[HN Gopher] Email doesn't suck - it's email clients that need im...
___________________________________________________________________
Email doesn't suck - it's email clients that need improving
Author : WithinReason
Score : 96 points
Date : 2022-08-24 11:38 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.wired.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.wired.com)
| alexklarjr wrote:
| Approach to email suck, instead of async communication it is
| became information duplication and hoarding. I suspect it is come
| from usenet times. And of course enterprise, managers (and
| Microsoft) made it 100x worse. There were attempts to make it
| sane - like Lotus Notes. Long gone and forgotten.
| jawns wrote:
| I am surprised that few commenters have criticized the tech-
| curmudgeon perspective that underlies most of the author's
| preferences. His rigid view of what email should consist of is
| not really mainstream.
|
| For personal and some business correspondence, sure, plain-text
| messages are fine. For transactional messages, structured
| metadata becomes more important. For anything from a brand, rich
| formatting helps convey information in a way that's consistent
| with the rest of the brand's digital presence -- which may not be
| important to _him_ , but is important enough to enough other
| people that companies spend a lot of money to make it so, and
| many consumers appreciate it.
|
| Dynamic elements, like calendar integrations, also have their
| place, and it feels like a lot of this stuff gets written off as
| cruft in his article, whereas it's not cruft to a lot of people.
|
| If anything, I would like email to become even more advanced and
| fluid, rather than scaled back to fit in the little box he has
| crammed it into.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| There's a large overlap between people that want to use email
| as a central part of their lives and people who think
| everything other than text is just unnecessary waste. It's not
| really a technical thing, but a cultural tie. Think suckless
| folks or the Gemini project people.
|
| I think a good argument could be made for Email being a
| federated, open substrate to send and receive non-real-time
| messages but not many people who make that argument want to see
| rich messages even though it's technically an easily solvable
| problem (albeit hopefully not the way MIME has done it today.)
| guelo wrote:
| Corporate spammers love rich formatting and dynamic elements.
| Nobody else wants that crap.
| defulmere wrote:
| > Email doesn't suck - it's email clients that need improving
|
| The wretched hive of scum and villainy that is my postfix
| quarantine begs to differ.
| leephillips wrote:
| I liked the article. The author seems to have the same attitudes
| and preferences about software that I do. But, does _Wired_ have
| a policy that forbids linking to anything that's not another
| _Wired_ article? The piece contains only two hyperlinks, both
| pointing to _Wired_. One of the main points of the Web is that
| it's a web of information. Every piece of software he talks about
| has a web page, and plenty of good articles and tutorials about
| it; there are certainly other interesting articles talking about
| the issues the author talks about. Why does _Wired_ hate the web?
| aendruk wrote:
| Not to mention the auto-playing video stuffed between two
| paragraphs. I wanted to upvote the article for its message but
| I can't in good faith recommend anyone visit this site with its
| current aggression.
| pwg wrote:
| With uBlock Origin blocking (by default) the javascript that
| wired serves, I read the whole article and was only aware of
| an auto-play video even being present when I read your
| comment.
| aendruk wrote:
| Good for us? (Yes, I too browse without scripting.) Their
| wrongdoing still exists and I refuse to shift the blame and
| burden of defense to users.
| leephillips wrote:
| Yeah, that was ridiculous. A random video that has nothing to
| do with the article. Contempt for the reader and for the
| author and the material.
|
| Publishers will respond to criticism like this by claiming
| that economic realities force them to avoid linking outside
| the site and to use obtrusive advertising and self-promotion.
| But there are plenty of counterexamples: LWN, for example,
| links extensively in every article to destinations all over
| the web and uses none of these user-hostile techniques--and
| their content is varied and at a consistently high level.
| phone8675309 wrote:
| Email does suck. It's an insecure mess that is impossible to
| secure by its very nature. All it takes is one small mistake and
| your email is sent in plaintext.
|
| It needs to die yesterday.
| hulitu wrote:
| My work computer has a SSL cert from the employer installed
| allong with the other ones. I don't see any improvement from
| plaintext. If we need secrecy we need to use encryption.
| jcynix wrote:
| Email does suck, at least HTML email. And that's not just because
| HTML was and still is the wrong markup tool for email.
|
| I'm reading most of my mail with mutt on the command line and
| that works quite well. Until ... some email with a confirmation
| link for something shows up. Or with the wrong MIME structure.
