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Gmail, We Need to Talk
- enginnr 11y agoSchema has the same problems as Microformats where adoption only takes off if the market demands it, or it gains enough momentum that people can't imagine webapps without them. There are countless other standards this article overlooks which have been implemented very well in recent years in Gmail, so why does it lambast the lack of Schema?
- LeoPanthera 11y agoMaybe I am just really, really old at this point, but sending emails in plain text solves all these problems. I don't think I've ever received an HTML email that couldn't have been adequately represented in plain text and maybe an attached image if necessary.
- soneca 11y agoI'm sole responsible for acquisition on a startup and I solely (for now) use direct cold email (it is B2B, email sent to public adresses, so it is not spam). I only use plain text emails. I don't even use email tracking so that hidden pixel doesn't trigger any annoying warning on the email client that ruins the experience.
- PhilWright 11y agoSending unsolicited email to public addresses in order to sell something is spam. Calling it 'cold email' to make it sound like a legitimate process does not change the fact you are spamming.
- betenoire 11y agoyou may be right regarding definitions of spam, but as a user I treat relevant-and-targeted(-yet-unsolicited) emails very differently than I treat automated junk email.
- soneca 11y agoI don't actually sell, as these business don't pay us anything. Rather they list they business on our website to their (and ours) value. Is it still spam? (honest question) Edit: They are a business and have a "contact us" email on their website. Should I really not email them just because im not a customer, but a possible partner?
- CamperBob2 11y agohttps://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categorical_imperative https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categorical_imperative Another way of phrasing your mother's advice: "What if everybody did X?"
- soneca 11y agoIf everybody visited one of this business website, the server wouldnt support. Yet, it is ethical that anyone visit. And if only people that really have an interest on visiting it do it. No problems. I think the same for the email. If,everybody who can make a legitimate business proposal email them, no problem. And I apply the same ethics when I had my own company with a public email on my website (now im an employee and emails dont get to me)
- mattm 11y agoThis argument never holds up. Being a doctor or an engineer is almost always thought of as a good path. But what if everyone was a doctor or engineer? There'd be no one left to do basic tasks in life and the positions available for doctors and engineers would be so in demand that these people would work for very little.
- CamperBob2 11y agoYour point can be rephrased as, "What if everyone ignored the realities of the job market?" There's no danger that everyone will do that, so there's no need to use ethical or other philosophical arguments to discourage it. On the other hand, spamming or otherwise misusing email to deliver your unsolicited "message" at everyone else's expense is a classic instance of the Tragedy of the Commons. There is no incentive for any individual actor to do the right thing. Kant's categorical imperative is one of several reasonable ways to think about it.
- tajen 11y agoIn some countries, business addresses aren't considered PII (private information). I, as a business, regularly get emails because of the Whois, as well as I receive letters which I dutifully send back to sender, but the law doesn't identify the latter as spam. Is it the case that emails to businesses aren't spam?
- napoleond 11y agoThat's not true, by either the letter of the law or the spirit of it. I own a business, and I post my email publicly because I want people to contact me. Some of those people will be selling me things--I want that! It's true that I end up with a lot of spam as a result, and that sucks, but it's better than never receiving unsolicited business email. Sending unsolicited email to consumers is, indeed, spam. B2B is different. EDIT: CANSPAM (US) is a bit ambiguous on this point. (Helpful blog post: http://customer.io/blog/Send-email-without-unsubscribe-link-cold.html. http://customer.io/blog/Send-email-without-unsubscribe-link-...) CASL, its Canadian equivalent (I'm Canadian) is very clear on this point, though--unsolicited B2B to a publicly posted email address is a-ok, as long as it's not automated.
- chinathrow 11y agoFrom that post - a gem: "Just to be clear, you’re not allowed to use Customer.io to send cold emails.." Guess why :)
- rdancer 11y ago> Sending unsolicited email to public addresses in order to sell something is spam. Only if it is sent in bulk.
- MagnumOpus 11y agoNo. Not by the spirit on not by the letter of the definition. Spam is bulk mail, or otherwise annoying a whole group of people. Sending a targeted e-mail to a single person (even if unsolicited, even if commercial) is not spam.
- dragonwriter 11y ago> it is B2B, email sent to public adresses, so it is not spam Unsolicited commercial email is spam, regardless of whether it is B2B, and regardless of whether it is sent to "public addresses".
