7 ms·

"Fuck you forever for breaking e-mail for everyone in the world." Did, uh, anyone else understand that bit?

by 13of40 9y ago

whiteandnerdy 9y ago
I _guess_ he means that siloing email provision to a few large providers means that its harder to run your own email server without being flagged as spam.
- mahranch 9y ago
  Does he not remember how much spam we received before those sorts of upgrades? Email spam in the late 90s and early 2000s was insane. And every grandmother who plugged in their PC at the time got hit by it. "I ordered v1gr4 cheap from this business, why hasn't it shown up 4 months later?!" Sure, I guess it's harder to run your own email server, but the trade-off was virtually zero spam making its way to my inbox. I think that's a trade worth making, since I vividly remember the dark days of email. One thing I've noticed about people who are nostalgic for the past, is that they either misremember or forget the negative things while wearing their rose-colored glasses. I saw someone pining for the good old days of the late 90s internet due to a lack of ads everywhere and I gently reminded them that due to a lack of bandwidth and modems capable of download at speed, a gif file took 5 minutes to download and view, videos were basically non-existent to download as real-player was in its infancy serving up what amounted to flip-book quality clips which still took 15 minutes to download a 15 second clip. The internet wasn't in some golden age back in the late 90s, it was slow as fuck, quality was shit and there was barely any content. We take so much for granted today...
  - noncoml 9y ago
    Today it’s google that decides what spam(aka marketing emails) gets delivered to my mailbox. No matter how many times I mark some emails as spam, they always seem to find the way to my inbox. But I guess that’s what you get when you use an email service from an advertising company.
    - busterarm 9y ago
      Phishing emails seem to always sail right through their filters. I'm lucky that I'm extra paranoid.
      - KozmoNau7 9y ago
        I honestly can't remember the last time I received any spam that didn't get caught by the filter. Right now, I have 12 mails in the spam folder, and that's my normal running 30 day average.
  - sametmax 9y ago
    While I agree, but I'm sure there is a balance. And clearly they don't try to find it. It's better business to lock everything in for yourself and say "we protect you". Google is all about control. They decide who is in and who is out. And that only works when the central power is benevolent. However we know there has never been in the history of any human structure an entity becoming the central power that stayed benevolent.
    - yters 9y ago
      Absolute power corrupts absolutely.
  - SerLava 9y ago
    >videos were basically non-existent to download as real-player was in its infancy serving up what amounted to flip-book quality clips which still took 15 minutes to download a 15 second clip. And then even after video was available, it was incredibly unreliable. Am I crazy, or does anyone else think YouTube became popular because the videos almost always worked when you hit Play? People seem to think the community features were responsible for YouTube's success, but I specifically remember finding videos, then looking them up on YouTube instead, because the original source was some garbage video player that you'd click and nothing would happen.
  - smilangalang 9y ago
    Anectodally the internet was reliable, fast as hell, and there was a vast world to explore for me in the 90's. And I'm not talking just text downloads. And certainly not referring to 28.8k modems. 56k was ok, shotgun 56k was better. I went pro in CS once I got ADSl and I dearly miss client side registration because it was so damn reliable and snappy with rarely any desync problems. Back then it was very easy to just aim further ahead of your moving target with the distance being proportional to your ping. I distincly remember playing kingpin and quake in a hotel room once and I had a 250 ping. All I did was prefire way early or in the case of the long range shots.. Oh god it was so satisfying to lead them by a few extra "feet", click, sit back and then after what seemed like forever I'd hear that thump thump thump of the rifle and they'd drop. You simply can't do that these days