[HN Gopher] Memos: stick private notes on your email
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Memos: stick private notes on your email
Author : nopcode
Score : 72 points
Date : 2024-08-29 11:32 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.fastmail.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.fastmail.com)
| oidar wrote:
| Hey did this and I thought it was a good idea. Glad this is
| getting picked up on by other email services.
| AvAn12 wrote:
| Great feature! Would love to see this in Outlook (only option at
| work), gmail and others. Is this proprietary or some kind of
| extension of the email spec? Cheers
| AvAn12 wrote:
| PS I'm a long-time user of FastMail for personal. Highly
| recommended!
| unshavedyak wrote:
| Same! I adore their masked emails and email aliases, and that
| it integrates into 1pass during signup. Really great UX for
| email
| slightwinder wrote:
| [..]You'll find them in the Memos folder, as a reply to the
| message your memo is attached to.[..]
|
| Seems they are just normal mails in a special location.
| Shouldn't be that hard for other clients to implement this.
| alberth wrote:
| I love Fastmail (and am a paid user) ... but don't understand
| what problem this feature is solving.
| dolni wrote:
| Some use cases are described in the blog post.
|
| I have wanted a feature like this before and worked around it
| by replying to the email but sending the reply only to me.
| slightwinder wrote:
| It's just another way of managing notes and tasks. Attaching
| notes and tasks directly to the mail, can result in shorter
| workflows. I mean, information should be where it's used, and
| mails are a very central point of some peoples' life.
| callmeal wrote:
| an immediate one for me is to track notes from phone calls to
| support. My current process is to reply to the email with my
| notes from the call.
| voisin wrote:
| I am a Fastmail user. I wish they would break out their Calendar
| from their Email app so that I could easily switch between them
| when composing emails and needing to reference my calendar (when
| mobile, using the app). I assume this is a pretty common use case
| - has anyone found a workflow for this?
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| I keep a two tabs, one with my email and the other with my
| calendar. You can also access your calendar in a side bar from
| within the email view. Are either of those useful to you?
|
| I'm not sure if I understand what your issue is, but it seems
| like it's possible to do this.
| voisin wrote:
| Sorry, I do most of my emails from my phone or iPad using
| their app rather than the website.
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| I know on iOS I can swipe down on the message I'm writing
| while writing an email (this hides the keyboard), then hit
| the calendar icon at the bottom of the screen. From the
| calendar view, if I hit the email icon I'm brought back to
| the draft I was just writing.
|
| I have no idea if the same convention will work on Android,
| though.
| davidbanham wrote:
| If you add your fastmail account to iOS it'll populate the
| inbuilt calendar and mail apps. Then you've got separate
| apps for each in addition to the fastmail app. Use
| whichever ones you please.
| zephraph wrote:
| The calendar is available in the sidebar (on desktop) which I
| tend to use quite often. On mobile if you swipe down it should
| hide the keyboard and you can switch to the calendar while
| keeping your draft open on the email tab.
|
| I generally agree that the workflow could be improved though.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| It's a pet peeve of mine that most email clients want to put
| the calendar and email list view in places where, by default,
| you can see one at a time. (I think Outlook started it but I
| could be wrong)
|
| If I am scheduling something I have a lot on my mind including
| the contents of the calendar and the email, possibly other
| emails, other things on the computer and other things that are
| just in my head. Seeing the calendar and the email
| simultaneously is the foundation for this. There are work-
| arounds but these are flawed in their own way. I hate opening
| multiple email windows in Outlook because if I do it seems
| Outlook is going to keep opening them forever every time I open
| Outlook.
|
| Myself I use eM client as a front end for Fastmail.
| jwells89 wrote:
| I think you're right in that the trend started with Outlook,
| but at least for a while Microsoft offered an opt-out in the
| form of Outlook Express, which was _just_ a mail client.
|
| My preference is that email and calendar are two entirely
| separate apps, because I have my calendar open for about half
| of the emails I compose, and the remainder of my calendar
| usage has nothing to do with email at all. This is one of the
| reasons I've stuck with Apple Mail + Calendar through the
| years.
| plg wrote:
| Hey does this as well, it's a cool feature
|
| https://www.hey.com/features/inbox-notes/
| hungie wrote:
| Is Fastmail hitting the point where they feel compelled to add
| new features on top of a perfectly good email client, bogging it
| down and slowly turning a snappy, clean experience into a morass
| because they couldn't just let it be good and functional?
