I think you mean "You can't afford to stop using mail"?
I think he means "You can't afford to stop using email"
I'm from the UK and I've never heard anybody say mail when they meant email.
You Can't Afford To Stop Using Mail
21–30 of 53 posts
Re: You Can't Afford To Stop Using Mail
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
I hear you. The problem with spam is that the current infrastrucutre allows anyone to distribute spam on a massive level and forces online apps to use expensive third party services to deliver their newsletters to inbox. For a regular end user on Gmail the problem is hidden but not solved. When you have spam, you need spam filters. Spammers get better, you must catch up... We want to solve that by replacing mail as y…
But then you're not solving end users' problems, but Google's; and who's going to pay you to do that...?
Yes, it's not our main focus right now. We have planned this for later next year. It's not just the Google - everyone who runs online app or shop needs to get to you with order information, registration confirmation, invoice... If it's a pain to get into your inbox for them, it's a pain for you too not getting what you want. We will make it impossible to send out and receive spam using our infrastructure.
Re: You Can't Afford To Stop Using Mail
#23Here's a thought to toss out and see if it sticks (or has been done):
How about an email app which groups messages by frequency/familiarity of sender? If someone sends me messages often, or has sent stuff on occasion over a very long time, group it at one end of the inbox; if seldom and not known for long, somewhere in the middle; if sender (&/| reply-to) has never been seen before, shove it to the other end. Maybe also track how long I read their messages: if I spend time on what's sent (relative to content size), it's important; if it's straight to trash or less than a half-second, put it in the "junk to screen" pile. VIP/white/black-lists are a pain because I have to screen every address listed; do some probabilistic sorting for me! don't just list things in a linear or threaded by-receipt-date line.
Re: You Can't Afford To Stop Using Mail
#24Looking forward to trying it, however requested an invite and the scanner on the Thank You screen mentions my @gmail.com account got a thumbs down for Deliverability and being 'weakly secured'. Kind of a bold statement to make about gmail, no?
I appreciate your interest. :) That check looks for blacklisted IPs of your provider. Gmail is blacklisted very often, thus making deliverability of your messages to some servers lower. Might be a poor wording on our side. We'll take a look at that.
Re: You Can't Afford To Stop Using Mail
#25Here's a thought to toss out and see if it sticks (or has been done): How about an email app which groups messages by frequency/familiarity of sender? If someone sends me messages often, or has sent stuff on occasion over a very long time, group it at one end of the inbox; if seldom and not known for long, somewhere in the middle; if sender (&/| reply-to) has never been seen before, shove it to the other end. Maybe a…
do some probabilistic sorting for me!
Gmail's Priority Inbox does this, and it works reasonably well. https://support.google.com/mail/answer/186531?hl=en
if sender (&/| reply-to) has never been seen before, shove it to the other end
That would only be helpful in a world where you never make new contacts.
Re: You Can't Afford To Stop Using Mail
#26> We have a strategy how to wipe out spam for good. I don't love Gmail and I certainly don't love Google, but using Gmail "wiped out spam for good" for me. In my experience, false positives are close to zero and false negatives extremely rare (and not very annoying), so how is spam not a solved problem?
False positives are WAY too high for me with Gmail. Once I discovered how many important, obviously-legitimate messages were being marked as spam, I started monitoring my spam folder on a daily basis. You'd think they'd at least whitelist my contact list, but no.
I don't know how they intend to beat Gmail, but that's not because Gmail is without major flaws.
Re: You Can't Afford To Stop Using Mail
#27I run a mail server for my own company and my immediate friends and family. I hope you aren't planning on using one of the many ESPs to do your actual delivery; increasingly I am blacklisting them (and by ASN) since despite any claims to the contrary they don't give two shits about spam or UCE. There may or may not be collateral damage but I really don't care anymore; I have a home-grown analysis script that runs dai…
> Nobody has ever sent any of my users a legitimate email with a utf8-encoded subject.
I suppose you and your users only ever communicate with Westerners. Or are all of your Japanese correspondents (for example) kind enough to encode their subjects in EUC-JP instead of UTF-8?
Re: You Can't Afford To Stop Using Mail
#28Things I like:
- Delivery tracking. This is the single most exciting feature that I found in your screenshots (welovemail.com). Mass mailing solutions and Transactional email services have had this feature for ages, and it's about time regular email got it, too. No more need to parse the incoherent ramblings of MAILER-DAEMON, hooray!
