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What's next Google? Dropping SMTP support?

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

#221

Post by wtbob »

laumars wrote: post #213
marssaxman wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd like to see it standardized that HTML is not supported in e-mails. Email worked fine before HTML came along and all the good email is still HTML-free... in my experience, only robots use HTML.

While the vast majority of my correspondence is plain text formatted. I do think there's a place for markup. Something that can embed images, provide different formatting styling (bold, italics, underline, colours and perhaps even sizes). It's also nice having an option between serif, sans serif and monospaced typefaces. Then there's hyperlinks. If not like HTML anchor tags were the hypertext is independent to the de…

> Then there's hyperlinks. If not like HTML anchor tags were the hypertext is independent to the destination, but still some method to follow links in e-mails as a lot of online registration requires email activation that way.

Well, there's the (IIRC) RFC-specified way to write URLs within '' pairs, e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/> (interestingly, the HN URL-finder doesn't support that).

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

#222

Post by thoughtcriminal »

wtetzner wrote: post #192
thoughtcriminal wrote: post #79

Stop relying on Google for everything. Stop building things on Google. No company should have such a big impact on your life and society as a whole. Several months ago I moved everything to the Microsoft ecosystem. In some ways its trading one taskmaster for another, but if we don't exercise our freedom of choice in the marketplace we soon won't have a choice.

> No company should have such a big impact on your life > Several months ago I moved everything to the Microsoft ecosystem. So now Microsoft has such a big impact on your life? Wouldn't it make more sense to spread things out over a variety of services?

Wouldn't it make more sense to spread things out over a variety of services?

For reasons of workflow efficiency, no.

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

#223

Post by pyre »

npsimons wrote: post #133
laumars wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 multip…

I'd like to see the HTML that is supported in e-mails standardised Count me out. It wasn't even two weeks ago that we had the story here about how The Onion was hacked because somebody clicked on an obfuscated HTML URL in email.

You can't put the genie back in the bottle, unfortunately. Most people use clients that support HTML right now, and a new format that doesn't support some sort of rich text decoration (like HTML) isn't going to become popular enough to matter.

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

#224

Post by jimbobimbo »

laumars wrote: post #98
UnoriginalGuy wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> HTTPS is end to end encryption. In the instances that SMTP traffic is encrypted, it's only node to node. So in this instance SMTPS is less secure than HTTPS. Sorry, not following you. HTTPS and SMTPS are both end to end encryption schemes. In fact they both use SSL in a similar way to secure traffic. > It's still not /the/ standard though, just /a/ standard; and one that's not particularly well supported in my expe…

> Sorry, not following you. HTTPS and SMTPS are both end to end encryption schemes. In fact they both use SSL in a similar way to secure traffic. Yeah sorry, I explained my point abysmally there. What I meant was e-mails are only encrypted on a node-to-node basis but obviously a proportion of that transport isn't over SMTP. (My complaints are about the entire e-mail stack where as you're focusing on just SMTP, so the…

I think I follow your point about SMTP being secure only node-to-node, but doesn't S/MIME (PGP, etc.) solve the problem of security?

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

#225

Post by smnrchrds »

marssaxman wrote: post #209
laumars wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 multip…

I'd like to see it standardized that HTML is not supported in e-mails. Email worked fine before HTML came along and all the good email is still HTML-free... in my experience, only robots use HTML.

Plain text works fine in ASCII world. But if you ever need to read bi-directional emails like I did(e.g. Arabic text with some English words) you will understand the necessity of using HTML in email. Without proper formatting and markup that HTML offers, English words seem to fly around the text and end up at semi-random places.

I wish to see better support for non-ASCII plain text in email clients and web browsers, but until the HTML is all I have.

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

#226

Post by ajross »

philwelch wrote: post #186
ajross wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Arrgh. Title is total link bait. There is no news about SMTP here . The linked blog post is whining about XMPP, which is not being disabled . Apparently the author is a user of "XMPP Federation" (the ability to link XMPP servers together a-la IRC), which is also not being disabled . But apparently it might be someday, as the new Hangouts stuff won't support it. So how did we get form "can't talk to your Hangout via a…

Between Google Reader and XMPP federation, it's clear that Google is turning against open standards.

