51–60 of 146 posts
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Gmail etc. could have provided encryption and authentication if they wanted to. Unfortunately they don't want to because their business model(s) rely on reading our emails.
Not at all relevant to my point. I'm talking about signing messages, not encrypting them. Authenticating messages is completely orthogonal to encryption and whether or not Google can read your mail.
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> I wonder how large percentage of messages are dropped silently by services like GMail as a spam prevention measure. I bet it's non-zero. Nobody forces you to use GMail. There are other mailservers with a much more sane behavior. For example, the mail server I use either accepts a mail, or doesn't accept it (when it looks like spam). It might be possible that a certain percentage of mails is misclassified, but in th…
I can't choose what service my recipients use. edit: I might add that spam backscatter is a significant issue (which stems from fundamental problems in email), and thus not sending bounce messages is fairly sane too.
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> I wonder how large percentage of messages are dropped silently by services like GMail as a spam prevention measure. I bet it's non-zero. Nobody forces you to use GMail. There are other mailservers with a much more sane behavior. For example, the mail server I use either accepts a mail, or doesn't accept it (when it looks like spam). It might be possible that a certain percentage of mails is misclassified, but in th…
I can't choose what service my recipients use. edit: I might add that spam backscatter is a significant issue (which stems from fundamental problems in email), and thus not sending bounce messages is fairly sane too.
If your server accepts the email first, then scans it, and then decides it is spam, it's too late. Then it has only the choice between ignoring and backscatter, because it can't reliably inform the real sender - the TCP/IP connection is already closed and the email's sender is almost certainly forged.
However, if your server scans the email during the SMTP transfer, and rejects it with a clean error code, the sender gets a clean error message and its the sender who is responsible to inform the client.
Note that there's another downside of this approach which is why you don't find this early-reject very often in the wild: The receipient has no chance to get the email, not even by scanning their spam folder. So the sender has to understand the error message and to send a "less spammy" email, or he can't get in contact to the receipient at all. For some professions, this might be a no-go, as this means missing potential customers just because they use a bad email client which sends spammy-looking emails.
However, if you don't have this "type" of customers, early-rejecting on SMTP level is a perfect solution. We're using this configuration for years on our mail servers, it works pretty well and we've never, ever had to send backscatters. Yet every sender whose email was classified as spam has been correctly notified about this issue.
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Diff'rent strokes for diff'rent folks. It amused me and made the post more entertaining for me to read, thus holding my attention better. Yes, I probably do have the sense of humor of a 12-year-old, but that's immaterial.
I don't agree with you. We should be establishing a polite ettiquette
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Email was not designed to be used the way we use it now. ...my inbox is a todo list, and email is the way things get onto it. But it is a disastrously bad todo list. ...it seems unlikely that people in 100 years will still be living in the same email hell we do now. And if email is going to get replaced eventually, why not now? ...some of the most powerful people are all at the mercy of email too. [1] Your posts remi…
> Email was not designed to be used the way we use it now. ...my inbox is a todo list So we should not use email as a TODO list, but keep a separate TODO list. Email is not broken, it's just the wrong tool for keeping TODO lists. I would never have thought of (mis)using email for a TODO list, and I'm astonished to read from various famous people (not just pg) that they're seriously doing that. Maybe this is a typical…
This is a common problem for busy people and has no obvious solution. One way we try to tackle hard problems is by identifying them, and then having open discussion.
> or use a simple Wiki to simulate an issue tracker.
> For my personal purposes, a plain text file works
> flawlessly.
My current solution is multi-layered, and starts with a text file. But it's not the simple problem that you make it out to be.
>We fix it by building smart clients. If you allow me to pick an interesting remark from this post: I think the idea of embedding instructions in the payload of an email is an interesting one. For instance an email could contain text and a link to a Pivotal Tracker story while at the same time it could contain a JSON payload which tells my augmented email client to render the story and allow me to interact with it. T…
I agree that payloads are an interesting idea; but would be a security nightmare. As soon as you load a URL based on an email, you are leaking information to the sender. You could restrict the types of content, but all you end up with is RSS.
>We fix it by building smart clients. I think improving email lies before the client. Email is just a message container and apps generally throw a load of different content into that container, events, to-do's, photos etc. Some of this stuff should never arrive in my inbox. A to-do email should automatically go to my to-do list, an event should automatically go to my calendar, photos should automatically go to iPhoto…
>We fix it by building smart clients. I think improving email lies before the client. Email is just a message container and apps generally throw a load of different content into that container, events, to-do's, photos etc. Some of this stuff should never arrive in my inbox. A to-do email should automatically go to my to-do list, an event should automatically go to my calendar, photos should automatically go to iPhoto…
http://pigeonal.com/ is my attempt at doing this, we've built this app for email that you can deal with in an "out of band" fashion e.g. while waiting in queue. Disclaimer: I'm one of the creators of this app.
I was thinking more that I'd never actually get these messages via email, that on the mail server, these messages would be interpreted and assigned to whatever app/protocol is relevant. A bit like Tripit do with bookings email.
Look forward to see more from your app!
The bottom line for me is: I hate email. It might be a great framework and all, but I dread opening up gmail. I know it's going to be full of shit I don't care about, I know there's going to be an unsurmountable, unsorted, confusing, library of old emails. Further, if i'm expecting an email, it could be anywhere! Bulk? Spam? Inbox? But why then do i love getting an sms? Where's the difference? The speed? The quality?…
Most people I know think modern communication is holy and you should check you're email and text messages multiple times a day and always answer as soon as possible.
I check my email personal email once a day (often don't read any email in the weekend) and this sometimes pisses people off. It sometimes feels like I should constantly be on my guard because people have send me something important (which it almost never is).
I would love it if we could go back to the time when you could only answer the phone when you are at home. Or the time when it was acceptable to wait two days to reply to email.
But i guess this is a bit of topic because the original message was talking about the technical part of email :P