18 ms·

Email is your electronic memory

1248 points by brongondwana 9y ago

ocdtrekkie 9y ago
Bron, I am so happy to see a blog from you guys about this... I was actually planning to ask. In the light of Google being a monopoly-scale actor, I understand that you may need to support AMP. But if I might offer a note of implementation suggestion, if you add AMP: Make sure AMP, like remote images, is off by default. Perhaps allow the user to whitelist certain services or addresses to show AMP content without the extra click. That way, if AMP provides me a benefit in the way I use emails from a particular provider, I can turn that on... but my email client is never assuming I want to load their dynamic content. I can see interesting use cases, as someone who pipes all my notifications at my email. I'd love to Favorite and Retweet right from my Twitter notifications, for example, without leaving FastMail. But I definitely don't ever want dynamic content loading from the latest marketing email from a store I've bought stuff from.
- brongondwana 9y ago
  We definitely would do something like that with address-book whitelisting or other controls! I expect everybody will. Remote content, even via a proxy, can still identify exactly who has opened the email (also when, unless content is cached - but the whole point with content that might change is that you can't cache the resources and still be dynamic) It's also going to mess pretty badly with offline mode when we get to that, unless we pre-fetch resources when downloading data for offline.
  - xenadu02 9y ago
    Can you freeze or un-AMP emails? Have your servers pre-download stuff or even strip it (somewhat akin to a browser's reader mode)?
    - chrismorgan 9y ago
      text/x-amp-html is intended as an optional enhancement over an email that other clients will still be able to cope with. So un-AMP-ing is mostly just called using the text/html part instead of the text/x-amp-html part. Pre-downloading or proxying content is theoretically quite possible with AMP (its limitations make that possible where it would not be readily possible with freeform JavaScript), but some modes of doing so will probably play hob with its interaction models. But it’s too early to reasonably review that aspect of it—better to wait until we can see what people actually do with AMP. Make no mistake: AMP is all about making emails applications instead of static messages. That is its raison d’être.
      - ancarda 9y ago
        Wasn’t text/html intended as an optional enhancement too? But most of the emails I receive are only text/html - no text/plain alternative, which would be displayed if available. I fully expect text/x-amp-html only emails in the future, and so should you. FastMail, please give me a way to permanently block AMP only emails. Just throw them away with a Mailer Demon reply. If there’s other versions, strip away the AMP version.
        4ad 9y ago
        > But most of the emails I receive are only text/html - no text/plain alternative Care to elaborate on that? Virtually every email I get has a plain text version (I can't even see HTML email). I don't think the email I get is particularly selective. The only pure HTML email that I ever get is spam.
        ancarda 9y ago
        Sorry for the delay in replying, I don’t check my comments very frequently. Usually only in the morning. I use mutt for emails, so believe me — I know when I get a text/html only email as mutt can’t display the text/plain version. Most emails I get from friends and so on are in text/plain as mail clients do a decent enough job at including that. However most of my mail isn’t from people I know, it’s from newsletters and notifications. A lot of it is text/html only, either because the programmer who created and sent that email didn’t want (or know) to include a text/plain version, or didn’t care to.
  - Alex3917 9y ago
    Why does it matter if email content changes, if that's the intention the author? Clearly one of the biggest benefits of email is that it's the only medium that's acceptable for memorializing agreements / decisions / roadmaps / plans / etc. At the same time, I don't really care if some clothing company's monthly marketing email changes if they run out of something, as long as it's clearly marked as ephemeral.
    - brongondwana 9y ago
      "as long as it's clearly marked as ephemeral" - yep, you hit the nail on the head there. The ecosystem danger is that ephemeral becomes the default. Who doesn't love the ability to silently fix mistakes. And when it becomes the cultural norm to send editable email, then people will do it because it's a nice experience as a sender if you have the choice. I sure enjoy being able to edit my posts on HN when I get something wrong. I'd love to be able to take back and "fix" emails that I've sent too! But having to stand by exactly what you sent when it comes to email is really a valuable part of how email works. If you made a mistake, you send a correction, but the recipient still has your original mistake too. They don't see it, then have it disappear when they go back to look at it again.
    - JustSomeNobody 9y ago
      I, for one, cannot wait until someone is able to alter a few words to a contract I've signed after I've signed it.
      - ocdtrekkie 9y ago
        FWIW, this is effectively what tech companies already do with the Terms of Service. They state that you must agree to them to use their product, and then state that they can amend them at any time, often without notifying you.
      - essayist 9y ago
        Had that happen to me. I'd "electronically signed" a PDF of a contract, and returned it to the other party with some minor questions. The other party marked up the PDF I had signed with some changes, based on my questions. All of the changes were agreeable to me (or not worth fighting about, I can't recall). But I still insisted we start with the changes made to an unsigned PDF, and then I signed that PDF with the changes. My thought was that socially/culturally green-lighting "after signature" contract changes was a path to madness and misunderstanding.
- chrismorgan 9y ago
  AMPHTML Email is designed to sit beside the text/plain and text/html parts as just another alternative, with type text/x-amp-html. So in theory, any senders of AMPHTML Email should also include a regular HTML part that is semantically equivalent, and any client that doesn’t support text/x-amp-html should simply get the less fancy version. In practice, if something gets popular enough then the alternative that is supposed to work properly side-by-side gets neglected. (Some email senders cop out on text/plain these days, leaving it out, or worse, empty, as in Dropbox Paper’s document update notifications.) But I don’t think AMPHTML Email is likely to be sufficiently broadly supported that this becomes a problem. (It’s only likely to happen at all if all the major providers and major email clients support it.) If at any point we do end up supporting AMPHTML Email, any remote content will be handled like remote images.
  - nextos 9y ago
    Yes, this might become an embrace, extend, extinguish like scenario, which is scary. Google did the same thing with XMPP and Google Talk. They adopted an open standard when it was cool for them. When they gained mass adoption, they switched to Hangouts and the whole Allo mess. And before that they crippled XMPP federation. While I don't like regulations too much, it might be desirable to penalize these behaviors as they are monopolistic.
    - cromwellian 9y ago
      Google Talk never gained mass adoption. Google was punished by their competitors by adopting open standards, like XMPP and OpenID, when some competitors implemented "one way" interoperabilility to siphon off users. I favor federated open standards, but let's not rewrite history. Google Talk was never mass adopted or a market leader, MSN, Yahoo Messenger, AOL Messenger always had way more market share. I mean, good lord, you're calling for regulations to penalize Google over failed messaging products, why don't you call on regulations to force Apple and Facebook who own the world's most popular messaging platforms, to open up their protocols to federation?
      - toomuchtodo 9y ago
mehrdadn 9y ago
Email is not immutable though? It's pretty easy to just copy an email out of your favorite IMAP client, modify it, and drag it back. Do they not know this?
- brongondwana 9y ago
  Well, duh - if you can delete, edit, and upload a NEW email clearly you can change the state of your mailbox. That's a new email though, it's not the same email. Books are also not immutable - you can throw away a book and print a different book with the same cover. So at that level, nothing is immutable if you have full write access to it. The difference is, who has access to mutate the message? If you mutate it yourself, more power to you. It's your copy. If the SENDER can mutate it right there in your mailbox, that's a different story.
  - mehrdadn 9y ago
    In what sense is it a "new" email? It has exactly the same headers and message body (except for whatever you choose to modify, obviously), including dates and sender and everything. It's like copying a file on top of another file and claiming the older one isn't modified, it's just a "new" file that you're copying. I mean, OK, but how is this a meaningful or useful statement? The result is pretty indistinguishable from having modified the bits of the original email in-place from the user's standpoint. If you mean it can't be mutated by anyone other than the account owner, then that would be worth clarifying I think? But even then, the same is true of, say, my Google Drive. Nobody can modify my files who hasn't received my explicit permission. So are files on Google Drive "immutable" to you?
    - brongondwana 9y ago
      "modify it" - looks like a new email to me. It's going to have a different secure digest. You can argue semantics here - but the main difference is: YOU can modify the messages in your Inbox. THE SENDER can not. Unless they have write access to your mailbox and can copy things out in a client, edit them, and write them back.
baxtr 9y ago
A bit unrelated, but since, Bron, you are obviously reading this: I love your blog, the only thing that drives me crazy: I can’t see the scroll bar in your blog posts on my mobile. I guess it’s because it’s rendered in white. Scroll bars, however, are great to have an indication how much of a page I’ve read already, like a download bar. Not having it drives me nuts :-)
- brongondwana 9y ago
  Yeah, our blog is currently a pain to work with in a few ways. It's generated straight out of our source repository from Markdown files, and you have to do the full pull request, merge, deploy to get posts out. We're looking at moving the blog to another platform, and usability review will be part of that!
  - iagovar 9y ago
    picocms
  - ianamartin 9y ago
    I recently wrote a blog engine that's pretty lightweight. Sort of tries to hit a middle-ground between a static blog and a wordpress type of thing. It also . . . doesn't work perfectly. I fucked something up with drafts, and I need to get back to it. But if you are interested, it's not too bad. Insanely fast. http://actuallysprained.net/ http://actuallysprained.net/ Source code is here: https://bitbucket.org/tronflux/pyrant https://bitbucket.org/tronflux/pyrant
    - brongondwana 9y ago
      I'll pass the link on to the team looking at it. I think they already have something in mind though. Ta.
- chrismorgan 9y ago
  What browser are you using? I can’t reproduce this on Firefox for Android (scrollbar rendered in grey, as is usual) and can’t easily imagine what could be causing it.
alt678 9y ago
I love seeing posts like these where a company demonstrates what their core values really are, not just shallow slogans. I'm a happy Fastmail customer and just renewed for 5 more years. Off-topic -: Do you plan to ever open source your Android app?
petecooper 9y ago
I went through a phase a couple of years ago when I was with Fastmail and looked around for alternatives [1]. I ended up staying with Fastmail and have adjusted to some of it's UI quirks in the admin interface. Posts like this remind me why I decided to stick with Fastmail. Do one job well. Fastmail do email really well for me. (Disclosure: Fastmail user on paid plan, unsolicited review/pat-on-the-back) [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11319298 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11319298
- IntronExon 9y ago
  Agreed, with similar disclaimer. I’ve used so many email providers, and none have had my love and loyalty like Fastmail. The highest praise I can offer these days, they earn: Fastmail treats me like the customer, and not the product.
- robinhood 9y ago