with reliability. You play against jerks on VPNs from AU who warp 20 feet before shooting you. I don't mean to say you're wrong, but I thought you might find it interesting. I was just a dumb kid but we downloaded stuff and had small 5-man lan parties where we played online too since we didnt have enough for balanced matches. It wasn't bad at all and we didn't even have a proper hub until much later on. Nowdays every realtime app suffers it seems. No matter where I'm at. And if you go to a big regional lan party everyone is queueing online. No local servers, or if there are it's kinda dead or it's private hard core competitive games, which I do love, but I miss the goofing off and socializing in lan servers too. The changes for me have been less than ideal, as a pro gamer and just regular gamer. Also as a UX/UI dev I've noticed things have become.. Annoying as hell to use. Even intentionally thanks to questionable business practices. Today I can plan my day online in 20minutes or less. Back in the day it wasn't too easy for me I wasn't the best student. Sorry for the novel. Thanks for sharing.
  - fjsolwmv 9y ago
    I want all the solutions Google provides and none of the drawbacks. If Google can't do that, they are obviously incompetent and worthless.
busterarm 9y ago
Gmail doesn't play well with plain text emails. Even if you manually select Plain Text to send, it still reflows lines at 78 characters by manually inserting linebreaks and adds its own special characters where it feels like. It also doesn't follow a handful of RFCs specific to email. There is no workaround for the forced hard-wrapping of lines in Plain Text. It will not let you use format=flowed either. Plain Text mode has been obviously unusable for a long time, and the only folks who ever really bothered to complain about it were kernel developers (the mailing list requires plain text). Nobody else cares, but they should. Go figure. If you're using a 'modern' mail client, you don't notice this. If you're using old, tried and true technology, the problems are plain as day. Gmail broke email.
- busterarm 9y ago
  Tangentially, think of all of the wasted bits sent in the multipart section of the email (often 2-5x longer than the text itself) just because HTML is the default...
- dahauns 9y ago
  Heh, yes - they are basically the heir to Outlook, which ironically does play well with plaintext email nowadays...
- jon_richards 9y ago
  I get furious that it threads conversations automatically instead of with the "reply-to" built into the email protocol. It usually just threads emails with the same subject, but... It sometimes doesn't thread emails with the same subject, but after someone else has replied to the first one. You have to put "Re:" in the second email, since the reply automatically added "Re:" and I guess that's too different for gmail to accept, yet... If you try to separate your emails by environment, a completely keyword in the subject often isn't enough to stop the emails from threading. Even if you filter and label your email by the subject lines, emails that get threaded together get all labels. You can't even give gmail feedback like "This email does not belong in this thread". The only options are to accept their threading or turn off threading entirely.
sametmax 9y ago
My take would be: - now it's quite impossible to administrate your own email servers. Anti-spam measures are very effective (and enjoyable for us as users), but so paranoid that being part of the few select nodes that don't have their emails marked as spam (or are even propagated at all) is a full time job. - gmail dicthed IMAP in favor of their own API. Pluging an IMAP client into your email account requires to dig inside your account security settings and change several obscure values with scary names and warnings. Sometime it even doesn't work, and then you do it again later, and it works for no reason. A non tech saavy user will never succeed in doing that, and hence everybody will use the web base version. - the security of gmail accounts are insane. Not in the good way. I have yet to have a problem with a pirated account. But I had several problems with being locked out by Google deciding that "something was suspicious" because I was traveling or using someone else computer. Of course google has zero help desk to solve this. Loosing access to my