|
| I hope not. I hope they are keeping it simple and clean.
| ashleyn wrote:
| Part of the implied deal I get for paying for a service is they
| _don 't_ feel the need to enshittify it. Here's hoping this
| will be a useful value-add.
| emestifs wrote:
| Looks like a simple and non intrusive and potentially useful
| feature. Your concern seems unnecessary (for now). They may not
| be perfect, but they seem to be better than most SaaS companies
| as far as my experience with them goes. Their web app works,
| hasnt enshitified or gotten slow, they aren't shoving AI into
| their stuff afaik. Theyre alright imo for now.
| flkiwi wrote:
| Aside from not having quite as robust an anti-spam approach
| as gmail (at least at the start), fastmail has been faster
| and easier to use than gmail was for me, and that's extremely
| high praise. Even something as obscure as setting a custom
| color theme for the web UI is fast and painless. I thought
| getting off gmail would be difficult but it's been a breeze.
| (not an ad, though it sounds like one)
| ghostpepper wrote:
| I have noticed more downtime in the last few months than the
| previous few years combined. I think they recently did a
| server migration so hopefully it's not an indication of
| anything more serious changing in their culture.
| neilv wrote:
| Nice, they reasonably kludged it into an IMAP folder:
|
| > _If you also use another email app to access your Fastmail
| account, such as Apple Mail or Thunderbird, you'll still have
| access to your memos. You'll find them in the Memos folder, as a
| reply to the message your memo is attached to._
| dunham wrote:
| Apple also does this with their "Notes" app and IMAP servers.
| (You have to turn on "Notes" for that service in the "Internet
| Accounts" settings panel.)
|
| It looks like I still have some notes in Fastmail from testing
| it out back in 2016. I thought IMAP as sync/storage was an
| interesting idea at the time, but didn't get around to using
| it. At one point I was considering it as a backing store for
| recipes.
| zimpenfish wrote:
| > Apple also does this with their "Notes" app and IMAP
| servers. (You have to turn on "Notes" for that service in the
| "Internet Accounts" settings panel.)
|
| Yeah, I've used this in the past to let family mark domains /
| addresses for email whitelisting. Needed some finagling
| because the notes are quoted-printable HTML but easy enough
| to feed the info into rspamd via redis keys.
| srockets wrote:
| This feature in Apple's software is there so it would be
| compatible with Exchange ActiveSync (a requirement by some
| organizations that have installed the latter placed on using
| the former).
| tengwar2 wrote:
| I know Notes can store in IMAP, but is there a way of
| associating it with an email? I can't see anything.
| 2-3-7-43-1807 wrote:
| i love fastmail web ux but i hate that the fastmail app is
| useless without internet. no browsing of cached mails.
| emestifs wrote:
| Use something like imail, thunderbird, etc? Those should all
| work offline for browsing cached content
| 2-3-7-43-1807 wrote:
| fastmail _app_ ... APP!!1!!1!!1!1!!!
| ghostpepper wrote:
| The biggest issue with apple's Mail.app is they don't support
| vanity domains the way Fastmail does. You can add them
| individually but the Fastmail app lets you create one right
| from within the compose box - you just type whatever you want
| into the From: field.
| slices wrote:
| "private", but the Australian government can access freely.
| petesergeant wrote:
| oh no.
| russelg wrote:
| As opposed to an American service like Gmail? Does the PRISM
| program ring any bells?
| bcye wrote:
| As opposed to numerous other alternatives from EU/Switzerland
| maybe?
| srockets wrote:
| There are multiple ways to define "private". Some of those can
| not be satisfied by any email service, but most don't, as
| email, by design, is not built for those use cases[0]. -- [0]
| https://www.latacora.com/blog/2020/02/19/stop-using-encrypte...
| savolai wrote:
| Heads up protonmail! This would give an edge. Also please allow
| seeing the note with each message of a thread.
| hs86 wrote:
| For years, I used Fastmail alongside four other email accounts
| with local mail clients like Thunderbird, Apple Mail, and eM
| Client. The experience was always just okay, but recently, tasks
| like opening messages, switching to folders with lots of items,
| or searching became frustratingly slow. Additionally, these mail
| clients consume more resources than I'm comfortable with, and
| their background processes ballooning to around 2GB on older
| devices with just 8GB of RAM was simply too much.