|
| Because these confirmation links more often than not are
| execessivly long, state-carrying links, which wrap around even in
| my 99 (or more) columns wide windows. Because lazy web designers
| don't use a short SHA key, which would relate to a database entry
| of the full data. No, they send their complete state.
|
| Oh, and did I mention those MIME emails with the wrong structure?
| Where the first part is the text part telling me that my MUA
| cannot display their fine mail? It can (easily formatted with
| external helpers like w3m) but I have to select the 2nd or 3rd
| part of their "fine" mail first by hand.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| > Email does suck, at least HTML email. And that's not just
| because HTML was and still is the wrong markup tool for email.
|
| I mean, citation needed. I'm ready to consider the idea but
| give me a reason!
|
| 95+% of computer users will not want to use a command line.
| aendruk wrote:
| Markdown would better serve 95% of the email I see.
| wahern wrote:
| Indeed, Markdown is literally derived from the markup
| conventions invented for usenet and e-mail messages.
| joshuamorton wrote:
| The markdown spec includes the full html spec
| (https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax#html)
| blooalien wrote:
| 95+% of computer users who mention not wanting to use or see
| a command line are so utterly terrified by the command line
| "bogeyman" that they _imagine_ command lines appearing in
| places they would actually _never_ be, or be required.
| gpvos wrote:
| What does the command line have to with non-HTML mail? It's
| perfectly feasible to have a window-based mail client that
| creates text mails.
| yakubin wrote:
| Forsaking HTML doesn't imply embracing command line.
|
| In my experience, most mails don't actually use any styling
| beyond the automatic blockquote for the endless quote chains
| that mail clients automatically add. So people are wasting
| storage and transfer for something they don't really use.
|
| When I see a mail which could actually use some styling, it's
| usually something involving maths and HTML is not suitable
| for that case. People usually send LaTeX snippets in plain
| text in this case.
|
| And while I'm at it, the endless quote chains are another
| thing which has no reason for existing. Each mail in a thread
| steadily grows in size, because mail clients "conveniently"
| _always_ quote everything _and put the text cursor above it_
| so that the user doesn 't stop for a moment to look at the
| size of what they're sending and consider the absurdity of
| the situation, when their client is perfectly capable of
| reconstructing the whole thread without copying all mails in
| each message. Quoting should be opt-in on a case-by-case
| basis. As they function in the wild today, the quotes are
| just useless garbage attached to everything.
| fragmede wrote:
| HTML vs plain text is a distraction; it's not the 1970's
| anymore and saving a byte or two here and there just isn't
| the computing world we're living in. Not when images,
| video, or audio files regularly get attached to email.
|
| Quote chains are why it's both email and email clients that
| need to improve. Without consensus on what's "right", we're
| left with poor solutions with poor UX, and implemented in a
| fragmented way, because all clients need to agree. What's
| more, how do you loop someone into a conversation they
| weren't previously a part of, if you don't have the history
| of the thread in each mail? This is something Slack gets
| right, and because they control the client as well, they
| can unilaterally make changes that support their view of
| how message history works. The strength of email is in its
| decentralization but here, it becomes a shortcoming.
| yakubin wrote:
| _> HTML vs plain text is a distraction; it 's not the
| 1970's anymore and saving a byte or two here and there
| just isn't the computing world we're living in. Not when
| images, video, or audio files regularly get attached to
| email._
|
| It's not about HTML vs plain text. It's about HTML vs a
| way to style text which is actually useful to the users.
| HTML is so bad for this purpose, in practice 99% of HTML
| mails don't use any tags in their proper content and
| mails which could use some styling to make them more
| readable are using plain text, because HTML is of no help
| to them. My remark about overhead was actually about the
| quotes, whose sizes grow linearly as threads get longer
| (and the threads grow quadratically instead of linearly),
| not about HTML. You don't pay for tags you do not use
| (almost). The only rich HTML mails (as opposed to plain
| text HTML mails) I get are marketing mails, which want to
| track me and "stand out from the crowd", neither of which
| I have an interest in, and HR mails.
|
| _> What 's more, how do you loop someone into a
| conversation they weren't previously a part of, if you
| don't have the history of the thread in each mail? This
| is something Slack gets right_
|
| Slack doesn't get it right. When you join a conversation,
| you always see the whole history. But in practice people
| conduct conversations according to the assumption of who
| is taking part in them at a given moment. They can't
| predict the future and that someone will add another
| person to the conversation, and now this person will see
| everything they wrote. There is no way to add them to the
| conversation with a context of "the last n messages" e.g.
