Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Introducing Outlook.com - Modern Email for the Next Billion Mailboxes

blogs.office.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

301–310 of 341 posts

Re: Introducing Outlook.com - Modern Email for the Next Billion Mailboxes

#301

Post by alphakappa »

aik wrote: post #263
blhack wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And I'm going to hope and pray that google stops screwing with their interface design. Gmail was perfect.

>> Gmail was perfect. Comments about perfect technology keep popping up on hn. I would think that claiming any technology is "perfect" is a little self-defeating coming from a tech startup news site? The very core of what we all stand for here is advancing mankind (or making the world a better place) through whatever means we are capable (most often technology). Viewing existing technologies as "perfect" closes the m…

You are probably being too abstract here. What you are saying is true as a general statement, but in Gmail's case, it's big draw was its simple, fast and clean interface that stood as a stark contrast to hotmail and yahoo. The storage it offered was bound to be matched by others soon, but the Ui design was something that could have used incremental feature improvements, not the drastic Web 2.0 treatment it received.

Today's gmail interface is hard to use and is slow. Very arguably a far cry from the perfection it seemed to be in 2004.

Re: Introducing Outlook.com - Modern Email for the Next Billion Mailboxes

#303

Post by magicalist »

jellicle wrote: post #296
magicalist wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What distinction are you making here? They also choose to not give you infinite storage space for free and choose to not indemnify you for copyright infringement when you send ripped mp3s as attachments. Every company operating in the US has to decide if offering services to children is worth the extra regulatory oversight. If you'd like, I can rephrase, but the meaning is the same: Google doesn't offer anything like…

I believe the point is that you're lying when you say, quote, "they have to close the account". Google could simply choose not to collect personal information on accounts of children. This would be, literally, one line of code to implement. They've chosen instead to ban children from Google services, which is in no way required by law.

Well, thanks for the "lying" comment. They don't have to pay taxes either, but that won't last long.

As for the literally one line of code, I don't believe that's correct. IANAL nor an implementor of a COPPA-compliant product, but my understanding is that even storing a copy of an email that contains personal information will be in violation of the law without parental consent and certainly without the ability for a parent to view it and delete it. Storing any received and sent email may be enough to count as collecting personal information.

Can you name any email provider that will knowingly allow children under 13 to use the service without having a parent controlling the account? When you do use the family accounts in hotmail or yahoo, you have to actually provide proof that you're an adult, and some level of proof of connection with the account (joining the accounts actually looks rather difficult, through hotmail, at least. Usually a parent account sets up child accounts). Setting up that system literally takes more than one line of code.

Re: Introducing Outlook.com - Modern Email for the Next Billion Mailboxes

#304

Post by magicalist »

samspot wrote: post #300
magicalist wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The under 13 thing, as has been discussed before, is due to COPPA. Google doesn't offer anything like hotmail's family account (where the child's account is managed by a proven parent's account), so if they find out that you're under 13, they have to close your account and they aren't allowed to warn you that they will do so (or let you go back and change your birthdate). As for the pseudonym thing, that never occurr…

I was setting up my wife's account for youtube and accidentally put today's date in for her birthdate. I was immediately locked out and had to pay a fee to get her email back.

and share how much the fee was...

("accepting and verifying a credit card number in connection with a transaction" is one of the COPPA approved methods of verifying adulthood)

Re: Introducing Outlook.com - Modern Email for the Next Billion Mailboxes

#305

Post by throwawaay »

jbigelow76 wrote: post #283
niels_olson wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll bet there are some smart, hard-working, upstanding googlers here that read that and felt a little sad.

And conversely so with Microsoft employees and similar criticisms. Nobody likes to the think they work for The Man or some kind of corporate tyrant, most truly believe they bringing value to the lives of their users as opposed to exploiting them (even incidentally). Google is just as susceptible to trust issues as Microsoft or anyone else. Every time Google is caught violating privacy it's always an "accident", like…

I'm tired of people making insinuations about some sinister motive behind the WiFi logging without evidence. How did that debacle "align with Google's business interests"?

