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What's next Google? Dropping SMTP support?

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Re: What's next Google? Dropping SMTP support?

#51

Post by laumars »

dsr_ wrote: post #40
UnoriginalGuy wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People keep banging on about "plain text, plain text" what is wrong with plain text? And what is wrong with SMTP? Also email attachments can be binary encoded, base64 is just one option. People are free to say that SMTP is "bad" or "broken" but they have to say exactly why that is the case. And "there are multiple different implementations" is a pretty poor justification, as a SMTP replacement would likely have the s…

Multiple implementations are a strength. In fact, you won't see a good replacement for SMTP without multiple independent implementations. (What will it look like? I would guess it will look like a two-part service, with one protocol for servers to talk to each other and another for clients to talk to servers. Servers will send tiny notifications to other servers that mail is available for their subscribers; then the…

I would like to see the replacement of SMTP be designed along with a redesign of e-mails themselves as well.

I'd like to see the HTML that is supported in e-mails standardised, so there's no more issues about which clients will render what. I'd like to see the failure notices standardised, so that invalid e-mail addresses produce a standard "404-like" response, and so on.

The problem isn't so much that we have multiple implementations (I agree that can potentially be a strength). The problem is that there's very little that's consistent across the platforms.

Re: What's next Google? Dropping SMTP support?

#52

Post by freehunter »

jpswade wrote: post #3

Don't forget, they tried "open" with Google Wave, which was a total flop. Developers did not buy into it. You can't expect to have it both ways, especially since Apple has proven that a closed infrastructure (walled garden) works.

Open? I waited for months to get an invite.

Re: What's next Google? Dropping SMTP support?

#53

Post by fulafel »

laumars wrote: post #14
claudius wrote: post #2

Everybody knows that SMTP is old, inefficient (hey, it’s nearly plain-text!), insecure, diversified (so many different servers to choose from!) and generally just bad. Clearly a closed web interface that only runs in Chrome would be much better for everyone! Then people could always be sure with whom they communicate, nobody could hack or social-engineer their way into other accounts, and everyone would have to follo…

SMTP is worse than plain text. It's plain text and base64 (which increases file sizes by ~30%). It's a horrid protocol, but sadly it's what we're currently stuck with. But this is all moot as the article is about XMPP, WebDav and RSS. The SMTP headline is nothing more than clickbait.

ASCII also increases "file size" by about 30% (using 8 bits per character where 6 would suffice).

A better optimization than diligent bit-packing is a stateful compression system such as deflate. In addition to doing real compression, it will take care of any wasted bits in ASCII andd Base64 (latter being a MIME feature btw, not SMTP).

I don't know if people usually run SMTP with TLS compression enabled - if not they probably aren't too worried about the wasted bits.

Re: What's next Google? Dropping SMTP support?

#54

Post by Shooti »

reidrac wrote: post #16
eschnou wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, the quote from The Verge is the following: "Singhal says Google had to make the difficult decision to drop the very 'open' XMPP standard that it helped pioneer."

That's for the new Hangouts service. If you can keep using XMPP with your Gmail account, then it's not that terrible. I don't know if it's a forced replacement. We may need to wait for Google's announcement.

"Not federated support, but supports interop with XMPP clients. Meaning you can continue to use XMPP clients to log in to Google Talk and those messages will interop with folks on Hangouts."

https://plus.google.com/107968525907303243288/posts/HFe3W7A9...

So Google Talk will continue to live on (which allows them to implement some sort of server side functionality which converts a Gtalk message to a Hangout message when both members have activated Hangouts), it's just not actively being worked on.

So really the only effective change is the Chrome extension and Android apps have been replaced so you have to use a 3rd party Jabber client if you do want to use GTalk on those platforms.

Re: What's next Google? Dropping SMTP support?

#55

Post by VikingCoder »

subway wrote: post #31
yanw wrote: post #18

Hyperbole aside (they won’t drop SMTP) that is a very narrow and unfair view on the situation, they at least tried for years to make it work with these standards and failed. They were obviously the last ones doing so, and this new approach is mainly about modernising their infrastructure. Is there anyone else of any consequence out there who is building these sorts of messaging apps on top of XMPP? Google was the las…

Lync 2013 fully supports XMPP federation. Cisco's IM offerings support XMPP federation. IBM's Sametime supports XMPP federation. Numerous organizations have deployments of these and other, smaller XMPP IM servers. As for cherry picking standards, isn't that exactly what you're doing with your statement on Chromium and web standards?