  Fastmail is hands down the best email provider I've found. Been a customer for 7 years now, and I'll probably be a customer for many years to come. Their web UI is exceptional, very fast and solid, and their IMAP support is top notch. After 7 years I'm still mind blown of how fast their IMAP is.
skybrian 9y ago
This is the first convincing argument I've read against AMP email. On the other hand, if someone sends you a link to a web page, sure the link didn't change, but that's not very useful, since anything can happen to the web page that the link points to. So it might just be about not confusing the user about what's immutable? Which is itself pretty important.
- brongondwana 9y ago
  Sure - and as I said in the blog post - this is already an issue with embedded images - which can be made to look pretty good and, if remote, can be changed later. Spam scanners penalise messages that are just a remote image for good reason.
- SpikeDad 9y ago
  Then you should use Apple Mail for macOS which has the option of including a PDF of the webpage rather than the obviously fragile URL.
  - TehCorwiz 9y ago
    Hey, Thunderbird team, this is a feature I'd want.
    - toomuchtodo 9y ago
      Thunderbird team: Generate a request to the URL, and include the attachment as a WARC file, not a PDF. The client or any other system can then render that content however they desire at a later date.
- notatoad 9y ago
  It's the first convincing argument i've read against AMP email, assuming it's a valid argument. It doesn't look like amp4email is any less immutable than standard email is - it fetches some resources from external servers, but mandates that those resources must be static and cacheable. Gmail's current behaviour is to download and store all images in emails when they are first opened, which makes the images in emails as immutable as fastmail wants them to be, and i don't see why they would treat any other resources delivered in amp emails differently to images. To me, this seems perfectly reasonable - the responsibility to store email contents in the state they were first recieved should be on the recipient's client, not the sender's server. i love this blog post, because it's great to write down in clear terms why email being a read-only log is so important. but it looks like in the case of amp it might be a bit of a straw man.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
samstave 9y ago
Gmail inexplicably deleted all my email prior to sept of 2009.... and later I needed the emails I had in the account. So yes - email is and should be your digital mem, but the system sucks and the companies suck that promise you free "digital memories" -- so I am still on the fence in general regarding all tech firms that provide a free service - but what should one plan to pay for this: --- I was born in 2028. I was immediately augmented from what I was organically contrived to be/become; a Human. Human. What did that mean exactly? What is the definition of a Human? What the FUCK is this bag of potential intelligence? This bag of potential revenue? This bag of potential fealty? This.. bag... of... ...potential??? Out of the gate the system labeled, confined, contrived, pre-determined and then finally programmed me as to what, no, WHO, I was.... I had to then begin to PAY to be "HUMAN" -- I had to pay for maintenance of my body, pay to feed it, pay to educate it, pay to protect it, pay to get it loved, pay for everything that I either required or desired... -- this is what the 'definition' of being human has become. If you are born and cant be intelligent enough, beautiful enough, lucky enough, rich enough or evil enough... You are not allowed to be human. Survival of the fittest at its best. And the only ones who would agree with that, are those that can state that they are better than masses who cant compete.... This is the new 'Human' -- Who is greater than what. When youre a "what" - a plumber, a coder, a low life, a socialite... yeah... there are lots of layers in WHAT.... But there is really only one "who". WHO is that WHAT? is the basics.... Who is that master plumber? Who is that elite socialite? Who is that low-life? --- Then the system judges "how much" "How much has that low life cost society" "how much does that plumber give to society?" "How much is that socialite worth?" "How much does that engineer contribute to my life's well being?" "How much do these jerks make?" --- So, as we discover who and what we are, we need to look at how we became that [thing]. How? Parents predilections, socioeconomic status, location born, innate abilities, genetic modifications, external modifications.... Human is a basic condition that is manipulable and shall be exploited through whatever given tools are available to those who are in a position to exploit. Now, where is my blood-boy. /fiction-rant
nofunsir 9y ago
AMP for gmail will be the straw that moves me completely off of google's platform.
- dleslie 9y ago
  For me it was when I had location services disabled on my phone and Android _still_ popped up a notification about the commute time between my home and work, as I was walking out the door.
  - Whitestrake 9y ago
    At the risk of venturing off the topic of the main thread... Could that behaviour possibly be explained by timing rather than location? My Android gives me commute data around 7:30AM, regardless of where I am or whether I'm moving. Perhaps they simply guessed you'd be at home.
    - latexr 9y ago
      “Google has confirmed it has been able to track the location of Android users via the addresses of local mobile phone masts, even when location services were turned off and the sim cards removed to protect privacy.”[1] Not saying that’s what happened here, but with Google these days I’ll assume evil[2] instead of giving the benefit of the doubt. [1]: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/nov/22/google-track-android-users-location-services-turned-off-sim https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/nov/22/google-tr... [2]: http://doonesbury.washingtonpost.com/strip/archive/2014/06/01 http://doonesbury.washingtonpost.com/strip/archive/2014/06/0...
    - badwolf 9y ago
      Not just timing... but you're connected to "CompanyWiFi" and it's the end of the business day when you usually disconnect your charging cable/leave. There are many signals they could use to show that
      - alphaalpha101 9y ago
igammarays 9y ago
Paper trails. Absolutely. The concept of keeping a recipient-owned copy of a message is as ancient as the invention of money and writing itself - it's absolutely critical for messages with legal effects, like receipts. Imagine if a fraudster could change the content of their original messages after the scam was done! Yes, Google could implement an audit trail mechanism, but that would be obscure and extremely confusing.
dmbaggett 9y ago
I've ranted here before about the complexity of email and the difficulty of even existing as a startup in the email space (see my bio). The single team that has navigated the insanity of the email space well as a small company is Fastmail. They are brilliant, ethical, and pragmatic. I sincerely hope the folks at Google who are behind this AMP-for-email idea will take the time to chat with the Fastmail team about it before pulling the trigger. Having lived through the last DOJ/Google 10-month battle royale (the sale of ITA Software, now called Google Flights), I think this is an absolutely terrible idea for Google from an antitrust standpoint. The upside for them, while obvious, pales in comparison to the downside they face by leveraging their email and search dominance to create a new walled garden. I'm amazed this got past legal.
- ocdtrekkie 9y ago
  Not unique to Google: I think many legal departments have realized that the FTC is currently basically disabled, as far as the United States goes. It's likely most companies feel like if they do something right now, it'll probably be accepted/standard practice before the FTC remembers it has a job to do.
  - sjg007 9y ago
    Yeah the EU is really the savior of last resort now.
  - nashashmi 9y ago
    Only on HN would someone describe FTC as "disabled". I think we are living in a time when companies are being frequently trusted. Because when they claim that mergers reduce costs, the automatic thought is the cost will trickle to the consumer. The other outcome we are eager to see is the innovation that occurs at the extra large scale level. Do we see the more robots make it in to industry? Or intensive AI? The opportunities and imaginations have exploded after Facebook and Google utilized their dominance for the greater good. Lastly, enforcement against unethical illegal behavior has become easier. Reducing the need of cynical and paranoid reasons to prohibit mergers. Only when there is actual concern of legal unethical actions negatively causing market consolidation and preventing startup incubation, the FTC will not be doing any of the things the paranoid want it to do.
rootsudo 9y ago
It's bad because people can manipulate email. It is not absolute. An overzealous email admin/exchange admin can work horrors. But maybe that's just me. I've been an Exchange admin.
- brongondwana 9y ago
  For sure - anybody who can modify your mailstore can change emails - that's not really under debate. The same way anybody who has access to your hard drive can change your files. The issue at hand here is whether the original sender can modify the message after you've received it.
  - superrad 9y ago
    I guess they can by brokering a deal with the bad actor in charge of your mail server. Unlikely but email is still bound to social manipulation.
    - brongondwana 9y ago
      We're in the "you're screwed regardless" territory here - like having an ISP who intercepts TLS connections and substitutes content as you download it. There's no real way to work around that, though you might be able to detect it if there are unforgeable signatures on some of the content (e.g. DKIM signatures from third parties on incoming emails) - though the intermediate can strip those too, so all you see is "unsigned" rather than "modified".
      - Alex3917 9y ago
        > if there are unforgeable signatures on some of the content (e.g. DKIM signatures from third parties on incoming emails) FWIW, in many cases content can be changed even if signed with DKIM without breaking the signature. http://noxxi.de/research/breaking-dkim-on-purpose-and-by-chance.html http://noxxi.de/research/breaking-dkim-on-purpose-and-by-cha... I think email clients should be rethinking how they communicate to users whether or not an email is signed, e.g. if the headers haven't been oversigned and/or the full body hasn't been signed then it may be better to just show the message as having been not signed at all.
Skunkleton 9y ago
Hi Bron, not related to TFA but I am a happy fastmail user and just wanted to say thanks. I really appreciate Fastmail's stable standards based services. These are increasingly hard to come by.
- brongondwana 9y ago
  Thanks! We aim to please :)
ianamartin 9y ago
I'm so happy to see this blog. I've been a happy, paying customer of fastmail since . . . I honestly don't know how long it's been. I never think twice about it. Fastmail is the ideal of, "It just works" that Apple strives to be. No offense to Apple or their employees, and it's a limited problem area, but these guys are really, really good at it. Yeah, I have a gmail account. It's mostly a spam folder at this point. Because if you were able to get a good name when it was in beta in 2004 or so, it's a shitshow, even with google's pretty good filtering. Fastmail is one of the best examples of why you should pay for online services. When you work with this kind of company, it's clear who the customer is: me. They aren't mining me for data; they aren't trying to trick me into anything. They reliably get my x dollars/year, and I pay them gladly. A thousand thumbs up for the Fastmail team. It's probably not the most glamorous thing in the world. But cheers to a company that is making a profitable living without hype, without bullshit product marketing, and without closing off access. By just being better at something than anyone else is. I'm hoping to start a company in the next year or so, and I want to do things the way Fastmail does them. You guys really are a beacon in the tech industry.
Aelius 9y ago
This makes a convincing argument for the general adoption of ipfs as a the backbone of the internet. As I understand it, nothing can be truly deleted, you only need to know what the hash of the object was and chances are it will still be accessible in cache for quite some time.
- TheRealPomax 9y ago
