[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? ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-08-24 23:01 UTC)