- Three-column view. (Or was it four-column?) I'm not particularly fond of 16:9 widescreens, but I might as well use all the space since I can't seem to buy anything else anyway.
- Managing multiple accounts.
- "The only way we can build a product that we can go and use without any stress today is to make the best out of what’s already available." -- Absolutely agreed. Email is email. It's not a todo list, it's not an instant messaging protocol. I'm glad you're taking this seriously.
- "Get a receipt from a local store directly to your inbox formatted the way for use in an accounting app." -- Wonderful. Don't stop with a pretty app, please go ahead and write an RFC that defines the standard markup for electronic invoices, receipts, to-do list items, etc. Then we'll be able to use SMTP, HTTP, or any other protocol to ship them around.
Things I'm not sure I'm going to like, although it seems early to make a judgment:
- "How simple a life could be if every citizen would own a mail account allowing them to vote in any election from anywhere in our solar system." -- What does email have to do with voting? My email account is not my identity, no matter how hard Mozilla Persona et al. tries to shoehorn identities into email addresses. It's just an address that I happen to be occupying at the moment, and that I can leave behind whenever I want. So please don't try to sell your product as a candidate for universal adoption from the first day. You'll be disappointed.
- Managing multiple accounts. Although I also mentioned this in "things I like", one of the reasons I keep multiple accounts is to put firewalls between them. For example, my primary email account is never accessed from a mobile device, I use a "proxy" account for that. The password recovery address is yet another account at a different provider. If one of my accounts get compromised, I don't want the attacker to gain access to any other account. How is your app going to manage user credentials and flow of information to/from your servers to minimize vulnerabilities?
Some questions/suggestions about the UI mockup:
- Social media integration, from Facebook/Twitter in the sidebar to nicely cropped photos for all your correspondents. Please tell me this can be turned off. When FastMail.fm rolled out its new interface a few months ago, there was a significant outcry from privacy-sensitive users who discovered that the webapp was pulling in everyone's Gravatar.
- Where's the metadata, like those ugly CC/BCC/Reply-To lines, "display source" links, and the message size? If you leave them out, you'll be lacking some of the features that email pros can't live without, and therefore earn the criticism that you're trying to replace email with something less. On the other hand, if you put them back in the UI, it won't be as neat as your screenshots currently are.
- Can I compose full-screen, or do I have to live with 100px of darkened, unusable space around your cute pop-up whenever I'm trying to write something?
- Is this a hosted web service? iOS/Android app? OSX/Windows program? All of the above?
/edited
Re: You Can't Afford To Stop Using Mail
#29Some thoughts:
"We have a strategy how to wipe out spam for good. [...] Phishing is going to be just a story too."
Whitelisting pretty much solves this. (Multiple accounts also help; one you give to people directly, and one you use for everything online, helps bump personal communication to the top)
"Are your important messages always delivered? We will guarantee a delivery in less than a second."
Those are two different things. Immediate delivery has nothing to do with guaranteed delivery.
"Get a receipt from a local store directly to your inbox formatted the way for use in an accounting app."
Are you writing RFCs for receipts? If not, this probably won't be picked up by anyone but customers of the accounting app.
Re: You Can't Afford To Stop Using Mail
#30I run a mail server for my own company and my immediate friends and family. I hope you aren't planning on using one of the many ESPs to do your actual delivery; increasingly I am blacklisting them (and by ASN) since despite any claims to the contrary they don't give two shits about spam or UCE. There may or may not be collateral damage but I really don't care anymore; I have a home-grown analysis script that runs dai…
> Nobody has ever sent any of my users a legitimate email with a utf8-encoded subject. I suppose you and your users only ever communicate with Westerners. Or are all of your Japanese correspondents (for example) kind enough to encode their subjects in EUC-JP instead of UTF-8?
You suppose correct; obviously that might change, but for now it's the case that in 20 years of email not one single legitimate message has had a non-7 bit ASCII subject line, whereas there's always plenty of ⋎Іǎḡɾǎ, ѵἲàɠṝà and ѷἰẫǧʀẫ to go around (in the form =?utf-8?Q?=E2=8B=8E=D0=86=C7=8E=E1=B8=A1=C9=BE=C7=8E?= of course)
Pro tip: if anyone is trying to block this shit without blocking legitimate Unicode, you'll be wanting Unicode::Normalize and something like
utf8::decode($rawSubject);
my $normalised = NFKD($rawSubject);
$normalised =~ s/\p{NonspacingMark}//g;