  So, literally illegal in Europe, where you have the legal right to be forgotten from the internet? There is a lot to be said for being able to delete data from an internet-connected computer and trust that it is, in fact, deleted. Email definitely falls in that category, but while deletion for email has a fairly obvious value, remote mutability of emails is extremely questionable at best.
  - Aelius 9y ago
    IANAL but I don't believe ipfs in of itself runs afoul of "right to be forgotten". Skimming Wikipedia, "the right to be forgotten" only requires search engines to not index things which are "deleted", or more realistically, things which have been unlisted. Because even in the infrastructure we have today, objects aren't truly "deleted" for quite some time, at least not where CDNs and Google and Facebook and others are involved.
    - Aelius 9y ago
      Perhaps a better place to start the discussion about the legality of ipfs would be to ask if bittorrent is illegal in Europe. After all, if even one seeder is online somewhere in the world, a torrent is accessible and cannot be deleted. Does bittorrent have the potential infringe on someone's right to be forgotten? ipfs operates in a similar way (peers and seeds).
dgudkov 9y ago
Email represents three important abstractions of the real life: First, it's a task queue. And you're the worker that processes the tasks. Anything that helps an email service to be that abstraction is very good for users -- prioritizing, postponing, auto-processing, branching, delegating, etc. Second, it's a log. As the article rightfully says -- an immutable one. Again, anything that helps email be a good log is very good for the user -- search, filtering, archiving, etc. Third, it's a file storage. This is the most overlooked part, unfortunately. Search, sharing, organizing into collections -- all that would be of great help to users. Yet, Google pushes that silly AMP :\
- brongondwana 9y ago
  Bah - file storage. Yep, it certainly is. And to a large degree, because it's a log. Once you email something as an attachment (even to yourself) it's like a version control commit. That copy is locked in, and won't change. You can find it and refer back to it later. It has a timestamp on it, and it's probably stored in the cloud somewhere with backups and such. Hence "memory" - because that's how people use it :)
  - dgudkov 9y ago
    >And to a large degree, because it's a log. I agree. Although, it's more than just a log. For instance, it would be great to have the ability to see a collection of all files sent by a particular sender, with file versions (with dates and links to according emails) stacked under one file name. Another suggestion -- view a collection of files in all emails with particular label. Finally, in some cases it can be helpful to have a local read-only copy of files in a particular collection. It's like one-way read-only Dropbox. This would make automated processing of email attachments so much simpler. (BTW, a product idea, anyone?!).
    - brongondwana 9y ago
      So one of the smartass login messages in our internal slack is "JMAP will fix it". Interestingly enough, JMAP will make this kind of thing much easier - and we have thought about it in the design! Our Cyrus server already internally keeps a blobId which is a digest of the binary content of each MIME part. Which means you can easily tell that two attachments are identical without reading the contents or guessing based on size and name. And it's easy to search for messages with file attachments and fetch just the file attachement details via JMAP, making this kind of interface relatively easy to write. The usual caveats about "we haven't got a particular timeframe in mind" apply - but once JMAP is standard, anyone can write a client to that standard!
reducesuffering 9y ago
Finally interested in getting off gmail. Could someone summarize the pros/cons of fastmail vs. protonmail or any other major email provider?
- benoliver999 9y ago
  I can't compare services too well but I'll toss Migadu into the hat. https://www.migadu.com/en/index.html https://www.migadu.com/en/index.html It's basically just an IMAP server. They have webmail but otherwise it's on you to provide a client. So far it's been great, I switched from gmail and I am not looking back. They give really nice clear instructions on setting up your DNS properly and the pricing isn't too bad. My main motivation was to get onto a service that lets me have my own domain. Once you're off gmail you are then free to choose and switch between whatever you like.
- happyraul 9y ago
  You might find this useful in your research: https://thatoneprivacysite.net/email-section/ https://thatoneprivacysite.net/email-section/
igammarays 9y ago
Here's a free B2C startup idea for you aspiring founders: a personal email (local?) archiver and search engine. Pull all my logs from my 15 different addresses I've had over the years, and give me super-fast realtime search on all of it. I wouldn't hesitate to pay 10 bucks a month for that. This idea has a super-useful B2B angle as well (think of the explosion of MailChimp clones).
- toomuchtodo 9y ago
  https://github.com/salyh/elasticsearch-imap https://github.com/salyh/elasticsearch-imap
- bo1024 9y ago
  getmail + grep
- danieldk 9y ago
  If you don't want to put your data in another silo, this is what mu [1] and notmuch [2] provide. I have been using mu/mu4e for a while and it is absolutely great for quickly finding e-mail, creating virtual search-based mailboxes, etc. Combined with isync and Fastmail's standard-conforming IMAP support, you have a really nice e-mail setup. Of course, it's not for the general public, but this is Hackernews ;) [1] https://www.djcbsoftware.nl/code/mu/ https://www.djcbsoftware.nl/code/mu/ [2] https://notmuchmail.org https://notmuchmail.org
yorby 9y ago
an email service would be the only instance where I would consider disabling my ad blocker if ads are not targeted... could FastMail consider?
JohnTHaller 9y ago
I'm moving email providers in the near future and was looking at Google. AMP for Gmail ensured that I won't touch it.
- x0x0 9y ago
  You should read the top comment here before you move to fastmail, and fastmail's response. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15855081 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15855081 I'm a founder of a company, and I use fastmail for my personal email and gmail for my professional email. I like fastmail more, but I need the security of gmail + yubikey because that professional email can manage DNS/domains/bank accounts. You should also be aware that fastmail doesn't really integrate that well on Android phones. Eg in order to access calendars hosted on fastmail, you will have to use a third party caldav program. I currently used caldav-sync, which fastmail recommends. It's a piece of shit that stops working approximately every other week on a stock HTC 10. The symptom is my calendar stops syncing. I have to notice this, go to the accounts option, and manually trigger a long term sync. This is very very very annoying and I'm going to find a new program as soon as I have the time. Note this isn't fastmail's fault, but it does significantly inhibit use of their service. The email composition box on mobile firefox on fastmail is a little funky too, but that's on me. I wouldn't be surprised if I'm essentially the only person using mobile firefox/android/fastmail's web client. This was pretty much the outcome of my effort to de-google myself. That said, I'm really happy with fastmail and I think I'm prepaid for another two years.
  - JohnTHaller 9y ago
    I won't be managing calendars. Sadly, your choices for that seem to be either Gmail (which I'll continue using for my calendar) or Outlook (and the Outlook calendar). I'd pay good money for a working third party calendar/contacts solution that worked well on my phone, tablet, and Windows. Google doesn't fit the bill there, either, unless you like web-only. As for securing Gmail with yubikey... how do you gain access via a standard email client like Thunderbird in that case? Anything that can't do that is a non-starter for me.
    - 9y ago
mrmondo 9y ago
As always Bron & teams - so happy with your take on this and proud to be a Fastmail user and advocate. -Sam.
piranha 9y ago
I’ve been trying to switch to fastmail about once a year for the last few years and checked it again to refresh my memory. My main gripe is still here: if you are on a bad connection (or with no connection at all), Fastmail’s mobile app cannot load interface and so can’t show your emails. Which makes it reeeeally painful at times when an app is most useful in the first place. :) Of course, I could connect native mail.app, but that makes your ui on desktop and mobile too different...
jacknews 9y ago
Excellent point. I'm a happy fastmail user, and actually I'd like to see the ability to 'fetch and save images' in addition to the 'show images' button, so that I can archive some of those remote-image-wrap emails. Remote image links are a bane - look how many forums have been effectively ruined because they relied on 3rd party image hosting, that has now changed it's policy, or gone away, etc. Another annoyance are the dynamic links to other stories that you see at the bottom of news sites. I often spy a link I'd like to follow just as I leave the page, and then when I reload, the links have all changed! Super annoying.
ggm 9y ago
Gmail has a reasonably nice small inner-core functionality with keyboard accellerators which is javascript-portable to my life. I won't trust a cafe computer to run gmail to login, but I can trust my changing personal device to let me run gmail in some consistent manner through keyboarded commands I like. And the spambot is good. But adding rich features? gaaaaah. I want to go back to MH. I want to go back to my shell. I'm so tempted to walk into a dark corner, rather than have the HTML actively engage with me. because many things, but perhaps I'm kidding myself? I bet I didn't realize how many tracking events exist through my email reading patterns, that google know, and can monetize. this AMP thing is just a more overt moment. I'm a frog, and I've been boiled slowly.
- latexr 9y ago
  > I'm a frog, and I've been boiled slowly. That is a myth: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog
  - zaphar 9y ago
    These days it's more of a metaphor than a myth.
    - ggm 9y ago
      Also I am not actually a frog
dustinupdyke 9y ago
Perhaps not to the point, but I find more interesting pieces that I want to remember occur in Hangouts, Slack or some other more expeditious medium other than email. I suspect that for some, email is losing priority.
gt_ 9y ago
>(even more specifically, an email with remote images can totally change after being content scanned). Can anyone speak to the prevalence of this abuse strategy? Are our anti-spam engines able to handle this?
yeukhon 9y ago
I mentioned this the other day when a "Google Talk" discussion [1] was featured on HN. The reason I love Google Talk is the fact that conversations are saved in my inbox, and I can export the history to a local drive and encrypt the files. Pictures can go 404, but text, never. Email should be simple, but I know in 20 years, our Internet technology will end up like futuristic anime world technology. A simple, non-interactive, non-multimedia e-mail will last like a paper. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16349897 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16349897
- Tom4hawk 9y ago
  E-mail and IRC. Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1782/ https://xkcd.com/1782/
deleted 9y ago
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enitihas 9y ago
I do want to use Fastmail, but their ToS are no better than Gmail i.e, that they can terminate your account any time for any reason whatsoever. Source : https://www.fastmail.com/about/tos.html https://www.fastmail.com/about/tos.html This is the biggest reason I am hesitant to try fastmail.
- marpstar 9y ago
  At least with FastMail you'd have a phone number that will get you to a human to ask why.
  - dingo_bat 9y ago
    And your email account won't take down all sorts of other stuff with it.
  - sitepodmatt 9y ago
    You have a phone number with Google Apps and support PIN in admin console, has anyone had any success of talking with someone that isn't a human version of a Twilio phone to email transcriber? That can actually get shit escalated whilst your on the phone or at least shortly after. The presence of a phone number means very little if they don't answer or one of those annoying press 1.. for then press 2.. blah blah A client was on Zoho business with paid support. Their phone number went to voicemail every single time, they called back four days later, great fun in an emergency. Stay away from them on the subject of email.