- chinathrow 11y ago> (it is B2B, email sent to public adresses, so it is not spam Depends in which country you are in but in most EU countries, that is still spam and hence subject to legal action. Edit: why the downvote? Care to explain your point?
- isido 11y agoYeah. Sadly, plain text email seems to be endangered species. But perhaps there is still hope, markdown and pals have made some inroads as all around useful document formats.
- newjersey 11y agoI know this is an extreme but I like this extreme. When I say plain text, I mean plain-text. I mean not even markdown. Just plain text. The client can choose to make links clickable if they like. Any formatted document should come as an attachment (I'd prefer PDF). I guess it should be an attachment I expect or I probably wouldn't open it. In any case, I don't like emails with tracking. It feels forced. If you really care, send delivery and read receipt requests but I doubt we do. Markdown should stay where it belongs. It should convert into HTML in the server, not on my client.
- PuffinBlue 11y agoI'm with you on this one, though I didn't realise we were extreme! Plain text cuts all the cruft and I can reasonably expect emails I receive to largely look similar so I get good at extracting relevant information. Every client I have, desktop and mobile, displays and sends in plain text only and I'm pleasantly surprised how infrequently this breaks anything completely and how often it exposes tracking links etc.
- sliverstorm 11y agoI'm fond of plaintext, but sometimes I do need to force a fixed-width font for a portion of the email.
- tajen 11y agoOutlook formats plain text email with a square monospaced system font, making the rest of the world look retarded. The favour is reciporcal, because, as a gmail user, Outlook-sent emails often have this delightful pastel cyan rounded font, making them look like kindergarten artifacts.
- TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
- brwnll 11y agoYou've never received data that needed to be displayed as a table? If plain text email was the end-all, then instant messenger and SMS would have killed email a long time ago.
- Karunamon 11y agoIf we're just displaying tables rather than interacting with them, that problem is solved. +----------------------------------+---------+------------------------+ | Col1 | Col2 | Col3 | +----------------------------------+---------+------------------------+ | Value 1 | Value 2 | 123 | | Separate | cols | with a tab or 4 spaces | | This is a row with only one cell | | | +----------------------------------+---------+------------------------+
- eggnet 11y agoThat only works if you can guarantee monospaced font rendering on the client. It also looks ugly.
- dredmorbius 11y agoYou cannot guarantee squat. Which is pretty much the gist of TFA, within a single vendor's various client interfaces to its own unified email system. However, as I put on my True Scotsman hat and kilt, any true email client will present monospaced fonts, therefor those which fail to do so aren't real email tools.
- TazeTSchnitzel 11y agoThis can't be reflowed to larger or smaller screen sizes. It also doesn't necessarily work well for non-European languages.
- J_Darnley 11y agoIn the old days instant messenger didn't work if the other party was offline, it didn't usually support more than 1 recipient, and it was just stuck in proprietary programs as it is these days. SMS is too short.
- kevinchen 11y ago…except Gmail doesn't support plain-text email well either. They've been converting plaintext quotes to literal '>' characters for at least 3 years and counting: https://groups.google.com/a/googleproductforums.com/d/msg/gmail/-/jLE7_XtZR8oJ https://groups.google.com/a/googleproductforums.com/d/msg/gm...
- MrScruff 11y agoI have a real estate app that sends me emails about new properties, with tables of data and embedded images. I couldn't do this with plain text email.
- scott_s 11y agoThe example presented are the kinds of emails I actively avoid. Perhaps the author is right, and Gmail is not working with them on purpose. If that is the case, it may be because many users are like me, and they tend to not want fancy-looking marketing emails, and just want basic rich-text features. The Schema initiative - I didn't know it was called that until now - is in the other direction, and I like it. Emails that have valuable information for me, such as airline flights, are presented not in the way those that send it want it to be shown, but in a way that my mail client thinks is best. Frankly, I want sameness in my emails.
- Cakez0r 11y agoI completely agree. I am totally unsympathetic about it being difficult to send consistent looking advertisements and emails that resemble web pages. If anyone from the gmail team happens to be reading, please let my comment be a contrary data point to this TC article and keep doing what you're doing!
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- discreditable 11y agoI'll agree there. One of my favorite things about using Thunderbird as my mail client is that I can force simple HTML view on all incoming mail. It ignores CSS and other garbage, while keeping basic things like bold, italic, and links in tact.