What use is there for fragments of WiFi payload data logged from a moving vehicle that also happens to be hopping WiFi frequencies? If there was any intent to exploit it, wouldn't you try to log more comprehensively? That is, by grabbing full HTTP transactions, or whatever.

Of course, this isn't meant to minimize the very clear fact that someone there fucked up. That case appears to be one where the accident label is justified.

Re: Introducing Outlook.com - Modern Email for the Next Billion Mailboxes

#306

Post by aik »

alphakappa wrote: post #301
aik wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Gmail was perfect. Comments about perfect technology keep popping up on hn. I would think that claiming any technology is "perfect" is a little self-defeating coming from a tech startup news site? The very core of what we all stand for here is advancing mankind (or making the world a better place) through whatever means we are capable (most often technology). Viewing existing technologies as "perfect" closes the m…

You are probably being too abstract here. What you are saying is true as a general statement, but in Gmail's case, it's big draw was its simple, fast and clean interface that stood as a stark contrast to hotmail and yahoo. The storage it offered was bound to be matched by others soon, but the Ui design was something that could have used incremental feature improvements, not the drastic Web 2.0 treatment it received.…

I agree it was good, and probably better in the past just because it was faster and less cluttered. But this attitude:

>> I'm going to hope and pray that google stops screwing with their interface design.

I don't agree with, and this is part of what I was addressing as well. I hope they do continue screwing with their interface design, but obviously I rather hope and pray that they improve it rather than make it slower and more cluttered. It doesn't make sense for me to happily use Google products and simultaneously fear that if they touch them they will make them worse. They are the owners of the product, so either I trust that they have some competency or I look elsewhere.

Re: Introducing Outlook.com - Modern Email for the Next Billion Mailboxes

#308

Post by bijupunalor »

blhack wrote: post #110
rickmb wrote: post #72

We haven't instantly forgotten how Microsoft handles Skydrive, have we?: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4265086 I think I'll pass on putting my email through their systems. Although I have to admit this looks way better than GMail. I hope this inspires Google to do something about their interface design.

And I'm going to hope and pray that google stops screwing with their interface design. Gmail was perfect.

You can get back the old UI using "old gmail" userstyle (http://userstyles.org/styles/57755/the-return-of-old-gmail) and a few tweaks such as turning off chat. This only works in chrome or firefox.

One complaint I've heard, a lot .. almost everyone thinks new gmail UI is butt ugly.

But it's also very functional. My parents were long time yahoo-mail users, who switched a few months ago. They love never having to delete mail in order to tidy, terrific spam detection etc. My dad uses filters and archiving, but my mom has a huge inbox and only ever searches. This dichotomy between searching and labeling is an on-going debate in the family :)

Re: Introducing Outlook.com - Modern Email for the Next Billion Mailboxes

#309

Post by xiaomai »

petercooper wrote: post #289
pyre wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, but it would be nice to augment Mutt with things like tags and conversations[1] without having convoluted setups involving hacks with external scripts. Another example, it would be really cool to be able to edit email as Markdown/Textile/reStructuredText and have it converted to a text+html (multipart/alternative) email, but currently there is no way to do that with Mutt without using some sort of sendmail wrap…

Not pointing this out for any reason other than it might useful for some: http://sup.rubyforge.org/ More generally, though, I last used mutt in the late 90s so I have no clue but.. it doesn't allow for a vim-style of extension by third party addons?

I used sup for many years (and contributed some very minor patches). sup is no longer maintained and it's difficult to get running with ruby 1.9. Some good people that weren't happy with sup created notmuch (http://notmuchmail.org/) with similar goals. There is a mutt fork that uses morning called mutt-kz (https://github.com/karelzak/mutt-kz/wiki).

I'm not as satisfied with mutt-kz as I was with sup, but it's probably even better if you have invested a lot of time configuring mutt just so.

Post reply on HN