    - efreak 9y ago
      When I enabled Enterprise trial on Google apps to change the domain on my legacy free account, they called me to see if there was anything they could help me with. There was no canned responses at the time, they actually answered the couple of off-topic questions I had at the time, and were quite friendly. That may have changed since, or it may be an Enterprise-only or new-customer thing, though, and I've never actually called them up myself.
- aibara 9y ago
JoshMnem 9y ago
The possibility that email content could change after receiving a message is worrying. Is there going to be a way to reject AMP emails? I won't accept any emails that require loading JavaScript or content from CDNs. If other email providers reject AMP emails with a bounce message explaining why, it might stop a disaster from taking hold. "Please resend your email in standard HTML or text format without JavaScript or external resources."
- dingo_bat 9y ago
  Or you can just configure your client to not run js. Seems easier and less dramatic.
  - JoshMnem 9y ago
    If you block JS from loading from CDNs on AMP pages it literally takes 8 seconds to load the AMP page.
    - dingo_bat 9y ago
      I don't understand. Can you not load the page normally and just not invoke your js interpreter at all? Just don't run any js. How can that take more time than normal loading and running?
      - JoshMnem 9y ago
        I didn't look closely, but give it a try. I counted about 8 seconds, and there is some CSS in AMP pages that says `8s`, so it's probably the CSS. If I click on an AMP link (usually only via HN), and I get a blank page without any loading indicator, it's usually because someone posted an AMP link.
  - tgsovlerkhgsel 9y ago
    Given that most of these mails will probably be the sort of e-mails one doesn't want (i.e. mostly newsletters, maybe some notifications, but _zero_ 1:1 human-to-human messages), I'd say such a filter could be pretty helpful.
sfilargi 9y ago
Outside marketing, HTML has no place in email IMHO. Personally I run my self coded all in one mail server(SMTP & web & IMAP) binary and only use the text parts, or convert them to text. Any marketing email gets blacklisted(sender or domain) and don’t have to worry about them anymore. Last time I was on Gmail I remember that no matter how many times I would report something as spam(and unsubscribe) it would somehow still land in my inbox next time.
- Spivak 9y ago
  Look, I'm for plaintext emails as much as the next guy but there is a value in something that provides formatting. Users, very reasonably, would like to use bold, underline, strike-though, highlighting, section headers, lists, tables, inline images, etc.. HTML was a convenient choice of format at the time and it worked well enough with budding webmail clients. In a forum of tech enthusiasts we might be able to get away with emails exported from groff but we can't throw out all the useful features users like along with it.
  - sfilargi 9y ago
    I think bold and links are enough. If you need more formatting just attach a document.
  - yoz-y 9y ago
    If only they have decided to use something like markdown or rtf at the time. (Some mail clients do support it). IMO the problem with choosing HTML is that then it becomes tempting to embed a complete HTML rendering engine and try blacklisting elements or restricting it. This opens up a door for vulnerabilities. If e-mail used some format which only does formatting then it would be easier to avoid security problems.
    - petepete 9y ago
      A simple Markdown dialect would have been perfect, but Markdown's ability to embed HTML would just lead to abuse. For emails, headings, quotes, code blocks, hyperlinks, images and bold/italic/strikethrough is surely enough. Perhaps tables. Unfortunately, that ship has sailed.
joshu 9y ago
This is why I hate docsend pitches. I can’t go back a year or two later and look at things - someone will ask me if I know a founder and I search my inbox and find them, but the pitch is gone and I can’t rememeber what they did or what we talked about.
tyingq 9y ago
This is pretty fun in an F500 org where email retention is 2 months or less. Many of you have the luxury of several years of searchable email. Not all of us do. And MS exchange search functionality isn't anywhere near what Gmail's is.
imron 9y ago
> We strongly believe that our customers stay with us because we’re the best, not because it’s hard to leave That's why I stay with them.
paulie_a 9y ago
Email is quickly becoming the equivalent of linked in notifications. When you have 100 unread emails you might be flooded with something important. When you have 20-100 thousand unread emails: Email is broken It's the electronic memory of nobody cares. I will potentially spend 5-30 minutes a day on email... Most days it is zero
- yoz-y 9y ago
  I suppose this depends on how you use it. The only mass notifications I get are from bitbucket and that is only because it does not have any other sort of notification system
- stordoff 9y ago
  You don't need to read everything for it to be useful. I get email reminders of things I need to do - I don't need to read past the subject line (same with shipping notifications), and purchase receipts are useful to keep in case there is a problem (you have a searchable record of when/where you bought it) but don't need to be actively read. There's a high percentage of emails I get that I don't get any extra value from actually reading them, but I would lose value by not getting them at all.
- robinhood 9y ago
  Don't accuse a system to be broken if you don't use the system properly.
agnos_tic 9y ago
I read this Of course, we’re a hosted “cloud” service. If we turned bad, we could start silently changing your email. The best defence against any cloud service doing that is keeping your own copies, or at least digests of them. Does this remind anyone else of that old Gmail Paper April Fool's prank? Last bastion of immutability. http://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1888721_1888719_1888655,00.html http://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,288... Wait why do they have a legit link to it still? https://www.gmail.com/mail/help/paper/ https://www.gmail.com/mail/help/paper/
- TuringTest 9y ago
  > "It's paper, plain and easy. I sometimes find myself wondering: what will Google think of next? Cardboard?" Keeps you wondering where they get their product names... https://web.archive.org/web/20141217113440/https://www.gmail.com/mail/help/paper/more.html https://web.archive.org/web/20141217113440/https://www.gmail...
bad_user 9y ago
From the TechCrunch article [1]: > What is the vast majority of “live” content on the web, stuff that needs to call home and update itself? Not articles like this one, or videos or songs — those are just resources you request. Not chats or emails. Cloud-based productivity tools like shared documents, sure, granted. But the rest — and we’re talking like 99.9 percent here — is ads. Truer words have never been spoken. Shame on you Google. [1] https://techcrunch.com/2018/02/13/amp-for-email-is-a-terrible-idea/ https://techcrunch.com/2018/02/13/amp-for-email-is-a-terribl...
- ainiriand 9y ago
  Brilliant article, to be fair. One small piece of internet history.
pvdebbe 9y ago
I'm disappointed at this. If everybody ignored this AMP business, it wouldn't get mainstream attention. I don't like the idea that some day use need to have a full blown web browser to check your mail.
mtgx 9y ago
Then why isn't Fastmail adding some kind of end-to-end encryption at least for its own users? Shouldn't our memories be private (unless we choose otherwise)?
- jhasse 9y ago
  https://blog.fastmail.com/2016/12/10/why-we-dont-offer-pgp/ https://blog.fastmail.com/2016/12/10/why-we-dont-offer-pgp/
  - brongondwana 9y ago
    Thanks! The benefits of having blogged all this already :)
suhastech 9y ago
I'm a fan of FastMail and their philosophy. I believe you have to own your data. It is hard to find companies with core values so deeply entrenched in the product. I think it gets a little hard to stick by it when there are variables like investments, hockey stick growth involved. There is an easy incentive to not make your product open. I recently had to think about that. That's the reason FastMail is small company. It's our collective responsibility to support the company as best as we could. Of course, not many people would have the mindspace to think about data ownership. One of the examples I can give is, I can easily pull up a polaroid from the 70s from the attic. I'm not sure we can do that 30 years from now in the digital space, unless we make a conscious effort. I've built a small email backup app[1] for the Mac a few years ago. I try to make the product as open as possible with open standards. I work with IMAP a lot. I love how they are spearing heading the movement (JMAP) to finally update a 20 year old protocol. [1] https://thehorcrux.com/ https://thehorcrux.com/
- arkades 9y ago
  I checked out your webpage, and I like the product, but it seems Mac only. Any plans for a Win version?
  - suhastech 9y ago
    I'd love to have a Windows version. As of now, I only have enough bandwidth to support the Mac version.
JustSomeNobody 9y ago
Great post! > The email in your mailbox is your copy of what was said, and nobody else can change it or make it go away. The fact that the content of an email can’t be edited is one of the best things about POP3 and IMAP email standards. I rely on this feature of email all the time as I'm sure most people do. We cannot let this change.
staticelf 9y ago
I love FastMail and this is just one of the several reasons I recently updated to a 2 year plan. I hope you can implement some feature to download the amp-content or similar so it works like normal email. I do not like amp at all but I understand if you have the need to do something to support it, but as other have written please leave it off by default!
tanu057 9y ago
Google just wants to take control of publishers. And then dictate to them what they can do or not, when a publisher page is displayed in an email. No, to AMP for email
habosa 9y ago
When I saw the AMP for email announcement I was not excited, but I did not get the online dread until I read this post. The immutability of my email has saved me so many times. I also have this feeling (which may be unfounded) that emails are "proof" of something when I get into a dispute. If my email can change or rot underneath me, I will have to change the entire way I operate online. I like AMP websites (at a basic level they're fast and that's all I care about) but I have no interest in AMP email. I hope I can opt-out of it.
moogly 9y ago
For me, email is just a repository of order and shipping confirmations. I can't even remember the last time I sent an email, or I even read one written by a human.
23443463455 9y ago
So they are going to create websites ... inside an email client! Do I even have to say that it's nonsense? I really feel like the kiddos have lost all real connection to what the internet is and what it can do and what purpose it serves. You would not see half the nonsense we see these days if they did. It's as if people are just running out of ideas so they have to try and create derivative nonsense from solid foundations. It's like postmodern art of technology ... can't created real art? No worries, drop a boulder on a car or splash some paint on something and call it art. It's all relative, things are what the mod declares them to be.
MattyRad 9y ago
I've begun to see immutability as a common theme in some of the most esteemed tech in production. Email, git, cryptocurrency, and stream processing (although I admit I don't know a lot about that one) just to name a few big ones.
e12e 9y ago
From the Google announcement[1]: > With AMP for Email, you’ll be able to quickly take actions like submit an RSVP to an event, schedule an appointment, or fill out a questionnaire right from the email message. Form the company that prides itself on doing advanced natural language processing and machine learning. How about I just reply to the email? You know, via text. Do some simple sentiment/content analysis and leave the rest to the senders integration between email client, calendar, crm whatever... We tried "send people code". It was called office macro virus (viri). Running the code as js doesn't really improve things as long as all your important data lives in the same js namespace... [1] https://www.blog.google/products/g-suite/bringing-power-amp-gmail/ https://www.blog.google/products/g-suite/bringing-power-amp-...
KarelIV 9y ago
I am a keen fastmail user, they do a great job. Without them, and also few others, I would be a way more skeptical about where technology goes these days. Karel.