| In an ideal mail client you would select which messages
| from the thread you want to share with the newly-added
| conversation participant.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| > Forsaking HTML doesn't imply embracing command line.
|
| To be clear, I agree, but it was the only reason I could
| see in GP for why HTML was annoying. (Not to say GP doesn't
| have a right to be annoyed, but I think that particular
| reason is relatively unique.)
| jcynix wrote:
| In my day job I use Thunderbird on a Mac, with HTML turned
| off. Because too many colleagues send Office attachments. So
| you don't need to use a command line to turn HTML off (but
| neither do you need to be afraid to use it CLI ;-)
|
| Citations:
|
| "HTML Email: Whenever Possible, Turn It Off!"
| https://subversion.american.edu/aisaac/notes/htmlmail.htm
|
| https://phishingtackle.com/articles/phishing-emails-with-
| htm...
| cm2187 wrote:
| smtp sucks hard though. Pretty much the only major protocol that
| never got upgraded (along DNS until DNS over https).
| Dysfunctional encryption (as in optional, easily downgradable),
| no assurance on the identity of the sender, bad interoperability
| (the likes of gmail sending directly to spam folder half of the
| domains).
| ink_13 wrote:
| Oh boy, never learn about BGP and you'll be much happier.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| Well at least BGP is basically an old boy's club so adherence
| to group rules, not any technical controls, keep the system
| in check.
| geocrasher wrote:
| This. SMTP was built upon FTP originally, and it's a protocol
| designed for ARPAnet, not Internet. SMTP is inherently the
| wrong protocol for the job. But it keeps working and is the
| gold standard for email communication and is dead simple to
| implement, so it keeps being used.
| Beltalowda wrote:
| It's not quite that bad; you can use SMTP over TLS (without the
| downgradable STARTTLS, plus there's REQUIRETLS now), and
| there's been plenty of extensions over the years (like
| SMTPUTF8). Identity verification has been handled in another
| layer (the message itself); you could argue that's not the best
| place, but it _is_ there. And gmail 's problems are gmail's
| problems.
|
| The entire world still runs on DNS; as an end-user you can now
| use DNS-over-HTTPS and that's nice, but that's mostly a
| frontend for DNS, which as a whole hasn't really been
| "upgraded". Upgrading SMTP to something new would require
| upgrading all the world's email servers, otherwise
| mail.server1.com can't communicate with mail.server2.com. This
| will probably happen at the same speed as IPv6.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| Assuming you mean identity verification is handled with GPG
| keys, nobody actually uses that in practice. Even the people
| that use Usenet today mostly don't.
|
| Email identity is handled de facto by a web of trust anchored
| by the big domains with no possibility of creating a new
| trust anchor. You're either managed by Google, Microsoft, or
| Apple and inherit their trust or you play endless games to
| not get your mails blocked by default. It's a sad world and
| didn't need to be this way, but there's no real urge to fix
| things because the only people who are clamoring to fix email
| are people who want to encourage folks to use niche
| experiences like mutt and PRs by mail.
| nmstoker wrote:
| Part of what makes it worse is that many of the pain points are
| such low hanging fruit.
|
| Being stuck with Outlook due to corporate inertia, most days i
| run into simple silly things that have been inconvenient for
| years:
|
| - non standard shortcuts (what modern windows app doesn't use
| Ctrl F for Find which you would think would let you search an
| open email for text except it does something else!
|
| - fragmented unintuitive disttribution of functions over tabs
|
| - remarkably unhelpful use of space in the inbox views, such that
| columns rarely show enough of what you need to see
|
| - annoying assumptions (eg typing a user name into the inbox
| search defaults to using From: when i frequently need to search
| with it as To: when I've got folders of email where I'm a co-
| recipient and need to search who the mail was address to)
| GraphenePants wrote:
| It's incorrect to assume that a Windows application will open
| the Find interface via the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+F. In
| Microsoft Word that shortcut opens the Navigation interface,
| and Find is now Advanced Find, which can be opened simply and
| intuitively via Ctrl+H - Alt+D.
|
| Frequent revalidation training in the leverage of Microsoft
| products is something that would have helped your person avoid
| looking unprofessional.