- rhino369 11y ago>If that is the case, it may be because many users are like me, and they tend to not want fancy-looking marketing emails, and just want basic rich-text features. Of course it wouldn't be that Google is the world's largest advertising company and they are in direct competition with those advertisements that they break.
- wise_young_man 11y agoThe article claims that Schema has not caught on, but in fact you have to be approved [1] to be able to have Gmail pick them up in emails you send and it's not really an open standard like it should be. Moz has a great article which covers it pretty well. Basically you have to send 100 emails per day for some length of time. Since you can't just add them to your email and expect them to work, I think that is why it hasn't caught on. I'd really love if it did though. 1: https://developers.google.com/gmail/markup/registering-with-google?hl=en https://developers.google.com/gmail/markup/registering-with-... 2: https://moz.com/blog/markup-for-emails https://moz.com/blog/markup-for-emails
- drhayes9 11y agoHTML emails reduce clickthrough rates: http://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/plain-text-vs-html-emails-data http://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/plain-text-vs-html-emails-... I think most people (correctly) interpret HTML-ness in email as a signal that the email is undesirable.
- ryan-c 11y ago> While the plain-text emails we created had some formatting capabilities (hyperlinks, tracking pixels, etc.), they were as close to plain-text as we could while maintaining the ability to track opens and clicks for testing purposes. That sounds like "HTML email with minimal cruft" rather than "plain text" to me.
- drhayes9 11y agoYeah, that's definitely true. "HTML email" in this case is a synonym for "email with lots of images and crud" in it.
- pfooti 11y agoI sure would love it if the gmail client supported more modern web stuff. The history of web development has always been a history of the Lowest Common Denominator: I'm held back from doing XYZ because this browser / email client doesn't support it and that represents a big fraction of my users. It's not just the gmail client, of course; nearly all rich mail renderers are astonishingly baroque and broken (take a look at which engines Outlook uses to render html mail - sometimes it's the msword renderer). Of course, we could all just agree to send plain text emails with a link to the web page-ified rich version of the email, but that's not satisfying. I work in the borderlands of rich email - I'm not sending advertising stuff, I'm just sending notifications to users, but those notifications look a lot better when they've got some good markup.
- ryan-c 11y agoMedia queries in email would allow a number of information leaks about how the email is being viewed, which I don't especially like. Allowing external images is already pretty awful.
- icebraining 11y agoImages are much less problematic for Gmail users since they started proxying them[1]. Now the sender can't tell if you opened the email by checking if the image was downloaded. [1] http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/12/gmail-blows-up-e-mail-marketing-by-caching-all-images-on-google-servers/ http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/12/gmail-...
- ryan-c 11y agoI was aware of the proxying, but didn't realize that gmail always prefetched the image. This implies that even sending each recipient a unique image URL will not work?
- icebraining 11y agoI believe that's correct - it always fetches the image, so there's no leak.
- jkturbo 11y agoAuthor here. Gmail does not prefetch the image. Appending a unique image URL will still allow the sender to know when you've opened the email. The proxy eliminates your IP as well as user-agent so the sender can't tell where you are and what you're using to read the email.
- ocdtrekkie 11y agoI was going to argue with you and go get a link to wave in your face. But you're right: https://blog.filippo.io/how-the-new-gmail-image-proxy-works-and-what-this-means-for-you/ https://blog.filippo.io/how-the-new-gmail-image-proxy-works-...
- DanBC 11y ago> Gmail and its plethora of rendering quirks is a big reason why developers avoid working on email. Developers like well-defined and documented environments, and email is anything but. Although many email clients suffer from rendering issues, getting an email to display nicely in the various Gmail desktop and mobile clients gives developers the most angst. THANK FUCK. Seriously, just send me plain text.
- kbart 11y agoExactly. It looks like some companies try to send you a whole website over an email.
- BuckRogers 11y agoI've been wondering about this and after reading that link, I think I'm going to switch from the Gmail iOS app to using the included Mail app. We'll see how it goes, but I do want my email as the developer intended.
- archmikhail 11y agoIf you have an Apple Watch, that is a must since there's no Gmail watch app. Checking email on the Watch is surprisingly useful.