1248 points by brongondwana 9y ago

Bron, I am so happy to see a blog from you guys about this... I was actually planning to ask. In the light of Google being a monopoly-scale actor, I understand that you may need to support AMP. But if I might offer a note of implementation suggestion, if you add AMP: Make sure AMP, like remote images, is off by default. Perhaps allow the user to whitelist certain services or addresses to show AMP content without the extra click. That way, if AMP provides me a benefit in the way I use emails from a particular provider, I can turn that on... but my email client is never assuming I want to load their dynamic content. I can see interesting use cases, as someone who pipes all my notifications at my email. I'd love to Favorite and Retweet right from my Twitter notifications, for example, without leaving FastMail. But I definitely don't ever want dynamic content loading from the latest marketing email from a store I've bought stuff from.

brongondwana 9y ago
We definitely would do something like that with address-book whitelisting or other controls! I expect everybody will. Remote content, even via a proxy, can still identify exactly who has opened the email (also when, unless content is cached - but the whole point with content that might change is that you can't cache the resources and still be dynamic) It's also going to mess pretty badly with offline mode when we get to that, unless we pre-fetch resources when downloading data for offline.
- xenadu02 9y ago
  Can you freeze or un-AMP emails? Have your servers pre-download stuff or even strip it (somewhat akin to a browser's reader mode)?
  - chrismorgan 9y ago
    text/x-amp-html is intended as an optional enhancement over an email that other clients will still be able to cope with. So un-AMP-ing is mostly just called using the text/html part instead of the text/x-amp-html part. Pre-downloading or proxying content is theoretically quite possible with AMP (its limitations make that possible where it would not be readily possible with freeform JavaScript), but some modes of doing so will probably play hob with its interaction models. But it’s too early to reasonably review that aspect of it—better to wait until we can see what people actually do with AMP. Make no mistake: AMP is all about making emails applications instead of static messages. That is its raison d’être.
    - ancarda 9y ago
      Wasn’t text/html intended as an optional enhancement too? But most of the emails I receive are only text/html - no text/plain alternative, which would be displayed if available. I fully expect text/x-amp-html only emails in the future, and so should you. FastMail, please give me a way to permanently block AMP only emails. Just throw them away with a Mailer Demon reply. If there’s other versions, strip away the AMP version.
      - 4ad 9y ago
        > But most of the emails I receive are only text/html - no text/plain alternative Care to elaborate on that? Virtually every email I get has a plain text version (I can't even see HTML email). I don't think the email I get is particularly selective. The only pure HTML email that I ever get is spam.
        ancarda 9y ago
        Sorry for the delay in replying, I don’t check my comments very frequently. Usually only in the morning. I use mutt for emails, so believe me — I know when I get a text/html only email as mutt can’t display the text/plain version. Most emails I get from friends and so on are in text/plain as mail clients do a decent enough job at including that. However most of my mail isn’t from people I know, it’s from newsletters and notifications. A lot of it is text/html only, either because the programmer who created and sent that email didn’t want (or know) to include a text/plain version, or didn’t care to.
- Alex3917 9y ago
  Why does it matter if email content changes, if that's the intention the author? Clearly one of the biggest benefits of email is that it's the only medium that's acceptable for memorializing agreements / decisions / roadmaps / plans / etc. At the same time, I don't really care if some clothing company's monthly marketing email changes if they run out of something, as long as it's clearly marked as ephemeral.
  - brongondwana 9y ago
    "as long as it's clearly marked as ephemeral" - yep, you hit the nail on the head there. The ecosystem danger is that ephemeral becomes the default. Who doesn't love the ability to silently fix mistakes. And when it becomes the cultural norm to send editable email, then people will do it because it's a nice experience as a sender if you have the choice. I sure enjoy being able to edit my posts on HN when I get something wrong. I'd love to be able to take back and "fix" emails that I've sent too! But having to stand by exactly what you sent when it comes to email is really a valuable part of how email works. If you made a mistake, you send a correction, but the recipient still has your original mistake too. They don't see it, then have it disappear when they go back to look at it again.
  - JustSomeNobody 9y ago
    I, for one, cannot wait until someone is able to alter a few words to a contract I've signed after I've signed it.
    - ocdtrekkie 9y ago
      FWIW, this is effectively what tech companies already do with the Terms of Service. They state that you must agree to them to use their product, and then state that they can amend them at any time, often without notifying you.
    - essayist 9y ago
      Had that happen to me. I'd "electronically signed" a PDF of a contract, and returned it to the other party with some minor questions. The other party marked up the PDF I had signed with some changes, based on my questions. All of the changes were agreeable to me (or not worth fighting about, I can't recall). But I still insisted we start with the changes made to an unsigned PDF, and then I signed that PDF with the changes. My thought was that socially/culturally green-lighting "after signature" contract changes was a path to madness and misunderstanding.
chrismorgan 9y ago
AMPHTML Email is designed to sit beside the text/plain and text/html parts as just another alternative, with type text/x-amp-html. So in theory, any senders of AMPHTML Email should also include a regular HTML part that is semantically equivalent, and any client that doesn’t support text/x-amp-html should simply get the less fancy version. In practice, if something gets popular enough then the alternative that is supposed to work properly side-by-side gets neglected. (Some email senders cop out on text/plain these days, leaving it out, or worse, empty, as in Dropbox Paper’s document update notifications.) But I don’t think AMPHTML Email is likely to be sufficiently broadly supported that this becomes a problem. (It’s only likely to happen at all if all the major providers and major email clients support it.) If at any point we do end up supporting AMPHTML Email, any remote content will be handled like remote images.
- nextos 9y ago
  Yes, this might become an embrace, extend, extinguish like scenario, which is scary. Google did the same thing with XMPP and Google Talk. They adopted an open standard when it was cool for them. When they gained mass adoption, they switched to Hangouts and the whole Allo mess. And before that they crippled XMPP federation. While I don't like regulations too much, it might be desirable to penalize these behaviors as they are monopolistic.
  - cromwellian 9y ago
    Google Talk never gained mass adoption. Google was punished by their competitors by adopting open standards, like XMPP and OpenID, when some competitors implemented "one way" interoperabilility to siphon off users. I favor federated open standards, but let's not rewrite history. Google Talk was never mass adopted or a market leader, MSN, Yahoo Messenger, AOL Messenger always had way more market share. I mean, good lord, you're calling for regulations to penalize Google over failed messaging products, why don't you call on regulations to force Apple and Facebook who own the world's most popular messaging platforms, to open up their protocols to federation?
    - toomuchtodo 9y ago

mehrdadn 9y ago

Email is not immutable though? It's pretty easy to just copy an email out of your favorite IMAP client, modify it, and drag it back. Do they not know this?

brongondwana 9y ago
Well, duh - if you can delete, edit, and upload a NEW email clearly you can change the state of your mailbox. That's a new email though, it's not the same email. Books are also not immutable - you can throw away a book and print a different book with the same cover. So at that level, nothing is immutable if you have full write access to it. The difference is, who has access to mutate the message? If you mutate it yourself, more power to you. It's your copy. If the SENDER can mutate it right there in your mailbox, that's a different story.
- mehrdadn 9y ago
  In what sense is it a "new" email? It has exactly the same headers and message body (except for whatever you choose to modify, obviously), including dates and sender and everything. It's like copying a file on top of another file and claiming the older one isn't modified, it's just a "new" file that you're copying. I mean, OK, but how is this a meaningful or useful statement? The result is pretty indistinguishable from having modified the bits of the original email in-place from the user's standpoint. If you mean it can't be mutated by anyone other than the account owner, then that would be worth clarifying I think? But even then, the same is true of, say, my Google Drive. Nobody can modify my files who hasn't received my explicit permission. So are files on Google Drive "immutable" to you?
  - brongondwana 9y ago
    "modify it" - looks like a new email to me. It's going to have a different secure digest. You can argue semantics here - but the main difference is: YOU can modify the messages in your Inbox. THE SENDER can not. Unless they have write access to your mailbox and can copy things out in a client, edit them, and write them back.

baxtr 9y ago

A bit unrelated, but since, Bron, you are obviously reading this: I love your blog, the only thing that drives me crazy: I can’t see the scroll bar in your blog posts on my mobile. I guess it’s because it’s rendered in white. Scroll bars, however, are great to have an indication how much of a page I’ve read already, like a download bar. Not having it drives me nuts :-)

brongondwana 9y ago
Yeah, our blog is currently a pain to work with in a few ways. It's generated straight out of our source repository from Markdown files, and you have to do the full pull request, merge, deploy to get posts out. We're looking at moving the blog to another platform, and usability review will be part of that!
- iagovar 9y ago
  picocms
- ianamartin 9y ago
  I recently wrote a blog engine that's pretty lightweight. Sort of tries to hit a middle-ground between a static blog and a wordpress type of thing. It also . . . doesn't work perfectly. I fucked something up with drafts, and I need to get back to it. But if you are interested, it's not too bad. Insanely fast. http://actuallysprained.net/ http://actuallysprained.net/ Source code is here: https://bitbucket.org/tronflux/pyrant https://bitbucket.org/tronflux/pyrant
  - brongondwana 9y ago
    I'll pass the link on to the team looking at it. I think they already have something in mind though. Ta.
chrismorgan 9y ago
What browser are you using? I can’t reproduce this on Firefox for Android (scrollbar rendered in grey, as is usual) and can’t easily imagine what could be causing it.

alt678 9y ago

I love seeing posts like these where a company demonstrates what their core values really are, not just shallow slogans. I'm a happy Fastmail customer and just renewed for 5 more years. Off-topic -: Do you plan to ever open source your Android app?

petecooper 9y ago

I went through a phase a couple of years ago when I was with Fastmail and looked around for alternatives [1]. I ended up staying with Fastmail and have adjusted to some of it's UI quirks in the admin interface. Posts like this remind me why I decided to stick with Fastmail. Do one job well. Fastmail do email really well for me. (Disclosure: Fastmail user on paid plan, unsolicited review/pat-on-the-back) [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11319298 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11319298