| pen2l wrote:
| > - remarkably unhelpful use of space in the inbox views,
|
| I agree with you here. The one time we saw a progression with
| Google Inbox (which showed cards of events, photo-previews,
| etc.: https://cdn.vox-
| cdn.com/thumbor/vRLmb7RDrySSxylcMGIoV7dWTK8=...), it was
| quickly followed by a regression: they closed it, I suspect
| because the previews were costing them too much bandwidth. The
| day I see a well-made OSS replica of Google Inbox is the day I
| go back to doing my own email.
| PascLeRasc wrote:
| Check out the Outlook web interface, it's so much better. They
| got the navigation delay down to 3-4 seconds! Also they have
| this safety feature where the delete button doesn't work unless
| you first archive and un-archive the message. The actual
| content view gets closer to a third of the screen space too,
| which is almost enough to load someone's 5 paragraph email
| signature. Now that's Enterprise Ready!
| pwg wrote:
| > what modern windows app doesn't use Ctrl F for Find
|
| For this, in Outlook, the explanation is (per Raymond Chen):
| Bill Gates
|
| https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20140715-00/?p=50...
| SaltyBackendGuy wrote:
| Thank you for this bit of history! Looks the benevolent
| dictator wins again.
| tomjakubowski wrote:
| Not so benevolent at that time :)
| n3storm wrote:
| Check thunderbird beta. Is amazing
| awill wrote:
| is it substantially different from the stable build?
| nixonpjoshua1 wrote:
| The Outlook web interface is substantially better than the
| desktop app at this point for UX
| bravetraveler wrote:
| Email clients suck, but we can't pretend that like three major
| organizations setting the spam policing rules is a good thing for
| the protocol
| mongol wrote:
| Google, Microsoft.. who is the third... Yahoo?
| bravetraveler wrote:
| I pulled the number out of the air, but sure -- let's call it
| Yahoo or 'everyone else'
|
| I feel like Google/MS cover the bulk of recipients, the main
| barriers to running your own MTA
| remram wrote:
| I'd love to use a non-web-based email client, but I do need it to
| sync between my devices, including labels, and search to be
| available over the entire corpus.
|
| Really surprising to see an article about email clients seemingly
| ignoring the fact that people have multiple devices. You can set
| your client however you like, sure, but for most people that's
| useless if it doesn't work the way you like consistently.
|
| E.g. if my labels show up as clunky folder-ish things, no thank
| you.
| leephillips wrote:
| I use mutt from my desktops and phone through ssh to my email
| server running IMAP. (Mutt supports labels.) This way there's
| never an issue of synchronization.
| welterde wrote:
| IMAP supports keywords/tags that are synchronized among
| clients. Wouldn't that work for you?
| remram wrote:
| I can do another survey of email clients and see if support
| is good enough. Last I did, it wasn't.
|
| The fact that I am using Gmail today will also be a problem,
| unless Gmail now uses those tags instead of folders to report
| its labels.
| calvinmorrison wrote:
| Here's a talk from one of the heads of Fastmail: "Email Hates the
| Living"
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4s9IjkMAmns
|
| Email itself is a very weird quirk filled system. If you want to
| read about the insanity behind some of the protocols watch that
| talk. That's why things like JMAP are being developed.
| fmajid wrote:
| No. It's not UI that causes people to hate email. Email users
| need to be trained on how to use it effectively within the
| context of an organization, and it is not a replacement for
| structured systems like ticketing systems. Cal Newport has some
| great articles on this, including the odd fact companies supply
| no training. All messaging platforms devolve to the same
| dysfunctional mess eventually.
|
| I do share the author's hatred of webmail, however.
| danielfoster wrote:
| I misread "email clients" as "clients" and silently agreed.
| remram wrote:
| Then I'm reading your silent thoughts ;)
|
| Joke aside, a lot of the pain from email seem to come from its
| users. I have to deal with a lot of people who refuse to reply
| to the list, add their reply _inside_ of the quoted previous
| message (not interleaved - I mean inside the blockquote), reply
| to old unrelated threads with a new question, fail to use the
| subject field ( "question", "inquiry", "please help"), have a
| questionable sender identity (From: "work account (new)
| <ad22@example.org>" - whose work account?).
|
| I am not sure this can easily be fixed by improving either the
| protocol or user interface.