If IBM's Sametime supported launching without crashing, it would be a better feature than their XMPP federation.

Re: What's next Google? Dropping SMTP support?

#56

Post by EvilLook »

dsr_ wrote: post #40
UnoriginalGuy wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People keep banging on about "plain text, plain text" what is wrong with plain text? And what is wrong with SMTP? Also email attachments can be binary encoded, base64 is just one option. People are free to say that SMTP is "bad" or "broken" but they have to say exactly why that is the case. And "there are multiple different implementations" is a pretty poor justification, as a SMTP replacement would likely have the s…

Multiple implementations are a strength. In fact, you won't see a good replacement for SMTP without multiple independent implementations. (What will it look like? I would guess it will look like a two-part service, with one protocol for servers to talk to each other and another for clients to talk to servers. Servers will send tiny notifications to other servers that mail is available for their subscribers; then the…

>What will it look like? I would guess it will look like a two-part service, with one protocol for servers to talk to each other and another for clients to talk to servers.

So SMTP and POP3/IMAP?

>Servers will send tiny notifications to other servers that mail is available for their subscribers; then the receiving servers will retrieve the mail and cache it or store it for clients. This changes the spam problem fundamentally by requiring some persistence on the part of the sending server.

So NNTP?

Re: What's next Google? Dropping SMTP support?

#57

Post by Maarten88 »

subway wrote: post #31
yanw wrote: post #18

Hyperbole aside (they won’t drop SMTP) that is a very narrow and unfair view on the situation, they at least tried for years to make it work with these standards and failed. They were obviously the last ones doing so, and this new approach is mainly about modernising their infrastructure. Is there anyone else of any consequence out there who is building these sorts of messaging apps on top of XMPP? Google was the las…

Lync 2013 fully supports XMPP federation. Cisco's IM offerings support XMPP federation. IBM's Sametime supports XMPP federation. Numerous organizations have deployments of these and other, smaller XMPP IM servers. As for cherry picking standards, isn't that exactly what you're doing with your statement on Chromium and web standards?

Lync's native protocol is SIP, a standard that Google could also have adopted years ago, but they went with the more modern and 'better' competing XMPP standard.

Microsoft went through a lot of problems implementing SIP it for Lync and its predecessors LCS and OCS, but they remained within the standard and worked on interoperability and improving the standard around security, even if it took more time than going it alone.

The roles of Microsoft and Google have certainly switched around.

Re: What's next Google? Dropping SMTP support?

#58

Post by VikingCoder »

recoiledsnake wrote: post #47

Wait, so Google is dropping XMPP support because Outlook.com is supporting it to allow Gtalk users to chat on Outlook.com, so in order to perpetuate the GMail/GTalk lock-in by caging the Gtalk chat users to GMail, they're dropping standards support and killing access to all XMPP clients in existence including non-Microsoft ones? And they announce this right when Microsoft spent all the time and effort to allow Outloo…

So, to be clear, Google is supposed to make video chat with groups of people, recording to YouTube, desktop sharing, and Google Docs live editing work with XMPP? Or else they're evil?

Re: What's next Google? Dropping SMTP support?

#59

Post by [deleted] »

snaky wrote: post #36
subway wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lync 2013 fully supports XMPP federation. Cisco's IM offerings support XMPP federation. IBM's Sametime supports XMPP federation. Numerous organizations have deployments of these and other, smaller XMPP IM servers. As for cherry picking standards, isn't that exactly what you're doing with your statement on Chromium and web standards?

Lync looks really nice with that edit: XMPP federation feature is not available in Ofice365 Lync options, that's sad

[deleted]

Re: What's next Google? Dropping SMTP support?

#60

Post by capo »

recoiledsnake wrote: post #47

Wait, so Google is dropping XMPP support because Outlook.com is supporting it to allow Gtalk users to chat on Outlook.com, so in order to perpetuate the GMail/GTalk lock-in by caging the Gtalk chat users to GMail, they're dropping standards support and killing access to all XMPP clients in existence including non-Microsoft ones? And they announce this right when Microsoft spent all the time and effort to allow Outloo…

GTalk is still as is.

As for YouTube it is and always have been available on the web for windows phone.

Microsoft in clear violation of Google's TOS used undocumented APIs and stripped ads from YouTube and now they have the audacity to say that they would have complied by the TOS if it suited them better.

Please take your anti-Google (probably Microsoft sponsored astroturf) elsewhere:

https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=recoiledsnake

https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=recoiledsnake

These submission are a honeypot for your sort.

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