IntronExon 9y ago
Agreed, with similar disclaimer. I’ve used so many email providers, and none have had my love and loyalty like Fastmail. The highest praise I can offer these days, they earn: Fastmail treats me like the customer, and not the product.
robinhood 9y ago
Fastmail is hands down the best email provider I've found. Been a customer for 7 years now, and I'll probably be a customer for many years to come. Their web UI is exceptional, very fast and solid, and their IMAP support is top notch. After 7 years I'm still mind blown of how fast their IMAP is.

skybrian 9y ago

This is the first convincing argument I've read against AMP email. On the other hand, if someone sends you a link to a web page, sure the link didn't change, but that's not very useful, since anything can happen to the web page that the link points to. So it might just be about not confusing the user about what's immutable? Which is itself pretty important.

brongondwana 9y ago
Sure - and as I said in the blog post - this is already an issue with embedded images - which can be made to look pretty good and, if remote, can be changed later. Spam scanners penalise messages that are just a remote image for good reason.
SpikeDad 9y ago
Then you should use Apple Mail for macOS which has the option of including a PDF of the webpage rather than the obviously fragile URL.
- TehCorwiz 9y ago
  Hey, Thunderbird team, this is a feature I'd want.
  - toomuchtodo 9y ago
    Thunderbird team: Generate a request to the URL, and include the attachment as a WARC file, not a PDF. The client or any other system can then render that content however they desire at a later date.
notatoad 9y ago
It's the first convincing argument i've read against AMP email, assuming it's a valid argument. It doesn't look like amp4email is any less immutable than standard email is - it fetches some resources from external servers, but mandates that those resources must be static and cacheable. Gmail's current behaviour is to download and store all images in emails when they are first opened, which makes the images in emails as immutable as fastmail wants them to be, and i don't see why they would treat any other resources delivered in amp emails differently to images. To me, this seems perfectly reasonable - the responsibility to store email contents in the state they were first recieved should be on the recipient's client, not the sender's server. i love this blog post, because it's great to write down in clear terms why email being a read-only log is so important. but it looks like in the case of amp it might be a bit of a straw man.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

samstave 9y ago

Gmail inexplicably deleted all my email prior to sept of 2009.... and later I needed the emails I had in the account. So yes - email is and should be your digital mem, but the system sucks and the companies suck that promise you free "digital memories" -- so I am still on the fence in general regarding all tech firms that provide a free service - but what should one plan to pay for this: --- I was born in 2028. I was immediately augmented from what I was organically contrived to be/become; a Human. Human. What did that mean exactly? What is the definition of a Human? What the FUCK is this bag of potential intelligence? This bag of potential revenue? This bag of potential fealty? This.. bag... of... ...potential??? Out of the gate the system labeled, confined, contrived, pre-determined and then finally programmed me as to what, no, WHO, I was.... I had to then begin to PAY to be "HUMAN" -- I had to pay for maintenance of my body, pay to feed it, pay to educate it, pay to protect it, pay to get it loved, pay for everything that I either required or desired... -- this is what the 'definition' of being human has become. If you are born and cant be intelligent enough, beautiful enough, lucky enough, rich enough or evil enough... You are not allowed to be human. Survival of the fittest at its best. And the only ones who would agree with that, are those that can state that they are better than masses who cant compete.... This is the new 'Human' -- Who is greater than what. When youre a "what" - a plumber, a coder, a low life, a socialite... yeah... there are lots of layers in WHAT.... But there is really only one "who". WHO is that WHAT? is the basics.... Who is that master plumber? Who is that elite socialite? Who is that low-life? --- Then the system judges "how much" "How much has that low life cost society" "how much does that plumber give to society?" "How much is that socialite worth?" "How much does that engineer contribute to my life's well being?" "How much do these jerks make?" --- So, as we discover who and what we are, we need to look at how we became that [thing]. How? Parents predilections, socioeconomic status, location born, innate abilities, genetic modifications, external modifications.... Human is a basic condition that is manipulable and shall be exploited through whatever given tools are available to those who are in a position to exploit. Now, where is my blood-boy. /fiction-rant

nofunsir 9y ago

AMP for gmail will be the straw that moves me completely off of google's platform.

dleslie 9y ago
For me it was when I had location services disabled on my phone and Android _still_ popped up a notification about the commute time between my home and work, as I was walking out the door.
- Whitestrake 9y ago
  At the risk of venturing off the topic of the main thread... Could that behaviour possibly be explained by timing rather than location? My Android gives me commute data around 7:30AM, regardless of where I am or whether I'm moving. Perhaps they simply guessed you'd be at home.
  - latexr 9y ago
    “Google has confirmed it has been able to track the location of Android users via the addresses of local mobile phone masts, even when location services were turned off and the sim cards removed to protect privacy.”[1] Not saying that’s what happened here, but with Google these days I’ll assume evil[2] instead of giving the benefit of the doubt. [1]: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/nov/22/google-track-android-users-location-services-turned-off-sim https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/nov/22/google-tr... [2]: http://doonesbury.washingtonpost.com/strip/archive/2014/06/01 http://doonesbury.washingtonpost.com/strip/archive/2014/06/0...
  - badwolf 9y ago
    Not just timing... but you're connected to "CompanyWiFi" and it's the end of the business day when you usually disconnect your charging cable/leave. There are many signals they could use to show that
    - alphaalpha101 9y ago

igammarays 9y ago

Paper trails. Absolutely. The concept of keeping a recipient-owned copy of a message is as ancient as the invention of money and writing itself - it's absolutely critical for messages with legal effects, like receipts. Imagine if a fraudster could change the content of their original messages after the scam was done! Yes, Google could implement an audit trail mechanism, but that would be obscure and extremely confusing.

dmbaggett 9y ago

I've ranted here before about the complexity of email and the difficulty of even existing as a startup in the email space (see my bio). The single team that has navigated the insanity of the email space well as a small company is Fastmail. They are brilliant, ethical, and pragmatic. I sincerely hope the folks at Google who are behind this AMP-for-email idea will take the time to chat with the Fastmail team about it before pulling the trigger. Having lived through the last DOJ/Google 10-month battle royale (the sale of ITA Software, now called Google Flights), I think this is an absolutely terrible idea for Google from an antitrust standpoint. The upside for them, while obvious, pales in comparison to the downside they face by leveraging their email and search dominance to create a new walled garden. I'm amazed this got past legal.

ocdtrekkie 9y ago
Not unique to Google: I think many legal departments have realized that the FTC is currently basically disabled, as far as the United States goes. It's likely most companies feel like if they do something right now, it'll probably be accepted/standard practice before the FTC remembers it has a job to do.
- sjg007 9y ago
  Yeah the EU is really the savior of last resort now.
- nashashmi 9y ago
  Only on HN would someone describe FTC as "disabled". I think we are living in a time when companies are being frequently trusted. Because when they claim that mergers reduce costs, the automatic thought is the cost will trickle to the consumer. The other outcome we are eager to see is the innovation that occurs at the extra large scale level. Do we see the more robots make it in to industry? Or intensive AI? The opportunities and imaginations have exploded after Facebook and Google utilized their dominance for the greater good. Lastly, enforcement against unethical illegal behavior has become easier. Reducing the need of cynical and paranoid reasons to prohibit mergers. Only when there is actual concern of legal unethical actions negatively causing market consolidation and preventing startup incubation, the FTC will not be doing any of the things the paranoid want it to do.

rootsudo 9y ago

It's bad because people can manipulate email. It is not absolute. An overzealous email admin/exchange admin can work horrors. But maybe that's just me. I've been an Exchange admin.

brongondwana 9y ago
For sure - anybody who can modify your mailstore can change emails - that's not really under debate. The same way anybody who has access to your hard drive can change your files. The issue at hand here is whether the original sender can modify the message after you've received it.
- superrad 9y ago
  I guess they can by brokering a deal with the bad actor in charge of your mail server. Unlikely but email is still bound to social manipulation.
  - brongondwana 9y ago
    We're in the "you're screwed regardless" territory here - like having an ISP who intercepts TLS connections and substitutes content as you download it. There's no real way to work around that, though you might be able to detect it if there are unforgeable signatures on some of the content (e.g. DKIM signatures from third parties on incoming emails) - though the intermediate can strip those too, so all you see is "unsigned" rather than "modified".
    - Alex3917 9y ago
      > if there are unforgeable signatures on some of the content (e.g. DKIM signatures from third parties on incoming emails) FWIW, in many cases content can be changed even if signed with DKIM without breaking the signature. http://noxxi.de/research/breaking-dkim-on-purpose-and-by-chance.html http://noxxi.de/research/breaking-dkim-on-purpose-and-by-cha... I think email clients should be rethinking how they communicate to users whether or not an email is signed, e.g. if the headers haven't been oversigned and/or the full body hasn't been signed then it may be better to just show the message as having been not signed at all.

Skunkleton 9y ago

Hi Bron, not related to TFA but I am a happy fastmail user and just wanted to say thanks. I really appreciate Fastmail's stable standards based services. These are increasingly hard to come by.

brongondwana 9y ago
Thanks! We aim to please :)

ianamartin 9y ago

I'm so happy to see this blog. I've been a happy, paying customer of fastmail since . . . I honestly don't know how long it's been. I never think twice about it. Fastmail is the ideal of, "It just works" that Apple strives to be. No offense to Apple or their employees, and it's a limited problem area, but these guys are really, really good at it. Yeah, I have a gmail account. It's mostly a spam folder at this point. Because if you were able to get a good name when it was in beta in 2004 or so, it's a shitshow, even with google's pretty good filtering. Fastmail is one of the best examples of why you should pay for online services. When you work with this kind of company, it's clear who the customer is: me. They aren't mining me for data; they aren't trying to trick me into anything. They reliably get my x dollars/year, and I pay them gladly. A thousand thumbs up for the Fastmail team. It's probably not the most glamorous thing in the world. But cheers to a company that is making a profitable living without hype, without bullshit product marketing, and without closing off access. By just being better at something than anyone else is. I'm hoping to start a company in the next year or so, and I want to do things the way Fastmail does them. You guys really are a beacon in the tech industry.

Aelius 9y ago

This makes a convincing argument for the general adoption of ipfs as a the backbone of the internet. As I understand it, nothing can be truly deleted, you only need to know what the hash of the object was and chances are it will still be accessible in cache for quite some time.