- mikeg8 11y agoAs someone who just made the switch in the opposite direction (I've been using Mail for multiple emails accounts for a few years) I'd strongly suggest sticking with Gmail's iOS app. My email experience on mobile has been much more enjoyable, Mail was glitchy and difficult to use/organize for me.
- BuckRogers 11y agoThanks for the info. I may just do that then, or just go with a shorter trial period. Pretty sure I can use both of them at once with no issue. I'd love to know who and why my parent comment was downvoted.. I hate that, you can't say anything on here without downvotes.
- jsmeaton 11y agoI use the Inbox by Gmail app on iOS and I really love it. I never got into the regular gmail app. Inbox is far better than the standard Mail client for gmail IMO.
- awqrre 11y agoI use Gmail somewhat indirectly... I forward all gmail emails to a non-Google email address
- CM30 11y agoOh god, HTML email. Gmail and Outlook literally make coding these things an absolute hell due to their dreadful lack of supports for any form of standard, and the author is damn well spot on about it. Indeed, the only good thing I can say about Gmail is that they didn't try to use the Microsoft Word engine to render HTML like Outlook did. The way HTML email is set up and the table filled soup like code that's needed to use them well is about half the reason most developers fall back to things like Mailchimp templates rather than trying to make anything half decent. It's also why it's a real shame that the old email standards project kind of got abandoned, because absolutely zero progress has been made on this front for years upon years (outside of Apple's smartphone email apps). And yes, while plain text email does 'work', good luck convincing a company (or your boss) to go with something basic rather than the equivalent of a glossy print brochure.
- mvdwoord 11y agoGmail and Outlook? I had to create some HTML email reports to be read in Lotus Notes. It made me extremely sad as Notes invariably does.
- mschuster91 11y agoBe thankful you hadn't to target Notes, Thunderbird and Outlook like I had to once. I still have the occasional bad dreams from this job.
- guyzero 11y agoGmail, we need to talk about how you make our unpopular product unpopular even with people who want to like it. We also need to talk about how to let more junk mail into people's inboxes and maybe you could just skip the whole thing about sorting important mail out from Sears flyers? "Journalism"
- rconti 11y agoGMail, we need to talk. We need to talk about how substring searches do not work, 11 years after your launch. We need to talk about how you've slowly engineered out everything that was good and unique about GMail. We need to talk about how you "flattened" the style, removed colors from threaded messages, and just decided to use shades of grey everywhere. We need to talk about how difficult it is to tell one message from a forwarded message from a divider line from attachments from the next message in a thread. We need to talk about how you've decided to replace the window manager by insisting that my messages be a window inside of a browser window, but ones that adhere to no UI standards. We need to talk about how you've hidden the date of a message, and hidden the To: address, and the Subject, so that what used to be a simple tab action now requires multiple mouse-clicks. And apparently something about HTML emails too.
- gdulli 11y agoMaps has really become a chore to use, too. I remember getting directions used to be easy once and now it's like interacting with enterprise software.
- icebraining 11y agoWhat? If you left-click in a place, a small card appears with an arrow that you can click to get directions. If you right-click, you can get directions from or to the place. And if you search, you also get a very visible round button with an arrow and the label "Directions". How is it hard? EDIT: Sorry if this came out as aggressive. I'm just dumbfounded, that's all.
- andyana 11y agoI have the same complaint. I can't explain how it has changed, but it used to be easy. Now it is difficult and error prone. I guess I just never paid attention to it when it was easy.
- icebraining 11y ago
- thieving_magpie 11y agotechcrunch, we need to talk about your article titles. Addressing the content of the article: - "Gmail Makes Developers Shun Email", I can't think of any developer I know that shuns email, and they all pretty much use gmail. - "How Gmail Breaks Email", to be frank... not even in the slightest. Sure, it sounds pretty annoying having to jump through all those hoops for a fancypants email. - "Google should take the lead in bringing the web mail stakeholders from Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL together toward the support of a common set of CSS and HTML." Who makes a demand like that of a company? Hey, Company X, gather every industry leader please and force them to all standardize to one spec. Am I the only one that would prefer companies to not be in the driver seat for these kinds of decisions? Isn't this what led to the IE6 debacle? I really don't get these articles. Today I've read HN front page articles about horrible gmail is (my favorite email service for the past 10 years) and "Amazon kind of sucks". I must be out of touch.
