You Will Not Understand This

Did, uh, anyone else understand that bit?

Even if you manually select Plain Text to send, it still reflows lines at 78 characters by manually inserting linebreaks and adds its own special characters where it feels like. It also doesn't follow a handful of RFCs specific to email. There is no workaround for the forced hard-wrapping of lines in Plain Text. It will not let you use format=flowed either.

Plain Text mode has been obviously unusable for a long time, and the only folks who ever really bothered to complain about it were kernel developers (the mailing list requires plain text). Nobody else cares, but they should. Go figure.

If you're using a 'modern' mail client, you don't notice this. If you're using old, tried and true technology, the problems are plain as day.

Gmail broke email.

- now it's quite impossible to administrate your own email servers. Anti-spam measures are very effective (and enjoyable for us as users), but so paranoid that being part of the few select nodes that don't have their emails marked as spam (or are even propagated at all) is a full time job.

- gmail dicthed IMAP in favor of their own API. Pluging an IMAP client into your email account requires to dig inside your account security settings and change several obscure values with scary names and warnings. Sometime it even doesn't work, and then you do it again later, and it works for no reason. A non tech saavy user will never succeed in doing that, and hence everybody will use the web base version.

- the security of gmail accounts are insane. Not in the good way. I have yet to have a problem with a pirated account. But I had several problems with being locked out by Google deciding that "something was suspicious" because I was traveling or using someone else computer. Of course google has zero help desk to solve this. Loosing access to my emails is NOT ok. And to do it to protect me (against a threat visibly less likely than google freaking out) is adding insult to injury.

- Google scans and collects every emails you send and receive. So much for privacy. It also shares everything, thanks to PRISM. Even when I decided to dicth gmail, most people are using gmail and will never setup encryption. So by just existing, my communication are spied on, even if I don't use the service myself. Oh, and the bot scanning your mails may follow links in them. I had "burn after reading" documents that I could never open because of this.

- The gmail account is a google acount. Which means something that should be "just emails" is now a beacon to track me on all the websites I go to. It's also associated with all my google services activity. And on the android phones I log into. It requires a lot of effort and disciple on my part to mitigate that. Running a phone without an account is extra annoying. Having to juggle between several emails providers, migrate, make sure I have extensions to handle trackers, etc. I just wanted emails when I open my first gmail account. Not that.

While I do appreciate what google did with gmail (it does have tremendous benefits), the cost to get that is quite important.

But I guess that’s what you get when you use an email service from an advertising company.