emails is NOT ok. And to do it to protect me (against a threat visibly less likely than google freaking out) is adding insult to injury. - Google scans and collects every emails you send and receive. So much for privacy. It also shares everything, thanks to PRISM. Even when I decided to dicth gmail, most people are using gmail and will never setup encryption. So by just existing, my communication are spied on, even if I don't use the service myself. Oh, and the bot scanning your mails may follow links in them. I had "burn after reading" documents that I could never open because of this. - The gmail account is a google acount. Which means something that should be "just emails" is now a beacon to track me on all the websites I go to. It's also associated with all my google services activity. And on the android phones I log into. It requires a lot of effort and disciple on my part to mitigate that. Running a phone without an account is extra annoying. Having to juggle between several emails providers, migrate, make sure I have extensions to handle trackers, etc. I just wanted emails when I open my first gmail account. Not that. While I do appreciate what google did with gmail (it does have tremendous benefits), the cost to get that is quite important.
- ryandrake 9y ago
  > The gmail account is a google acount. Yea, this is an irritating trend, not confined to Google. It's getting harder and harder to have separate accounts and separate identities (or, god forbid, no identity) across services anymore. BIG BUTTON: "LOG IN WITH FACEBOOK!!!" Small, gray 6pt text: "Create an account with us." How about no? How about neither? I just want to browse the web. I don't want a relationship with you, company. And I really, REALLY don't want such a close relationship where you to have this unique identifier of me that allows you to correlate my activity on your site with my unrelated or related activity on some other site. It's none of your business. I don't need you aggregating everything I do, and I don't care that you're only doing it to "improve my experience" in some vague way. My web experience was fine and dandy before you tried scanning my rectum daily. There are a scant few sites with whom I deliberately choose to share my identity, such as HN. This should be the exception.
xelxebar 9y ago
A couple people have replied about problems setting up private email servers and getting flaggad as spam. I run my own. With SPF, DKIM and DMARC setup properly, I've not noticed anywhere that's flagged me as spam. GMail users certainly receive my emails no problem.
- busterarm 9y ago
  Are you running your own on physical hardware on-premises or in the cloud?
  - ThatGeoGuy 9y ago
    Not the guy you were replying to, but I run my own email off of a DigitalOcean vps, and I have yet to have problems with spam filters. I didn't even have problems with spam filters before I set up DKIM, DMARC, SPF, etc. I imagine if I set up a new IP on DigitalOcean today it might be a different story, but anecdotally I don't think I've actually observed instances where this has become a major issue.
  - Jaruzel 9y ago
    Also not the person you were replying to, but in most blocklists are ranges of what are known as dynamic IPs. i.e. those handed out to residential customers. Because most email spam comes from botnets running on peoples personal machines, these ranges are quite sensibly blocked. If you want to improve your chances of not being blocked when sending email, get a static IP address for your home connection (if your ISP supports that) or host your mailserver on a server instance at a proper hoster.
  - tvmalsv 9y ago
    I also run a personal mail server and haven't had any issues with delivery (that I know of). I'm using Mail-in-a-Box, which deserves all of the credit for keeping the box low friction to setup and maintain. I'm running it on a low-end VPS from a cloud provider I'm too embarrassed of to name, but it works (usually). Edited: cleaned up some of the mistakes made when editing and moving text around, prior to posting.
gcb0 9y ago
Yes. Despite the technical problems (e.g. pulling out dmarc on the last second to make others look bad), it taught everyone to reply on top. > Did, uh, anyone else understand that bit?
- KozmoNau7 9y ago
  Outlook already did that, since basically forever. > it taught everyone to reply on top.