- Shog9 11y agoIt's an opinion piece from a guy who... apparently... wants to put image carousels into emails and is upset that GMail doesn't let him, and yet dares to intrude upon his beautiful iOS. Hopefully no one exposes him to the ocean of old Outlook clients with crufty Word-based HTML renderers out there; he might die of a heart attack. Mentioning Pine/Alpine would be cruel as well.
- jkturbo 11y agoAuthor here. Haha yes I write on experimental techniques like carousels mainly to get developers curious into the kinds of stuff they can do with just CSS. I'm very aware of Outlook's backward HTML support, but at least its a single client. With Gmail, each of their clients has weird quirks that make it frustrating to code for. As developers sometimes creating HTML emails are necessary, such as creating system generated reports for business users. Right now, the process is fraught with issues - including figuring out Outlook, so fixing this does not just benefit email marketers alone.
- mhartl 11y ago"Gmail Makes Developers Shun Email", I can't think of any developer I know that shuns email, and they all pretty much use gmail. I think you've misinterpreted the phrase "Gmail Makes Developers Shun Email". TechCrunch writes: Gmail and its plethora of rendering quirks is a big reason why developers avoid working on email. This suggests that developers shun email clients as a development platform (i.e., working on email), not that developers don't use email themselves.
- igetspam 11y agoGMail, we need to talk. Thank you for making it complicated for people to send me "rich" text emails. Thank you for making it harder for embedded tracking images to function correctly. Perhaps the moving target that are your rendering changes will lead to a simpler, more featureless, email landscape like we once had. I really appreciate the time and money designers are forced to spend on annoying me; if i have to deal with the full frontal assault on my eyes, they should at least have to work for it. Please keep up the good work and thanks for encouraging people to focus on the iOS market instead (those people will buy anything AMIRITE?).
- TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago> Thank you for making it harder for embedded tracking images to function correctly. Thank you Google for protecting my privacy and making spam harder.
- merpnderp 11y agoWhy has Gmail made it so hard to delete emails? I use various imap connections to gmail, and they've all replaced the delete icon with an archive button. Only the web app still has an easy to click delete button.
- archmikhail 11y agoThe last thing Google wants is to lose your personal data. They don't want you deleting anything.
- smithkl42 11y agoBeing the only coder at my startup, you have to do everything. And the other day, I had to spend the whole day troubleshooting rendering differences between Outlook and GMail. It reminds me of the old days, back around the time of IE6, when it was all-but-impossible to get FF and IE to render the same HTML - except worse, by at least an order of magnitude. It's astounding to me that the same companies who've worked their asses off to make sure that their browsers all render HTML and CSS exactly the same, haven't given the slightest thought to making sure that their email clients can get along. This is a huge time-suck for developers. Glad to see that they're getting the public shaming they deserve.
- danielsamuels 11y ago> And the other day, I had to spend the whole day troubleshooting rendering differences between Outlook and GMail. We just build the template in Mailchimp and export it out as HTML nowadays. Never had an issue with that workflow.
- jkturbo 11y agoAuthor here. Glad to hear this from another developer. I think once developers are tasked to code an email, perhaps something as simple as a notification or a report, they'll quickly realize how truly foobar the email situation is. Short emails may be fine with plain text, but once you need to present any sort of structure, HTML becomes necessary and there's no reason why email needs to be this difficult.
- CaptSpify 11y agoAs someone who reads all of my email in a terminal: I don't see the problem here. I think gmail has a lot of issues, but making it harder for you to send me spam is not one of them.
- smegel 11y agoIt's not a bug, it's a feature! Seriously.
- jinst8gmi 11y agoAs someone who gets all my email hand-carved into stone tablets in ancient Greek I also don't see the problem.
- CaptSpify 11y agoYou say that like a terminal is a step back. I see it as the opposite: I started with email in web-based systems. Terminals improved my email experience 100-fold
- jinst8gmi 11y agoI'm saying that your usage pattern has little in common with the 99.99% of gmail users, hence isn't super-relevant as a data point to be used in the design of gmail.