| mikek wrote:
| > A stand-alone email client gives you the same advantages all
| native applications have over their web-based counterparts:
| speed, grace, and offline accessibility.
|
| That exactly describes Superhuman.
| harikb wrote:
| While talking about email, don't underestimate the need for
| calendar integration.
|
| There are many projects that start solving "Inbox" before they
| get in to the abyss that is calendar management and fall flat.
| solarkraft wrote:
| I emphatically agree that E-Mail clients suck, to the point of
| wondering whether I should build an E-Mail client (my answer is
| "probably not").
|
| Instead I did the second best thing and came up with some user
| styles to make one of the better hosted E-Mail clients, IO.OX
| (B2B software used by mailbox.org and Strato), a bit more
| bearable and almost even comfortable:
| https://gist.github.com/solarkraft/6afcfff8d5283cefad40695c9...
| stevekemp wrote:
| I wrote a console-based modal email-client, which was written
| in 50% C++ and 50% Lua for the user-interface and all
| scripting.
|
| My advice to anybody considering writing an email client would
| be .. don't. The amount of broken MIME things you'll have to
| deal with, strong opinions on UI, and similar things will make
| you go crazy.
|
| I used to use mutt, then my own client. These days there are a
| few console-based clients that are new such as aerc, but even
| so writing the basics is easy, but coping with real mail is way
| harder than you'd expect
| PurpleRamen wrote:
| > The amount of broken MIME things you'll have to deal with,
| strong opinions on UI, and similar things will make you go
| crazy.
|
| Would it make more sense to first build a bunch of libs, to
| create a common ground, onto which people could more easily
| build their customized clients?
| sph wrote:
| Email clients are absolutely terrible. If the best we can do is
| Thunderbird, a slow-moving almost abandonware monolith (have a
| look at its extension store. It's a ghost town), the situation
| is dire.
|
| Webmail is good enough, but PWA implementation across operating
| systems is terrible as well. I keep Fastmail pinned in a
| browser tab, and let's hope I don't close the browser.
|
| I hear CLI email clients are great, but the latest startup
| newsletter didn't get the memo and I keep receiving HTML emails
| with images, and I don't want to live in the terminal either.
| addicted wrote:
| Thunderbird isn't almost abandonware.
|
| It literally was abandonware for several years.
|
| It was only recently resurrected by 1-2 devs a few years ago
| and they've had to rebuild the community, funding and
| contributor support.
|
| The fact that Thunderbird worked perfectly well even while
| being abandonware is a testament to Thunderbird and email.
|
| I think the last part they really need to get completed is
| separation from the Firefox code. We're already seeing
| accelerating delivery of features which should hopefully
| improve.
| CogitoCogito wrote:
| I've used Thunderbird for probably like 15 years now and
| this is the first time I'm hearing that it ever was
| abandonware. At no point during that time did I not like it
| much better than all alternatives. Pretty impressive given
| that it apparently wasn't being developed for several
| years.
| mindentropy wrote:
| Does the Thunderbird calendar work as good as outlook for
| you? Does calendar invites and other communication
| programs have good integration with Thunderbird?
| dotancohen wrote:
| At my last gig I used a paid extension called owl to sync
| with outlook, even though the company did not support
| anything other than MS Outlook or the Office 365 web
| interface. It was not expensive and worked terrifyingly,
| even syncing the company calendar and address books.
| mh- wrote:
| I honestly can't be sure if _terrifyingly_ was a typo
| here. Perhaps for _terrifically_..
| guestbest wrote:
| I always hear this brought up but how essential to
| emailing is calendaring? Is exchange support built in to
| mutt or pine?
| dotancohen wrote:
| You might have noticed that there was a period during
| which none of your extensions or add-ons stopped
| functioning? That was the abandonware period.
|
| Now that it's ended once again some of my extensions have
| stopped functioning.
| PurpleRamen wrote:
| > If the best we can do is Thunderbird
|
| What about KMail/Kontact? Evolution? Sylpheed Claws? The
| Client of the Vivaldi(?) Browser? Not to forgotten all the
| commercial clients. Are they all dead or trash?
|
| > a slow-moving almost abandonware monolith (have a look at
| its extension store. It's a ghost town)
|
| To be fair, Thunderbird has a complicated history. The
| unloved child of Mozilla, survived far too long on it's own,
| until it got love again, at the time when the parent moved
| away from XUL, giving the future of Thunderbird-extensions a
| timelimit. That it's still surviving on high levels is more
| of a miracle.