"Fuck you forever for breaking e-mail for everyone in the world." Did, uh, anyone else understand that bit?

by 13of40 9y ago

"Fuck you forever for breaking e-mail for everyone in the world." Did, uh, anyone else understand that bit?

I _guess_ he means that siloing email provision to a few large providers means that its harder to run your own email server without being flagged as spam.

mahranch 9y ago
Does he not remember how much spam we received before those sorts of upgrades? Email spam in the late 90s and early 2000s was insane. And every grandmother who plugged in their PC at the time got hit by it. "I ordered v1gr4 cheap from this business, why hasn't it shown up 4 months later?!" Sure, I guess it's harder to run your own email server, but the trade-off was virtually zero spam making its way to my inbox. I think that's a trade worth making, since I vividly remember the dark days of email. One thing I've noticed about people who are nostalgic for the past, is that they either misremember or forget the negative things while wearing their rose-colored glasses. I saw someone pining for the good old days of the late 90s internet due to a lack of ads everywhere and I gently reminded them that due to a lack of bandwidth and modems capable of download at speed, a gif file took 5 minutes to download and view, videos were basically non-existent to download as real-player was in its infancy serving up what amounted to flip-book quality clips which still took 15 minutes to download a 15 second clip. The internet wasn't in some golden age back in the late 90s, it was slow as fuck, quality was shit and there was barely any content. We take so much for granted today...
- noncoml 9y ago
  Today it’s google that decides what spam(aka marketing emails) gets delivered to my mailbox. No matter how many times I mark some emails as spam, they always seem to find the way to my inbox. But I guess that’s what you get when you use an email service from an advertising company.
  - busterarm 9y ago
    Phishing emails seem to always sail right through their filters. I'm lucky that I'm extra paranoid.
    - KozmoNau7 9y ago
      I honestly can't remember the last time I received any spam that didn't get caught by the filter. Right now, I have 12 mails in the spam folder, and that's my normal running 30 day average.
- sametmax 9y ago
  While I agree, but I'm sure there is a balance. And clearly they don't try to find it. It's better business to lock everything in for yourself and say "we protect you". Google is all about control. They decide who is in and who is out. And that only works when the central power is benevolent. However we know there has never been in the history of any human structure an entity becoming the central power that stayed benevolent.
  - yters 9y ago
    Absolute power corrupts absolutely.
- SerLava 9y ago
  >videos were basically non-existent to download as real-player was in its infancy serving up what amounted to flip-book quality clips which still took 15 minutes to download a 15 second clip. And then even after video was available, it was incredibly unreliable. Am I crazy, or does anyone else think YouTube became popular because the videos almost always worked when you hit Play? People seem to think the community features were responsible for YouTube's success, but I specifically remember finding videos, then looking them up on YouTube instead, because the original source was some garbage video player that you'd click and nothing would happen.
- smilangalang 9y ago
  Anectodally the internet was reliable, fast as hell, and there was a vast world to explore for me in the 90's. And I'm not talking just text downloads. And certainly not referring to 28.8k modems. 56k was ok, shotgun 56k was better. I went pro in CS once I got ADSl and I dearly miss client side registration because it was so damn reliable and snappy with rarely any desync problems. Back then it was very easy to just aim further ahead of your moving target with the distance being proportional to your ping. I distincly remember playing kingpin and quake in a hotel room once and I had a 250 ping. All I did was prefire way early or in the case of the long range shots.. Oh god it was so satisfying to lead them by a few extra "feet", click, sit back and then after what seemed like forever I'd hear that thump thump thump of the rifle and they'd drop. You simply can't do that these days with reliability. You play against jerks on VPNs from AU who warp 20 feet before shooting you. I don't mean to say you're wrong, but I thought you might find it interesting. I was just a dumb kid but we downloaded stuff and had small 5-man lan parties where we played online too since we didnt have enough for balanced matches. It wasn't bad at all and we didn't even have a proper hub until much later on. Nowdays every realtime app suffers it seems. No matter where I'm at. And if you go to a big regional lan party everyone is queueing online. No local servers, or if there are it's kinda dead or it's private hard core competitive games, which I do love, but I miss the goofing off and socializing in lan servers too. The changes for me have been less than ideal, as a pro gamer and just regular gamer. Also as a UX/UI dev I've noticed things have become.. Annoying as hell to use. Even intentionally thanks to questionable business practices. Today I can plan my day online in 20minutes or less. Back in the day it wasn't too easy for me I wasn't the best student. Sorry for the novel. Thanks for sharing.
- fjsolwmv 9y ago
  I want all the solutions Google provides and none of the drawbacks. If Google can't do that, they are obviously incompetent and worthless.

busterarm 9y ago

Gmail doesn't play well with plain text emails. Even if you manually select Plain Text to send, it still reflows lines at 78 characters by manually inserting linebreaks and adds its own special characters where it feels like. It also doesn't follow a handful of RFCs specific to email. There is no workaround for the forced hard-wrapping of lines in Plain Text. It will not let you use format=flowed either. Plain Text mode has been obviously unusable for a long time, and the only folks who ever really bothered to complain about it were kernel developers (the mailing list requires plain text). Nobody else cares, but they should. Go figure. If you're using a 'modern' mail client, you don't notice this. If you're using old, tried and true technology, the problems are plain as day. Gmail broke email.

busterarm 9y ago
Tangentially, think of all of the wasted bits sent in the multipart section of the email (often 2-5x longer than the text itself) just because HTML is the default...
dahauns 9y ago
Heh, yes - they are basically the heir to Outlook, which ironically does play well with plaintext email nowadays...
jon_richards 9y ago
I get furious that it threads conversations automatically instead of with the "reply-to" built into the email protocol. It usually just threads emails with the same subject, but... It sometimes doesn't thread emails with the same subject, but after someone else has replied to the first one. You have to put "Re:" in the second email, since the reply automatically added "Re:" and I guess that's too different for gmail to accept, yet... If you try to separate your emails by environment, a completely keyword in the subject often isn't enough to stop the emails from threading. Even if you filter and label your email by the subject lines, emails that get threaded together get all labels. You can't even give gmail feedback like "This email does not belong in this thread". The only options are to accept their threading or turn off threading entirely.