- dijit 11y agoI'm weird, I don't like all this HTML email. What I _do_ like, is that when I get an email with things like flight details that my client can add it to the calendar. if I have any complaint with gmail it's that they're too successful, running your own mail server that's standards compliant and runs all the DMARC/SPF/DKIM + PTR is fine, but until you have a reputation with gmail 70% of people aren't seeing email from you (and I'm not talking marketing emails). which is self-fulfilling, because my emails go into the spam bin, which means when the spam bins get churned into the anti-spam learning engine it has, it sees that "(S)He's been marked spam before". So it somehow centralises email, which is at it's core decentralised. :\
- alkonaut 11y agoI'm not going to add another "just use plain text" comment. I really want to send images (in the text, not just attached), and simple rich text features such as bold text can really help readability. But that's not a huge responsive webpage crammed into an email -- it's just rich text. It's html entirely without style, neither inline nor in a header. That should be the standard email format apart from plaintext. My client can style all emails like I want them in terms of fonts and so on. Consistently. If the sender wants me to see a website, just send me the damn link?
- rockshassa 11y agoThey say history repeats itself... Google is making all the mistakes Microsoft made with IE a decade+ ago. Amusingly, Apple remains unfazed.
- archmikhail 11y agoApple makes money on hardware, making mail better on iOS won't really attract more Android users to switch IMO.
- shadesof 11y agoCode School actually offers a course that (I would think) makes this a little less painful for the uninitiated. https://www.codeschool.com/courses/unmasking-html-emails https://www.codeschool.com/courses/unmasking-html-emails
- zaphar 11y agoAllowing style to be included in a web based email client is just asking for trouble. It's not just hard. It's close to impossible thanks to CSS global nature. You would have to literally parse out the css and rewrite it as well as all the html content to automatically uniquely namespace it so it doesn't collide with the rest of your page. And meanwhile you've just created a new attack vector for your email service with security implications you may not want to take on. All of that just so that you can pretend an inherently text medium is actually a way to deliver web pages directly to users. This is a lot of work for questionable benefit to GMail's actual users as opposed to Email Marketers.
- mschuster91 11y agoThere's this thing called "iframes" with an attribute called "sandbox". And to prevent tracking or other cruft with images or external content, well, writing a CSS filter (url:... values) and filtering out src="" attributes in the HTML is not THAT hard. There is no valid reason anymore for not iframe'ing your HTML emails any more. Browsers are consistent enough in rendering that you can achieve trivial cross-platform pixel perfection (font rendering aside).
- jkturbo 11y agoI'm the author of the article. All the other web mail clients from Yahoo! Mail, Outlook.com, Comcast and so forth support the style tag. If it was a big security attack vector, all those clients wouldn't be doing that. The other webmails rewrite ids and classes and prepend unique identifiers to prevent them from clashing with their own namespace (AOL is the only one that puts it in an iframe). Interestingly Gmail webmail actually supports the style tag but strips out id and class selectors in them leaving element selectors - so they're actually doing some heavy duty parsing already. As for it being an inherently text medium. I would say it depends on the recipient. Emails do not need to be web pages, but simple CSS styling can go a long way to ease readability in emails - especially in a long curated newsletter like Product Hunt.
- hobarrera 11y agoSchema.org is also missing support for non-html emails. Sometimes actions would be nice, but there specification does not define how to use them in good ol' plain-text emails.
- kirualex 11y agoGMail really became the IE of mail readers, that's how bad it is
- qewrffewqwfqew 11y agoI've become convinced that gmail's goal is not to improve email, but to extinguish and replace it. This article talks about one minor aspect of that. In addition: * breaking established addressing conventions. Gmail (last time I used it) made it difficult to distinguish between To: and Cc:, both in received emails and when sending. * messed-up quoting, and other broken conventions. * the one that's been discussed to death here recently: it's on the way to impossible to send email and expect it not to be silently dropped if you're not on gmail. * the email authenticity measures linked to the last point also screw up mailing lists and forwards. Most of the DMARC notifications I get from gmail now include a bunch of FAILs for people that forward from another domain to gmail. Soon, they'll simply stop receiving most mail. Email is walking dead, and gmail is largely to blame.
- ViViDboarder 11y agoWhy would Google want it to be easier for you to market via email than paying them for ads?
- cronjobber 11y agoBack in pre-history, they did a similar number on their usenet interface, again after having offered a decent product for long enough to lure people away from running local clients.
- qewrffewqwfqew 11y agoThey killed usenet off good by providing a reasonable interface that encouraged people to link to it .. then destabilising the URLs. I've seen wiki links to google groups that have been changed 3 or 4 times before people simply gave up trying to re-find the original target. Pisses me off no end.