| guestbest wrote:
| I wouldn't say it is because it is a miracle, but because
| it still focuses on being an e-mail client. In Ubuntu kmail
| requires a database server and groupware.
| hulitu wrote:
| (al)pine is pretty good.
| MomoXenosaga wrote:
| People who hate email what is your alternative? What doesn't
| suck? Carrier pigeons?
| hammyhavoc wrote:
| No doubt it's going to be IM for most folks.
| themadturk wrote:
| IM doesn't work unless everyone you want to keep in touch
| with is also on IM. I have regular, multiple-times-a-week
| email correspondents who are _never_ on IM. They don 't even
| keep their phones on enough for texting. It's email or
| nuthin'.
| guenthert wrote:
| There is just no single universally and actually used IM
| ecosystem and with the expression of unchecked capitalism Web
| 2.0 has become (see what happened to XMPP), there is no
| chance there will be one. Besides that the asynchronous
| nature of e-mail is a highly desirable feature for everyone
| who has actually things to do.
|
| e-mail is here to stay.
| hammyhavoc wrote:
| 60m publicly addressable users on Matrix protocol, not even
| including EU gov, healthcare, military, emergency services.
|
| Nobody is saying email is going anywhere.
| aendruk wrote:
| > the asynchronous nature of e-mail is a highly desirable
| feature
|
| This is a good point and makes me wonder whether e.g.
| Matrix should incorporate something like a "prefers async"
| field that could be used by clients to treat messages more
| like mail.
| Arathorn wrote:
| This is an excellent idea - on a per-conversation
| granularity at least you could declare whether the intent
| of the conversation is sync or async, distinguishing IM
| from mail or forums.
| addicted wrote:
| IM sucks hard. IM used to be great when it was based on open
| protocols so you could download Trillian on Windows or Adium
| on Mac and choose your client and communicate across a wide
| variety of protocols from the same context.
|
| Now you have to download and run massive resource hogging
| apps like Team and Slack to simply communicate on 2
| protocols.
| hammyhavoc wrote:
| Matrix protocol has over 60m publicly addressable accounts,
| and that's not even including all the EU gov, healthcare,
| military or emergency services. You can even bridge closed
| protocol apps like Messenger, WhatsApp, Discord et al to
| your own Matrix Synapse server and get it all in a single
| client. Works great. Been using it for over a year, can
| even send files back and forth to people still on
| Messenger.
| adamisom wrote:
| Speaking of clients, I like Hey. I just like it, and have
| discretionary income to spend on an important tool _shrug_
| Arcanum-XIII wrote:
| The same here. I use it with the wife, and we even use it for
| her mother's shop. Worked great, except for the need of having
| an smtp server for available to sent email from services (
| calendar notification, error, printer message, nas update...)
|
| Still, love Hey. Expensive, but so good.
| jimmar wrote:
| I strongly disagree that the problem with email is clients. We
| simply get too much information sent to us via email. I don't
| want to have to filter my inbox--I want to receive just as much
| information that I need.
|
| For example, my company sends me an email everyday telling me
| about company-sponsored social events. Often, the emails contain
| information they've already sent at least 5 times. Email is the
| wrong way to communicate this information. They should have a
| shared calendar or web page that lists this information. No email
| client UI can resolve poor information sharing practices.
| vt100 wrote:
| The same problem exists with physical mail. I don't need
| advertisement flyers. I want a realtime spreadsheet with
| updated prices and discounts.
| wswope wrote:
| Hmmm... someone should really make an email client with user-
| friendly filters to let you sinkhole that junk into a folder
| you never look at ;).
| jasode wrote:
| _> someone should really make an email client with user-
| friendly filters to let you sinkhole that junk into a folder
| you never look at_
|
| If you read past it, he actually wrote _" I don't want to
| have to filter my inbox"_.
|
| I also agree with him. I never use email clients' software
| filtering "rules" or "smart folders" because that's _extra
| digital housekeeping work I don 't want to do_.
|
| Doesn't matter if the email client filtering UI is "user-
| friendly". I still don't want to mess with it.
| wswope wrote:
| Yeah my bad, brain autoparsed that as "filter" == "clean
| out" in context.
