans start at 1 euro a month. Works fine but once in a while my mail client gets login errors that go away after 5-10 min.

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

#153

Just use https://forwardemail.net (I'm the creator) We're launching our own Gmail alternative, so if you want beta access just toss me a message or sign up for an account on our site to get notified. We're also a completely open and transparent startup. 100% of the source code is open-source and 100% of our data is open. https://forwardemail.net/open-startup https://github.com/forwardemail

Are you using machine translation? The Danish version that I get by default seems weird, not exactly bad but just weird choices of words and some sentences.

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

#154
post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I loved Inbox, but what actually happened there was that there were two visions of Gmail 2.0 internally. Inbox didn’t win, partly because it was written in a nightmarish C++ framework, but some of its best features were brought into Gmail. Gmail is a conservatively managed product, but it does improve over time.

What is Gmail written in?

Java, compiled with Closure

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

#155
post #125
post #13

This is quite an innovative approach to email, and they describe the features here: https://hey.com/features/ - screening by default - removes email tracking pixels - streamlined reply/read flows - improved attachment handling - doesn't interrupt you by default There's also a video tour of the product from the CEO here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=296&v=UCeYTysLyG... For me as a gmail user I'm keen to…

I thought Gmail loaded images when it got the email, not when users opened it? Doesn't this prevent pixels from tracking?

This might have been the plan, but it doesn't happen in my experience. I've tested it multiple times and Gmail loads those images when you open the email and it's possible to track when users open their email. It also appears that Gmail loads those tracking pixels every time you open that email, doesn't do caching, so it's possible to track how many times the recipient opens the email.

The redeeming quality is that by proxying those images, your IP and User-Agent are no longer leaked. But that's it.

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

#156

Possibly OT, but dropping email and going exclusively with dialtone/messaging for communications would be a breath of fresh air vs cat-n-mousing around the global spam issue (being under 24/7 attack/abuse is absurd). It may take reengineering some models/processes, but good business only requires good communications (simplicity is the ultimate sophistication). One-size-fits-all (email in this case) is rarely a soluti…

How do you handle things like ordering things online that usually requires a email address?

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

#157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google had an innovative email platform called Inbox that was widely loved by its users and they killed it two years ago. If the market is not billions of people they just don't care about it.

I loved Inbox, but what actually happened there was that there were two visions of Gmail 2.0 internally. Inbox didn’t win, partly because it was written in a nightmarish C++ framework, but some of its best features were brought into Gmail. Gmail is a conservatively managed product, but it does improve over time.

Nobody I know who used Inbox feels that the current Gmail interface—even with some Inbox features backported—is an acceptable substitute for Inbox.

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

#158

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 mor…

Have you ever been on the receiving end of a sales person's drip campaign?

I haven't had a single legitimate company ignore a firm and strongly worded e-mail or phone call asking to not be contacted again. Plus in Europe we have the GDPR on our side and while it's not actually being enforced, mentioning it is usually enough to raise some eyebrows.

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

#159

>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.

So do we go back to a world of completely plain-text emails? No buttons? Links buried in a wall of ASCII? We use SendGrid to fire important, user-anticipated emails (i.e. "the Zoom class you paid for is starting at 8:30 AM, here's the private link"). Blocking all images is insane, and would set back email UX to the BBS ages. Blocking all SendGrid-served images would simply mean people host images on their own domain…

> set back email UX to the BBS ages

I don't understand why that's bad or why e-mail needs an "UX" beyond being text. E-mail is there to convey information and text is the most efficient way to do it. If images are really important, you can include them as attachments and they'll be displayed even with remote content blocked.

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

#160
post #44
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?

To be fair, if this happens server-side then they can just preload all remote content at delivery time, negating the privacy impact of trackers because the only data they'll get is the IP/user agent of the email server.
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