- pasbesoin 11y agoGoogle: First 6, 7 years, one great product after another. Since then: Slow death by "product manager", or whatever the hell they call it. (In league, I suspect in my personal opinion, with some cabal of out-of-control graphic "designers". Though this is hardly the only problem.)
- ocdtrekkie 11y agoYes! I fundamentally believe Matias Duarte and his "Design department" at Google is one of the worst things to ever happen to the company. As Material Design has taken over, product by product, performance and usability has taken a backseat to branding and animation.
- csomar 11y agoIf you haven't already, you are better leaving Gmail 1. Have your own domain for emails. This is important. Gmail (or any service provider) can block you/remove your account for no reason and with no recourse. Your email is very important if you are doing serious work and have financial sites and data linked to that email address. 2. The very reason that I used Gmail was speed and storage. The very reason that I left Gmail was speed. Storage is no longer relevant now. Speed become a problem in 2012-2014. It seems better now, but there seems to be "rush hours". 3. The Gmail web app is no longer good. I like a very simple interface because I write very long email. Why make the "compose" show up as a pop-up? I write emails and not chat messages. 4. The SPAM filter is good until it catches a couple business emails. This is when I decided that no SPAM filter is better. 5. If you don't pay for the product, you are the product. I left Gmail after using it for 8 years. I was fine for 12 years but as the business grow I thought about that line. Suddenly, I had strange thoughts about Google using all my data.
- g_delgado14 11y ago> If you don't pay for the product, you are the product I'm starting to think that this statement is becoming really generalized. Anonymized data has the power to help society. I.e. anonymized cancer patient data to help doctors see larger societal trends without jeopardizing client privacy. I trust larry page and the Google team, and presume Google is handling my data responsibly.
- goodata 11y ago>> I trust larry page and the Google team, and presume Google is handling my data responsibly. http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/15/google-needs-to-do-a-lot-more-than-fire-employees-who-abuse-user-data/ http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/15/google-needs-to-do-a-lot-mo...
- DaveWalk 11y agoYou have a really interesting argument against the oft-repeated "If you don't pay, you are the product." I think you are right, that there is great power in anonymized data, but ultimately motives matter. From what I saw as a former scientist, the goodwill of patients donating their tissues formed the foundation of great cancer (and neuroscience, and HIV, and...) research. IBut I think there is a social contract for scientists (and open-source programmers, and nonprofits, and...) that gives them credibility. Maybe it's our human nature to trust them, and for them to trust themselves? But 1)corporations are obliged to care about profit, and 2) anonymized data can be de-anonymized with (to me) astonishing ease. In Data and Goliath Bruce Schneier cites a dozen cases of de-anonymized data, from health records to Netflix history to personal identification.[0] It is possible that I'm just more paranoid than the average GMail user, but this scared the bones out of me. [0] An example on his website: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/05/reidentifying_a.html https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/05/reidentifying...
- legohead 11y agoGMail/Google, why are you tying Google Fi to my GMail account? I got it for my wife, who now has to have my GMail account setup on her phone for the service to work. You say you don't have family plans yet, but it sounds like you will. Do you really expect me to be okay with having my GMail account setup on my children's phones?
- wldcordeiro 11y agoI must be odd because I enjoy Gmail as it is and their Inbox app as well. Both the desktop and mobile experiences are excellent for everything I do.
- mschuster91 11y agoIt's not just Google Mail that doesn't support proper HTML emails. The Android mail client doesn't, the iOS mailclient doesn't, Outlook actually feature-retarded between 2010 and 2013, most webmailers break on anything that's not tables with inline styles, Lotus Notes Webmail is actually fairly good but unfortunately depending on the platform the full Notes client uses either its horrid internal engine or something provided by the OS that may actually be IE7 (shit, you design a beautiful newsletter for Mac Notes, and it falls apart on Windows; also weird weird suboptions hidden deep inside Notes make it balk on anything but color/background-color/height/width)... The only mail client that can render full-featured HTML5 newsletters is Thunderbird.
- moron4hire 11y agoHe complains about Gmail not making it easy for developers to make the types of emails I hate the most. It's not very compelling.
- zeckalpha 11y ago> Gmail is the only email client that doesn’t support <style>. And that's a problem? Please don't put CSS in your email.