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| What I want is a unified (?) comms client. Email, SMS, RSS,
| notifications, etc. in a single dashboard.
|
| They all have the very similar properties. Sender / source,
| subject, body, attachments, etc.
|
| And I want to make it easy to tag / organize them. Maybe a tab
| for each type + tags within each. Search across all (since too
| often I forget the medium of a particular msg)
|
| Finally, I don't want the provider of this service / client
| reading the content and generally probing the sphincter of my
| privacy.
| dotancohen wrote:
| Thunderbird once had a chat extension that worked great. It
| supported the big protocols - including Yahoo, AOL, XXMP, MS
| Messenger, and IRC I believe and a whole slew of lesser known
| protocols. I had to stop using it when the world embraced Skype
| and everyone moved there, probably around 2006 or so I think.
|
| Today, most chat protocols have the same flaw as Skype:
| hostility towards third party clients.
| PurpleRamen wrote:
| Thunderbird still has chat-support out of the box. I use it
| for XMPP and IRC. And it also still supports Newsfeeds, but I
| would say it could be improved on that part.
| waz0wski wrote:
| I've been using matterbridge[1] to bring all sorts of
| 'modern' non-standard-compliant chat services back to my irc
| client[2]
|
| [1] https://github.com/42wim/matterbridge
|
| [2] https://xkcd.com/1782/
| asdfqwertzxcv wrote:
| I pretty much have this setup currently:
|
| Email hosted by a 3rd party (like migadu or purelymail) then
| moved my cell number over to voip.ms, which sends all texts and
| voicemails to me via email, where I can now respond to texts
| via my email client. Then I use feedmail to have all my rss and
| social feeds email the full text and images to me in either a
| digest or when they are published.
|
| I have to say I've been loving it. I'm currently setting up
| notmuch and alot as my mail indexer/sorter and commandline
| viewer, too.
| hammyhavoc wrote:
| Sounds like the next major version of Thunderbird might suit
| you.
| dotancohen wrote:
| What's in that version?
| ndegruchy wrote:
| I'm kind of surprised no one has mentioned "Hey!" the email
| service from the Basecamp folks. I haven't had an opportunity to
| try it, but the UI looks like something that could be replicated
| locally.
|
| There is also likely some major pushback from people who already
| have their workflows set _just so_ and any major deviation from
| "list of items" is going to break that.
| derekzhouzhen wrote:
| That's why you need to write your own email client, or help me to
| polish mine:
|
| https://github.com/derek-zhou/liv
| squarefoot wrote:
| I use Claws Mail since ..uh.. forever (it was called Sylpheed
| back then) and never felt the need to change. It's fast, and I
| mean really fast; I keep all my email since day one online so I
| can quickly search among all messages exchanged since 1997 (I
| migrated the earlier mailboxes from Windows/Eudora flawlessly)
| and find everything, including spam filled with vintage Windows
| malware or those watermarked Viagra/Cialis banners. It's tens of
| thousand messages and searches in indexed fields is next to
| instantaneous. If you think web based mail sucks and console
| clients are too much for non tech users, Claws Mail might be a
| middle ground worth of consideration.
|
| https://claws-mail.org/downloads.php
| ldarby wrote:
| Sylpheed is still Sylpheed. Claws is a fork of it.
| prmoustache wrote:
| What suck is what people came to do with email.
|
| Using it as notification system? That is a big no to me.
| lake_vincent wrote:
| Agreed. My company uses Google Workspace, and I find the Gmail
| UI/UX absolutely unbearable in every way. I personally like
| Outlook (or rather what it used to be), and just wish for a clean
| Outlook for Gmail integration.
|
| But the nightmare that is IMAP has prevented me from ever
| succeeding in cleanly integrating the two. In fact, the general
| experience of using Microsoft and Google products together is
| quite frustrating. I get that they are competitors, but not
| acknowledging the multi-platform reality of modern work and
| forcing me to suffer because you can't be healthy adversaries, is
| really ridiculous and I resent both companies for their user-
| hostile practices.
|
| Looking at you too, Apple.
| srvmshr wrote:
| As much as Google Workspace email feels convenient, they have
| sort of broken the IMAP with the label system. Syncing to
| conventional email clients without label feature just creates
| multiple copies of emails if they have been labeled with more
| than 1 label. It is frustrating sometimes
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Ideally, Google, MS, etc would deprecate IMAP and replace
| with JMAP.