|
| The most responsive and lightweight email experience I've found
| is, surprisingly, the Fastmail web app. However, I hesitated for
| a long time because using a webmail interface felt like a step
| backward, and I dislike more vendor lock-in. (For context, I
| already use my own domain through Fastmail.)
|
| But eventually, I couldn't stand the slowdowns anymore and made
| the switch. I used Fastmail's IMAP importer to fetch all messages
| from my other accounts, added their SMTP credentials to Fastmail
| for composing new emails, and enabled Fastmail's Labels feature
| in the settings.
|
| Everything is better now. Processing new messages and achieving
| inbox zero is much faster, labels are more flexible, search is
| nearly instant, and the resource usage of this additional Firefox
| tab is significantly lower than running a native email client.
|
| New features like Memos seem useful, but I'm still somewhat wary
| of the increased vendor lock-in. For example, I hesitate to use
| their 1Password integration with Masked Emails because I'm not
| sure how much of a hassle it would be if Fastmail ever turns
| evil, and I need to jump ship and point my domain to another
| email host.
| prirun wrote:
| Without commenting on whether it's a good feature or not, this
| morning I had the pop-up ad for this new feature displayed in my
| Fastmail web page. However, it was positioned on the screen so
| that the "Got It" link at the bottom was obscured, and the pop-up
| captured all clicks. I could move the mouse all over the place,
| things highlighted and unhighlighted, but the only thing actually
| clickable (Got It) was off the screen. And the ad said something
| about paying my utility bill online, which I don't have setup, so
| I thought I had some kind of virus locking up my email account.
|
| I really didn't appreciate this at all, and that's being
| diplomatic about it.
| meowster wrote:
| I was momentarily confused as well. Not a feature I ever
| thought about before, and will probably never use.
|
| I'd rather have them implement something simplier like having
| an anniversary field for contacts and that show up in my
| calendar so I know when to mail anniversary cards.
| edp wrote:
| You made me check but there is a "birthday" field on the
| contact form and I can display a "Birthdays" calendar with
| events for the birthdays of my contacts.
| kqr wrote:
| For other types of anniversaries (like close friends' and
| relatives' wedding anniversaries) I sometimes create dummy
| contacts.
| ngrilly wrote:
| Fastmail has a birthday field that shows up in the calendar.
| I know because I use it :)
| dbuxton wrote:
| This was one of my favorite features of Google Inbox (RIP). Does
| anyone know of a good browser extension that can reproduce this
| feature for GMail? Preferably one that just works with
| localstorage rather than forcing you to put your notes in some
| third-party service...
| seeknotfind wrote:
| I use email drafts for this.
| shafoshaf wrote:
| In GMail, I just forward the email to myself. That way it stays
| in the thread in the exact position and doesn't clutter my
| Drafts folder.
| gxonatano wrote:
| Those of us that check email in Emacs have long had this feature.
| Org mode has capture functions that can take an email and make a
| note out of it, or a todo item, schedule it, or do whatever. It's
| amazingly powerful, and doesn't rely on some web-based software.
| climb_stealth wrote:
| I appreciate that the data is still available via IMAP. But, it
| feels fastmail is slowly drifting towards the inevitable
| enshittification. Maybe that is a bit harsh but still. Some
| things that have been bothering me in recent months:
|
| - It is not possible to prepay anymore. I used to have at least a
| year's worth of credit to make sure the account doesn't lapse if
| I get incapacitated on renewal time
|
| - If a paid account stops, the email address eventually becomes
| up for grabs for someone else
|
| - The monthly calendar view does not scroll smoothly anymore.
| Instead it now jumps to full days or months and it makes
| scrolling through it a badly jagged experience. It used to be so
| smooth and the best calendar view of any service, ever. Now, it's
| just as annoying as everything else.
|
| - The calendar view now greys out the month that isn't current.
| Again making scrolling through the year a worse experience.
|
| I'm sure there are justifications for all changes. But for me
| things like this make me go from "Fastmail is awesome!" to "Meh,
| it's email and it's alright". Saying that as someone who has been
| a paying user for many years.
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