- rathish_g 11y agoYes. Why a common man want css in their email? The so called "developers" in the article are actually spammers! We moved to gmail to escape from spam not to get more spam.
- jkturbo 11y agoAuthor here. The majority of non-personal emails contain some form of styling for readability. And the styling is done using CSS. The only issue with Gmail is that they force you to inline them which makes coding email very tedious.
- zeckalpha 11y ago> for readability Really? Because I find it so much more readable if all of my emails are the same font.
- spdegabrielle 11y agoGmail- thanks for the free email service for the past years. I don't mind the pretty minimal advertising you include for a free service. I could run my own mail server, but yours is fine, and let's face it - far better than the email that provided by my ISP. (You would think ISP's would be more motivated to provide a better service with the single feature that is most likely to stop me switching provider.) Oh- what's that? Do your competitors find it hard to advertise on your platform? That's so sad. I really value the service that email marketers provide. Thanks again Google, Your search is still ok - but it is your email account that is good enough to keep me as a customer. An Bing is awful. Except for the arial photos - they are better than the shitty ones on google maps.
- Animats 11y agoWhy use Gmail when IMAP will sync all your devices? Android has a good IMAP client. On desktops, use Thunderbird. What value does GMail add? Besides ads, of course. And Google building a profile of you.
- RawInfoSec 11y agoIt's email. SMTP. It's not instant messaging and it sure isn't a browser. Point blank, it's easy to see that this is by design and not by quirk or fault. If anything Google are looking to maintain usability by keeping as close to RFC spec as possible. One of the biggest problems facing email today is SPAM, and general deliverability. Once you veer far off spec it gets a lot more difficult to manage these two issues. For example, look how nice Greylisting worked in theory, until you realize that most IT or hosting companies don't have a clue how to configure an MTA within RFC specs and do silly things like retrying delivery every 5 mins. When your dealing with complex systems, it's better to keep each part of that system well oiled and within a predictable spec. And then Microsoft adds HTML support to Outlook so that marketing execs can throw 15 sales related images and some wording about saving trees... Often, solution providers should have given an alternative when asked to do things that break from standards. As we often say in this field, "Just because you can, doesn't mean that you should." Kc/
- dijit 11y ago>look how nice Greylisting worked in theory, until you realize that most IT or hosting companies don't have a clue how to configure an MTA within RFC specs and do silly things like retrying delivery every 5 mins. that's what needs to happen for greylisting to work. it's spambots that don't have the retry ability.
- RawInfoSec 11y agoThanks, but you misunderstand my point. Actually you pretty much prove my point that most MTAs are run by those who can't grasp that there are RFC standards out there. An MTA should never resend after only 5 minutes. It should wait at least 25 minutes before even the first retry. I've seen many set up to retry every 60 seconds, giving up after 5 tries. One IT tech even told me it was so his boss doesn't have to wait 3 days to get a non-delivery report! Lol.
- wangii 11y agothe only thing from Google I really like, at this moment, is Golang. Products I used to love are either gone (greater) or ruined. It's amazing to witness a long, gradual process of unavoidable increment of entropy/mediocracy. so long, and thanks for all the fish!
- buro9 11y agoI like the current state of HTML emails in Gmail. I like that it forces the use of templates that are rigorously tested and will seldom change. Because when I mark the email as spam... it will very likely bin all other emails produced by the same template. I only slightly jest, but the best emails are the ones with the least possible styling. These are also the most deliverable emails, the ones most likely to make it through to an inbox.
- gansai 11y agoOne way of pushing users to use a new product is by degrading an existing product. Here, Inbox is the new Gmail. Switch. Switch. Switch
- akrymski 11y agoNobody seems to have mentioned that the author works for FreshInbox - an email marketing company. Sorry Justin, but sending web-pages by email is exactly why email sucks. No messaging apps allow HTML+CSS markup to be sent, and there's a reason for this - it's not readable. Instead send a URI/Link and the recipient can view the HTML using a tool that's designed for that - the browser! Web-pages aren't messaging. That's what the WWW is for, not email. Apple is totally at fault for introducing HTML support in emails, they didn't see the spam coming. Email is a messaging protocol, not a news reader or web browser. NOBODY (except for advertisers) wants SHOPPING CARTS in their emails. What non-sense.