|
| https://jmap.io/software.html
| egberts1 wrote:
| JavaScript, embedded, in email is, pejoratively, a bad idea
| by putting too much power into a transmitted email.
|
| Too many security holes, discovered and undiscovered with
| JavaScript, not to mention JMTP.
|
| Better yet,
|
| Hashing the local part of the email address and
| retrofitting mail clients to do the mapping and rejection
| is the best way to delete unwanted and unsolicited emails.
|
| Couple that with new decentralized lookup of sender's PKI
| (as well as DKIM).
|
| That should add years/decades to SMTP viability and
| usability.
| Flimm wrote:
| JMAP is _not_ JavaScript embedded in email. Are you
| thinking of something else?
| egberts1 wrote:
| But it does nothing to prevent JS in its payload.
| windows_sucks wrote:
| the client should be responsible for not executing
| embedded JS in a message
| sleepybrett wrote:
| sure, but that's not a feature a protocol should have.
| Because the protocol itself does not interact with it in
| any way. It's clients that process that javascript and
| execute it. The protocol is about moving 'emails' from
| one place to another. If you don't want javascript in
| your email and run your own email stack you can certainly
| filter out javascript blobs if you want. Or you can chose
| clients that disable or simply don't even know what
| javascript is.
| hsbauauvhabzb wrote:
| You cannot read this email until you disable your
| adblocker.
| hulitu wrote:
| > JavaScript, embedded, in email is, pejoratively, a bad
| idea by putting too much power into a transmitted email
|
| The exploits writers would like to politely disagree. /s
| trevoristall wrote:
| I was under the impression JMAP was just a sync protocol
| and had nothing to do with js in email. Is that
| incorrect?
| gsich wrote:
| Why?
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| IMAP is antiquated and suboptimal with today's clients
| and use cases.
| wokkel wrote:
| That sound more like fud than fact. Van you back that up?
| themadturk wrote:
| I want to like Outlook, even on my Mac. But it doesn't handle
| quoting in replies the way I want it to, and I have several
| correspondents whose email chains get heavily into replies to
| replies.
|
| I mostly use Apple Mail, which is acceptable, if not great. I
| guess I need to look at Thunderbird (which I haven't looked at
| since I've been using a Mac) and, maybe, Vivaldi.
| black_puppydog wrote:
| Jup. Even using thunderbird with a gmail account it's not
| great. Google insists on displaying my emails in multiple
| locations; among others, sent emails show up in the default
| inbox folder. WTF google?
|
| Anyhow, I am so happy I recently took the time to set up
| thunderbird for my gsuite account at work. I've been using
| thunderbird for a long time privately and the UX is just so
| much better than gmail, it really improved my quality of life
| during work hours.
| doubled112 wrote:
| Does the Outlook Sync Tool work for you?
|
| It has it's own quirks, but you don't have the Google IMAP
| weirdness.
|
| https://support.google.com/a/users/answer/171710?hl=en
| kuon wrote:
| Well, e-mail has different uses, I do use mutt and I send plain
| text email, but I understand sending newsletter with "nice"
| format in HTML. I am happy that many includes a "view link" I can
| just open in my browser if I want to read it.
|
| I use lynx for html formatting, which works, except with long
| confirmation link, for this I use urlscan[1] which let me browse
| and open links.
|
| I don't think email must be loved or hated, it's not black and
| white, it is an old protocol with lots of problems, but it's also
| the only working federated protocol (and I do operate my own
| email server with 0 issues, google/ms never rejected me) which is
| an important freedom.
|
| I agree that many client have bad UX, but many have nice UX, and
| you are free to use what you want, even if you have a gmail
| account.
|
| [1]: https://github.com/firecat53/urlscan
| yesUgotit wrote:
| I don't see the point in debating protocols when "the suckiness"
| always comes down to UI/UX
|
| UX that works for async comms and real time comms can be "backed
| by" HTTP. One does not literally need the data model to conform
| to the presentation in mind.
|
| "Email" view might be a good default. "Chat view" could be a
| toggle for when the group is online at the same time.
|
| UX needs a rethink in general. What a designer finds trendy in
| the moment is user hostile. I want flexibility and customization
| at the presentation layer. Give me an API key and I'll build my
| own UX in Docker containers, thanks.
| freemint wrote:
| Any recommendations for an Android email client besides K9?
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