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The Future of Email

fastmail.com

191–200 of 217 posts

Re: The Future of Email

#191
post #113

I read this article and was surprised when I reached the end because the whole thing felt like it was setting the stage for some announcement or new thing. But nothing came..? Forgive me if I'm being thick but what was the takeaway?

Because it's just inbound marketing. Write some random vaguely interesting blog article, post it everywhere, then watch as thousands of people see your brand name for the first time, connect it with being helpful. Maybe even see a search engine boost for your product.

Re: The Future of Email

#192
post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple’s Hide My Email does the same thing and it’s just phenomenal.

Apple is a problematic email service provider. They don't even send DMARC reports.

Irrelevant to the subject of the Hide My Email feature.

Re: The Future of Email

#193
post #159

> The second is AI assistance: tools that summarize your inbox, surface action items, draft replies, and in some cases take actions on your behalf. That is the most evil part. Finally we will have bots talking to bots, no human in the loop. All email problems can be solved with GPG, but that ruins Fastmail and other email services business, as they won't be able to read and analyze their users' emails. No ads, no sel…

Fastmail reads or analyzes users email to sell ads? Fastmail trains ai models on their user's email messages?

Metadata is more valuable than message content for analysis. GPG solves that how?

Re: The Future of Email

#194
post #190

I love fastmail, I switched from Proton a couple years ago after deciding the trade offs to have encrypted email were not worth it, since even if I fully trust Proton, most emails come from or go to AWS, Outlook, or Gmail anyway. I have been extremely happy with the service. Fairly priced, very fast even with a huge inbox, and they don’t add unnecessary features or bloat. I thought I would use my OS’s mail apps but t…

The Fastmail desktop app is literally a wrapped version of their website but with the added feature of... get this... no back button (or equivalent shortcut). My 30 years of muscle memory using webmail is made useless by this "app" because some web developer somewhere wants to cosplay as a desktop app developer now. It's not an oversight either. It's an intentional choice to not have a go-back-to-previous-page keyboa…

It might be worth learning their hotkeys because they're pretty efficient in many cases (potentially included cases where you want the back button). They work in the browser and the app:

https://www.fastmail.help/hc/en-us/articles/360058753534-Key...

Not saying your complaint is invalid at all.

Re: The Future of Email

#196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having a trustworthy inbox that contains only legitimate email and a separate friend request queue where you can decide “do I know this person / organisation?” is far better than having a single inbox that’s a vast ocean of emails of unknown provenance you have to make a trust decision for for every single email.

You can do this with email today. Heck, you could do it in 2001, I remember. Hotmail's "exclusive" spam filter policy where anything not from your contacts goes to spam, where you can decide if you want to add them as a contact or not.

That doesn’t work because it relies upon the receiver adding all the possible variations of the sending email address to their address book ahead of time.

Re: The Future of Email

#197
post #117

What's the point of this article? The most I got was "email is here to stay," followed by some discussion of an MCP server for their proprietary mail platform. I particularly don't understand the constant fanfare around discussions of SPF/DKIM/DMARC. They're widely understood, published RFCs that have been around for at least 10-15 years, some of them longer. They're not obscure folk wisdom passed down through genera…

> They're widely understood I'll tell you right now, I've had multiple cases where I've had to quote parts of the RFCs to large companies because they were handling email authentication incorrectly. They are wildly misunderstood. The moment I see "add this include: directive to your SPF record" in some marketing platform's integration documentation I know they're going to fuck something up. To add-on, the really pro…

I was expecting someone to say this when I said "widely understood" without qualification.

Unfortunately, I do tend to agree that we can't fix stupid or the inability to read the RFCs. :-(

Thanks for providing a balanced view

Re: The Future of Email

#199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Somehow they mail letters with info. Encrypted email wouldn’t require a BAA.

It's a crime to open someone else's mail and generally speaking the post office does a pretty good job of reliable delivery. Even if an address is a bit wrong/corrupted, it can likely be delivered just from the name and the zipcode. Email is a lot harder. The older SMTP standard sends emails unencrypted so there's a possibility of a MITM reading the email. But also addresses if you get them wrong can end up in the wr…

Isn't the post office heroics normally when it's not deliverable? If the sender wrote down 744 Evergreen Terrace but they meant 742, that mail will be delivered to your neighbor and hopefully they'll redirect it to you.

Re: The Future of Email

#200
post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a crime to open someone else's mail and generally speaking the post office does a pretty good job of reliable delivery. Even if an address is a bit wrong/corrupted, it can likely be delivered just from the name and the zipcode. Email is a lot harder. The older SMTP standard sends emails unencrypted so there's a possibility of a MITM reading the email. But also addresses if you get them wrong can end up in the wr…

Isn't the post office heroics normally when it's not deliverable? If the sender wrote down 744 Evergreen Terrace but they meant 742, that mail will be delivered to your neighbor and hopefully they'll redirect it to you.

It'll depend on the mailman. I'm fairly confident mine would ultimately deliver it to me.
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