Given that Google was, essentially, the only meaningful provider of either a public federated XMPP service or a RSS feed reader[1], that seems like a pretty weak argument. If there's no community, was it ever really open?

[1] Calling Google's 100% proprietary (albeit publicly documented) reader protocol an "open standard" is a bit of a stretch, FWIW. Google certainly isn't refusing to support RSS on its blog offerings.

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

#227

Post by icebraining »

QEDturtles wrote: post #151
icebraining wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uh, no. None of them existed before Google. What did exist were two pieces of infrastructure (Webkit and the Linux kernel), and Google could've used both without open-sourcing the rest of the application, since the licenses allow it: - Webkit is LGPL/BSD, so it can be linked to proprietary code without forcing its redistribution. - The Linux kernel is GPL, but the license has never applied to userspace code, and ever…

Wait... so Android Inc didn't exist for the 2 years between its founding in 2003 and Google's acquisition in 2005?

Oh, I was actually thinking of ChromeOS. But the point still stands, since they owned the copyright, and therefore they did have a choice to keep the userspace closed.

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

#228

Post by cooldeal »

pi18n wrote: post #164
cooldeal wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Comparison fail. What Google's been saying from 3 years while dragging it's feet is that Windows Phone does not have enough users to make an app for, but now their claim is that so many people are using the Microsoft Youtube App for Windows Phone that it's hurting the content creators. Huh? Why can't they monetize them by making an app and show twice as many ads in it just to spite WP users? No, they won't. They want…

1. Google is not obliged to create an app for any platform. Regardless of user count. WTF. 2. Microsoft is obliged to follow the ToS on websites they are pulling data from. Regardless of user count. I'd love to see Google forced to admit what they are doing also, though.

> Google is not obliged to create an app for any platform. Regardless of user count. WTF.

Sure, but they should come out and say they don't want to create a YouTube app for Windows Phone, instead of hiding behind the excuse of WP8 not having enough users to monetize but having enough users to cause revenue shortfall.

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

#229

Post by laumars »

raylu wrote: post #214
laumars wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While we're at it, let's all abandon HTML5 and have every browser doing their own thing, because people occasional fall for fake anti-virus ads. We can't stop social engineering like that - it's completely unavoidable. Which is why banks and payment providers regularly tell people not to follow links asking for bank details (etc). Yeah it sucks that The Onion got hacked that way, but your argument is doesn't fix that…

I think he's saying we should instead have text-only e-mail, because that's both standard and has a tiny attack surface.

That doesn't fix anything either. Many clients make URLs clickable (even with text-only emails) and even if those clients didn't do that, someone will just copy and paste a URL into the address bar without looking. Given that the average user isn't an expert on domain names, it's not actually that hard to trick them into thinking that face.book.com isn't the same as facebook.com (and even those that are savvy enough to know the difference might misread the link and get fooled occasionally).

So like I said before, it's impossible to prevent social engineering.

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

#230

Post by laumars »

wtbob wrote: post #221
laumars wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While the vast majority of my correspondence is plain text formatted. I do think there's a place for markup. Something that can embed images, provide different formatting styling (bold, italics, underline, colours and perhaps even sizes). It's also nice having an option between serif, sans serif and monospaced typefaces. Then there's hyperlinks. If not like HTML anchor tags were the hypertext is independent to the de…

> Then there's hyperlinks. If not like HTML anchor tags were the hypertext is independent to the destination, but still some method to follow links in e-mails as a lot of online registration requires email activation that way. Well, there's the (IIRC) RFC-specified way to write URLs within ' ' pairs, e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/&#62 ; (interestingly, the HN URL-finder doesn't support that).

There's a million different ways it can be done. I only suggest a HTML-derived format because of familiarity.
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