sametmax 9y ago

My take would be: - now it's quite impossible to administrate your own email servers. Anti-spam measures are very effective (and enjoyable for us as users), but so paranoid that being part of the few select nodes that don't have their emails marked as spam (or are even propagated at all) is a full time job. - gmail dicthed IMAP in favor of their own API. Pluging an IMAP client into your email account requires to dig inside your account security settings and change several obscure values with scary names and warnings. Sometime it even doesn't work, and then you do it again later, and it works for no reason. A non tech saavy user will never succeed in doing that, and hence everybody will use the web base version. - the security of gmail accounts are insane. Not in the good way. I have yet to have a problem with a pirated account. But I had several problems with being locked out by Google deciding that "something was suspicious" because I was traveling or using someone else computer. Of course google has zero help desk to solve this. Loosing access to my emails is NOT ok. And to do it to protect me (against a threat visibly less likely than google freaking out) is adding insult to injury. - Google scans and collects every emails you send and receive. So much for privacy. It also shares everything, thanks to PRISM. Even when I decided to dicth gmail, most people are using gmail and will never setup encryption. So by just existing, my communication are spied on, even if I don't use the service myself. Oh, and the bot scanning your mails may follow links in them. I had "burn after reading" documents that I could never open because of this. - The gmail account is a google acount. Which means something that should be "just emails" is now a beacon to track me on all the websites I go to. It's also associated with all my google services activity. And on the android phones I log into. It requires a lot of effort and disciple on my part to mitigate that. Running a phone without an account is extra annoying. Having to juggle between several emails providers, migrate, make sure I have extensions to handle trackers, etc. I just wanted emails when I open my first gmail account. Not that. While I do appreciate what google did with gmail (it does have tremendous benefits), the cost to get that is quite important.

ryandrake 9y ago
> The gmail account is a google acount. Yea, this is an irritating trend, not confined to Google. It's getting harder and harder to have separate accounts and separate identities (or, god forbid, no identity) across services anymore. BIG BUTTON: "LOG IN WITH FACEBOOK!!!" Small, gray 6pt text: "Create an account with us." How about no? How about neither? I just want to browse the web. I don't want a relationship with you, company. And I really, REALLY don't want such a close relationship where you to have this unique identifier of me that allows you to correlate my activity on your site with my unrelated or related activity on some other site. It's none of your business. I don't need you aggregating everything I do, and I don't care that you're only doing it to "improve my experience" in some vague way. My web experience was fine and dandy before you tried scanning my rectum daily. There are a scant few sites with whom I deliberately choose to share my identity, such as HN. This should be the exception.

xelxebar 9y ago

A couple people have replied about problems setting up private email servers and getting flaggad as spam. I run my own. With SPF, DKIM and DMARC setup properly, I've not noticed anywhere that's flagged me as spam. GMail users certainly receive my emails no problem.

busterarm 9y ago
Are you running your own on physical hardware on-premises or in the cloud?
- ThatGeoGuy 9y ago
  Not the guy you were replying to, but I run my own email off of a DigitalOcean vps, and I have yet to have problems with spam filters. I didn't even have problems with spam filters before I set up DKIM, DMARC, SPF, etc. I imagine if I set up a new IP on DigitalOcean today it might be a different story, but anecdotally I don't think I've actually observed instances where this has become a major issue.
- Jaruzel 9y ago
  Also not the person you were replying to, but in most blocklists are ranges of what are known as dynamic IPs. i.e. those handed out to residential customers. Because most email spam comes from botnets running on peoples personal machines, these ranges are quite sensibly blocked. If you want to improve your chances of not being blocked when sending email, get a static IP address for your home connection (if your ISP supports that) or host your mailserver on a server instance at a proper hoster.
- tvmalsv 9y ago
  I also run a personal mail server and haven't had any issues with delivery (that I know of). I'm using Mail-in-a-Box, which deserves all of the credit for keeping the box low friction to setup and maintain. I'm running it on a low-end VPS from a cloud provider I'm too embarrassed of to name, but it works (usually). Edited: cleaned up some of the mistakes made when editing and moving text around, prior to posting.

gcb0 9y ago

Yes. Despite the technical problems (e.g. pulling out dmarc on the last second to make others look bad), it taught everyone to reply on top. > Did, uh, anyone else understand that bit?

KozmoNau7 9y ago
Outlook already did that, since basically forever. > it taught everyone to reply on top.