TheRealPomax 9y ago
So, literally illegal in Europe, where you have the legal right to be forgotten from the internet? There is a lot to be said for being able to delete data from an internet-connected computer and trust that it is, in fact, deleted. Email definitely falls in that category, but while deletion for email has a fairly obvious value, remote mutability of emails is extremely questionable at best.
- Aelius 9y ago
  IANAL but I don't believe ipfs in of itself runs afoul of "right to be forgotten". Skimming Wikipedia, "the right to be forgotten" only requires search engines to not index things which are "deleted", or more realistically, things which have been unlisted. Because even in the infrastructure we have today, objects aren't truly "deleted" for quite some time, at least not where CDNs and Google and Facebook and others are involved.
  - Aelius 9y ago
    Perhaps a better place to start the discussion about the legality of ipfs would be to ask if bittorrent is illegal in Europe. After all, if even one seeder is online somewhere in the world, a torrent is accessible and cannot be deleted. Does bittorrent have the potential infringe on someone's right to be forgotten? ipfs operates in a similar way (peers and seeds).

dgudkov 9y ago

Email represents three important abstractions of the real life: First, it's a task queue. And you're the worker that processes the tasks. Anything that helps an email service to be that abstraction is very good for users -- prioritizing, postponing, auto-processing, branching, delegating, etc. Second, it's a log. As the article rightfully says -- an immutable one. Again, anything that helps email be a good log is very good for the user -- search, filtering, archiving, etc. Third, it's a file storage. This is the most overlooked part, unfortunately. Search, sharing, organizing into collections -- all that would be of great help to users. Yet, Google pushes that silly AMP :\

brongondwana 9y ago
Bah - file storage. Yep, it certainly is. And to a large degree, because it's a log. Once you email something as an attachment (even to yourself) it's like a version control commit. That copy is locked in, and won't change. You can find it and refer back to it later. It has a timestamp on it, and it's probably stored in the cloud somewhere with backups and such. Hence "memory" - because that's how people use it :)
- dgudkov 9y ago
  >And to a large degree, because it's a log. I agree. Although, it's more than just a log. For instance, it would be great to have the ability to see a collection of all files sent by a particular sender, with file versions (with dates and links to according emails) stacked under one file name. Another suggestion -- view a collection of files in all emails with particular label. Finally, in some cases it can be helpful to have a local read-only copy of files in a particular collection. It's like one-way read-only Dropbox. This would make automated processing of email attachments so much simpler. (BTW, a product idea, anyone?!).
  - brongondwana 9y ago
    So one of the smartass login messages in our internal slack is "JMAP will fix it". Interestingly enough, JMAP will make this kind of thing much easier - and we have thought about it in the design! Our Cyrus server already internally keeps a blobId which is a digest of the binary content of each MIME part. Which means you can easily tell that two attachments are identical without reading the contents or guessing based on size and name. And it's easy to search for messages with file attachments and fetch just the file attachement details via JMAP, making this kind of interface relatively easy to write. The usual caveats about "we haven't got a particular timeframe in mind" apply - but once JMAP is standard, anyone can write a client to that standard!

reducesuffering 9y ago

Finally interested in getting off gmail. Could someone summarize the pros/cons of fastmail vs. protonmail or any other major email provider?

benoliver999 9y ago
I can't compare services too well but I'll toss Migadu into the hat. https://www.migadu.com/en/index.html https://www.migadu.com/en/index.html It's basically just an IMAP server. They have webmail but otherwise it's on you to provide a client. So far it's been great, I switched from gmail and I am not looking back. They give really nice clear instructions on setting up your DNS properly and the pricing isn't too bad. My main motivation was to get onto a service that lets me have my own domain. Once you're off gmail you are then free to choose and switch between whatever you like.
happyraul 9y ago
You might find this useful in your research: https://thatoneprivacysite.net/email-section/ https://thatoneprivacysite.net/email-section/

igammarays 9y ago

Here's a free B2C startup idea for you aspiring founders: a personal email (local?) archiver and search engine. Pull all my logs from my 15 different addresses I've had over the years, and give me super-fast realtime search on all of it. I wouldn't hesitate to pay 10 bucks a month for that. This idea has a super-useful B2B angle as well (think of the explosion of MailChimp clones).

toomuchtodo 9y ago
https://github.com/salyh/elasticsearch-imap https://github.com/salyh/elasticsearch-imap
bo1024 9y ago
getmail + grep
danieldk 9y ago
If you don't want to put your data in another silo, this is what mu [1] and notmuch [2] provide. I have been using mu/mu4e for a while and it is absolutely great for quickly finding e-mail, creating virtual search-based mailboxes, etc. Combined with isync and Fastmail's standard-conforming IMAP support, you have a really nice e-mail setup. Of course, it's not for the general public, but this is Hackernews ;) [1] https://www.djcbsoftware.nl/code/mu/ https://www.djcbsoftware.nl/code/mu/ [2] https://notmuchmail.org https://notmuchmail.org

yorby 9y ago

an email service would be the only instance where I would consider disabling my ad blocker if ads are not targeted... could FastMail consider?

JohnTHaller 9y ago

I'm moving email providers in the near future and was looking at Google. AMP for Gmail ensured that I won't touch it.

x0x0 9y ago
You should read the top comment here before you move to fastmail, and fastmail's response. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15855081 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15855081 I'm a founder of a company, and I use fastmail for my personal email and gmail for my professional email. I like fastmail more, but I need the security of gmail + yubikey because that professional email can manage DNS/domains/bank accounts. You should also be aware that fastmail doesn't really integrate that well on Android phones. Eg in order to access calendars hosted on fastmail, you will have to use a third party caldav program. I currently used caldav-sync, which fastmail recommends. It's a piece of shit that stops working approximately every other week on a stock HTC 10. The symptom is my calendar stops syncing. I have to notice this, go to the accounts option, and manually trigger a long term sync. This is very very very annoying and I'm going to find a new program as soon as I have the time. Note this isn't fastmail's fault, but it does significantly inhibit use of their service. The email composition box on mobile firefox on fastmail is a little funky too, but that's on me. I wouldn't be surprised if I'm essentially the only person using mobile firefox/android/fastmail's web client. This was pretty much the outcome of my effort to de-google myself. That said, I'm really happy with fastmail and I think I'm prepaid for another two years.
- JohnTHaller 9y ago
  I won't be managing calendars. Sadly, your choices for that seem to be either Gmail (which I'll continue using for my calendar) or Outlook (and the Outlook calendar). I'd pay good money for a working third party calendar/contacts solution that worked well on my phone, tablet, and Windows. Google doesn't fit the bill there, either, unless you like web-only. As for securing Gmail with yubikey... how do you gain access via a standard email client like Thunderbird in that case? Anything that can't do that is a non-starter for me.
  - 9y ago

mrmondo 9y ago

As always Bron & teams - so happy with your take on this and proud to be a Fastmail user and advocate. -Sam.

piranha 9y ago

I’ve been trying to switch to fastmail about once a year for the last few years and checked it again to refresh my memory. My main gripe is still here: if you are on a bad connection (or with no connection at all), Fastmail’s mobile app cannot load interface and so can’t show your emails. Which makes it reeeeally painful at times when an app is most useful in the first place. :) Of course, I could connect native mail.app, but that makes your ui on desktop and mobile too different...

jacknews 9y ago

Excellent point. I'm a happy fastmail user, and actually I'd like to see the ability to 'fetch and save images' in addition to the 'show images' button, so that I can archive some of those remote-image-wrap emails. Remote image links are a bane - look how many forums have been effectively ruined because they relied on 3rd party image hosting, that has now changed it's policy, or gone away, etc. Another annoyance are the dynamic links to other stories that you see at the bottom of news sites. I often spy a link I'd like to follow just as I leave the page, and then when I reload, the links have all changed! Super annoying.

ggm 9y ago

Gmail has a reasonably nice small inner-core functionality with keyboard accellerators which is javascript-portable to my life. I won't trust a cafe computer to run gmail to login, but I can trust my changing personal device to let me run gmail in some consistent manner through keyboarded commands I like. And the spambot is good. But adding rich features? gaaaaah. I want to go back to MH. I want to go back to my shell. I'm so tempted to walk into a dark corner, rather than have the HTML actively engage with me. because many things, but perhaps I'm kidding myself? I bet I didn't realize how many tracking events exist through my email reading patterns, that google know, and can monetize. this AMP thing is just a more overt moment. I'm a frog, and I've been boiled slowly.

latexr 9y ago
> I'm a frog, and I've been boiled slowly. That is a myth: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog
- zaphar 9y ago
  These days it's more of a metaphor than a myth.
  - ggm 9y ago
    Also I am not actually a frog

dustinupdyke 9y ago

Perhaps not to the point, but I find more interesting pieces that I want to remember occur in Hangouts, Slack or some other more expeditious medium other than email. I suspect that for some, email is losing priority.

gt_ 9y ago

>(even more specifically, an email with remote images can totally change after being content scanned). Can anyone speak to the prevalence of this abuse strategy? Are our anti-spam engines able to handle this?

yeukhon 9y ago

I mentioned this the other day when a "Google Talk" discussion [1] was featured on HN. The reason I love Google Talk is the fact that conversations are saved in my inbox, and I can export the history to a local drive and encrypt the files. Pictures can go 404, but text, never. Email should be simple, but I know in 20 years, our Internet technology will end up like futuristic anime world technology. A simple, non-interactive, non-multimedia e-mail will last like a paper. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16349897 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16349897

Tom4hawk 9y ago
E-mail and IRC. Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1782/ https://xkcd.com/1782/

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

deleted 9y ago

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enitihas 9y ago

I do want to use Fastmail, but their ToS are no better than Gmail i.e, that they can terminate your account any time for any reason whatsoever. Source : https://www.fastmail.com/about/tos.html https://www.fastmail.com/about/tos.html This is the biggest reason I am hesitant to try fastmail.

marpstar 9y ago
At least with FastMail you'd have a phone number that will get you to a human to ask why.
- dingo_bat 9y ago
  And your email account won't take down all sorts of other stuff with it.
- sitepodmatt 9y ago
  You have a phone number with Google Apps and support PIN in admin console, has anyone had any success of talking with someone that isn't a human version of a Twilio phone to email transcriber? That can actually get shit escalated whilst your on the phone or at least shortly after. The presence of a phone number means very little if they don't answer or one of those annoying press 1.. for then press 2.. blah blah A client was on Zoho business with paid support. Their phone number went to voicemail every single time, they called back four days later, great fun in an emergency. Stay away from them on the subject of email.
  - efreak 9y ago
    When I enabled Enterprise trial on Google apps to change the domain on my legacy free account, they called me to see if there was anything they could help me with. There was no canned responses at the time, they actually answered the couple of off-topic questions I had at the time, and were quite friendly. That may have changed since, or it may be an Enterprise-only or new-customer thing, though, and I've never actually called them up myself.
aibara 9y ago

JoshMnem 9y ago

The possibility that email content could change after receiving a message is worrying. Is there going to be a way to reject AMP emails? I won't accept any emails that require loading JavaScript or content from CDNs. If other email providers reject AMP emails with a bounce message explaining why, it might stop a disaster from taking hold. "Please resend your email in standard HTML or text format without JavaScript or external resources."

dingo_bat 9y ago
Or you can just configure your client to not run js. Seems easier and less dramatic.
- JoshMnem 9y ago
  If you block JS from loading from CDNs on AMP pages it literally takes 8 seconds to load the AMP page.
  - dingo_bat 9y ago
    I don't understand. Can you not load the page normally and just not invoke your js interpreter at all? Just don't run any js. How can that take more time than normal loading and running?
    - JoshMnem 9y ago
      I didn't look closely, but give it a try. I counted about 8 seconds, and there is some CSS in AMP pages that says `8s`, so it's probably the CSS. If I click on an AMP link (usually only via HN), and I get a blank page without any loading indicator, it's usually because someone posted an AMP link.
- tgsovlerkhgsel 9y ago
  Given that most of these mails will probably be the sort of e-mails one doesn't want (i.e. mostly newsletters, maybe some notifications, but _zero_ 1:1 human-to-human messages), I'd say such a filter could be pretty helpful.

sfilargi 9y ago

Outside marketing, HTML has no place in email IMHO. Personally I run my self coded all in one mail server(SMTP & web & IMAP) binary and only use the text parts, or convert them to text. Any marketing email gets blacklisted(sender or domain) and don’t have to worry about them anymore. Last time I was on Gmail I remember that no matter how many times I would report something as spam(and unsubscribe) it would somehow still land in my inbox next time.

Spivak 9y ago
Look, I'm for plaintext emails as much as the next guy but there is a value in something that provides formatting. Users, very reasonably, would like to use bold, underline, strike-though, highlighting, section headers, lists, tables, inline images, etc.. HTML was a convenient choice of format at the time and it worked well enough with budding webmail clients. In a forum of tech enthusiasts we might be able to get away with emails exported from groff but we can't throw out all the useful features users like along with it.
- sfilargi 9y ago
  I think bold and links are enough. If you need more formatting just attach a document.
- yoz-y 9y ago
  If only they have decided to use something like markdown or rtf at the time. (Some mail clients do support it). IMO the problem with choosing HTML is that then it becomes tempting to embed a complete HTML rendering engine and try blacklisting elements or restricting it. This opens up a door for vulnerabilities. If e-mail used some format which only does formatting then it would be easier to avoid security problems.
  - petepete 9y ago
    A simple Markdown dialect would have been perfect, but Markdown's ability to embed HTML would just lead to abuse. For emails, headings, quotes, code blocks, hyperlinks, images and bold/italic/strikethrough is surely enough. Perhaps tables. Unfortunately, that ship has sailed.

joshu 9y ago

This is why I hate docsend pitches. I can’t go back a year or two later and look at things - someone will ask me if I know a founder and I search my inbox and find them, but the pitch is gone and I can’t rememeber what they did or what we talked about.

tyingq 9y ago

This is pretty fun in an F500 org where email retention is 2 months or less. Many of you have the luxury of several years of searchable email. Not all of us do. And MS exchange search functionality isn't anywhere near what Gmail's is.

imron 9y ago

> We strongly believe that our customers stay with us because we’re the best, not because it’s hard to leave That's why I stay with them.

paulie_a 9y ago

Email is quickly becoming the equivalent of linked in notifications. When you have 100 unread emails you might be flooded with something important. When you have 20-100 thousand unread emails: Email is broken It's the electronic memory of nobody cares. I will potentially spend 5-30 minutes a day on email... Most days it is zero

yoz-y 9y ago
I suppose this depends on how you use it. The only mass notifications I get are from bitbucket and that is only because it does not have any other sort of notification system
stordoff 9y ago
You don't need to read everything for it to be useful. I get email reminders of things I need to do - I don't need to read past the subject line (same with shipping notifications), and purchase receipts are useful to keep in case there is a problem (you have a searchable record of when/where you bought it) but don't need to be actively read. There's a high percentage of emails I get that I don't get any extra value from actually reading them, but I would lose value by not getting them at all.
robinhood 9y ago
Don't accuse a system to be broken if you don't use the system properly.

agnos_tic 9y ago

I read this Of course, we’re a hosted “cloud” service. If we turned bad, we could start silently changing your email. The best defence against any cloud service doing that is keeping your own copies, or at least digests of them. Does this remind anyone else of that old Gmail Paper April Fool's prank? Last bastion of immutability. http://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1888721_1888719_1888655,00.html http://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,288... Wait why do they have a legit link to it still? https://www.gmail.com/mail/help/paper/ https://www.gmail.com/mail/help/paper/

TuringTest 9y ago
> "It's paper, plain and easy. I sometimes find myself wondering: what will Google think of next? Cardboard?" Keeps you wondering where they get their product names... https://web.archive.org/web/20141217113440/https://www.gmail.com/mail/help/paper/more.html https://web.archive.org/web/20141217113440/https://www.gmail...

bad_user 9y ago

From the TechCrunch article [1]: > What is the vast majority of “live” content on the web, stuff that needs to call home and update itself? Not articles like this one, or videos or songs — those are just resources you request. Not chats or emails. Cloud-based productivity tools like shared documents, sure, granted. But the rest — and we’re talking like 99.9 percent here — is ads. Truer words have never been spoken. Shame on you Google. [1] https://techcrunch.com/2018/02/13/amp-for-email-is-a-terrible-idea/ https://techcrunch.com/2018/02/13/amp-for-email-is-a-terribl...

ainiriand 9y ago
Brilliant article, to be fair. One small piece of internet history.

pvdebbe 9y ago

I'm disappointed at this. If everybody ignored this AMP business, it wouldn't get mainstream attention. I don't like the idea that some day use need to have a full blown web browser to check your mail.

mtgx 9y ago

Then why isn't Fastmail adding some kind of end-to-end encryption at least for its own users? Shouldn't our memories be private (unless we choose otherwise)?

jhasse 9y ago
https://blog.fastmail.com/2016/12/10/why-we-dont-offer-pgp/ https://blog.fastmail.com/2016/12/10/why-we-dont-offer-pgp/
- brongondwana 9y ago
  Thanks! The benefits of having blogged all this already :)

suhastech 9y ago

I'm a fan of FastMail and their philosophy. I believe you have to own your data. It is hard to find companies with core values so deeply entrenched in the product. I think it gets a little hard to stick by it when there are variables like investments, hockey stick growth involved. There is an easy incentive to not make your product open. I recently had to think about that. That's the reason FastMail is small company. It's our collective responsibility to support the company as best as we could. Of course, not many people would have the mindspace to think about data ownership. One of the examples I can give is, I can easily pull up a polaroid from the 70s from the attic. I'm not sure we can do that 30 years from now in the digital space, unless we make a conscious effort. I've built a small email backup app[1] for the Mac a few years ago. I try to make the product as open as possible with open standards. I work with IMAP a lot. I love how they are spearing heading the movement (JMAP) to finally update a 20 year old protocol. [1] https://thehorcrux.com/ https://thehorcrux.com/

arkades 9y ago
I checked out your webpage, and I like the product, but it seems Mac only. Any plans for a Win version?
- suhastech 9y ago
  I'd love to have a Windows version. As of now, I only have enough bandwidth to support the Mac version.

JustSomeNobody 9y ago

Great post! > The email in your mailbox is your copy of what was said, and nobody else can change it or make it go away. The fact that the content of an email can’t be edited is one of the best things about POP3 and IMAP email standards. I rely on this feature of email all the time as I'm sure most people do. We cannot let this change.

staticelf 9y ago

I love FastMail and this is just one of the several reasons I recently updated to a 2 year plan. I hope you can implement some feature to download the amp-content or similar so it works like normal email. I do not like amp at all but I understand if you have the need to do something to support it, but as other have written please leave it off by default!

tanu057 9y ago

Google just wants to take control of publishers. And then dictate to them what they can do or not, when a publisher page is displayed in an email. No, to AMP for email

habosa 9y ago

When I saw the AMP for email announcement I was not excited, but I did not get the online dread until I read this post. The immutability of my email has saved me so many times. I also have this feeling (which may be unfounded) that emails are "proof" of something when I get into a dispute. If my email can change or rot underneath me, I will have to change the entire way I operate online. I like AMP websites (at a basic level they're fast and that's all I care about) but I have no interest in AMP email. I hope I can opt-out of it.

moogly 9y ago

For me, email is just a repository of order and shipping confirmations. I can't even remember the last time I sent an email, or I even read one written by a human.

23443463455 9y ago

So they are going to create websites ... inside an email client! Do I even have to say that it's nonsense? I really feel like the kiddos have lost all real connection to what the internet is and what it can do and what purpose it serves. You would not see half the nonsense we see these days if they did. It's as if people are just running out of ideas so they have to try and create derivative nonsense from solid foundations. It's like postmodern art of technology ... can't created real art? No worries, drop a boulder on a car or splash some paint on something and call it art. It's all relative, things are what the mod declares them to be.

MattyRad 9y ago

I've begun to see immutability as a common theme in some of the most esteemed tech in production. Email, git, cryptocurrency, and stream processing (although I admit I don't know a lot about that one) just to name a few big ones.

e12e 9y ago

From the Google announcement[1]: > With AMP for Email, you’ll be able to quickly take actions like submit an RSVP to an event, schedule an appointment, or fill out a questionnaire right from the email message. Form the company that prides itself on doing advanced natural language processing and machine learning. How about I just reply to the email? You know, via text. Do some simple sentiment/content analysis and leave the rest to the senders integration between email client, calendar, crm whatever... We tried "send people code". It was called office macro virus (viri). Running the code as js doesn't really improve things as long as all your important data lives in the same js namespace... [1] https://www.blog.google/products/g-suite/bringing-power-amp-gmail/ https://www.blog.google/products/g-suite/bringing-power-amp-...

KarelIV 9y ago

I am a keen fastmail user, they do a great job. Without them, and also few others, I would be a way more skeptical about where technology goes these days. Karel.