6 ms·

This is only possible if one believes in the capacity to control client security on the other side. There’s also the problem that something viewable by the reci

This is only possible if one believes in the capacity to control client security on the other side. There’s also the problem that something viewable by the recipient’s eyeballs is also photographable by the recipient’s camera. Moreover, I worry about the new Gmail feature that undermine the open platform of email. Email is just about the last unwalled comms platform we have, and I really worry for its safety if gmail thinks it can start differentiating network effects on gmail vs network effects on email. I switched my vanity domain over to Fastmail a while back. I haven’t had any regrets. New features like this make me even more glad.

Someone1234 9y ago
Email is doomed either way. The standard is indefinitely stuck in "IE6" mode, where there's few if any improvements, updates, or fixes. Everyone time anyone suggests significant improvements one of the big players (Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, etc) says no and it stalls. If email gets a "HTML5"-like major refresh at some point then I'd be proven wrong but that hasn't happened yet in my lifetime. Microsoft in particular between Outlook.com, 365, and Exchange/Outlook Desktop are a major hindrance to any advancement. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simple_Mail_Transfer_Protocol#Related_requests_for_comments https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simple_Mail_Transfer_Protocol#...
- bad_user 9y ago
  Not having improvements is a feature. Yes, please leave email the way it is, because it works fine. It’s one of the few things that does. The only feature I want is end to end encryption. Google will never make encryption easy on their own because they’ve got perverse incentives not to.
  - euyyn 9y ago
    It works fine for some definition of "fine".
    - benrbray 9y ago
      What's wrong with it?
      - euyyn 9y ago
        That come to mind: Hard to separate pending tasks from just conversations. Hard to split conversations into separate threads when two topics diverge. Leaving a conversation isn't just your decision: you have to both reply all and hope that no one else replies all using a previous email in the thread. In a corporate email, inability to prevent mass emails from other employees. Hard to do for personal email too. EDIT: I'm a huge fan, e.g., of the "travel bundles" Inbox creates. It's a giant win in usability for the use case of getting confirmation emails of booked trips. But you can see how it's a battle uphill that Inbox fights against the protocol, as the AI isn't always able to bundle all relevant information together, or extract key pieces of info from the email bodies.
        pjmlp 9y ago
        Those are email client specific issues.
        euyyn 9y ago
        How would you solve them in the client, that GMail hasn't been able to?
        pjmlp 9y ago
        > Hard to separate pending tasks from just conversations. Emails aren't tasks. In any case, Outlook allows for assigning tasks to emails and organize them. > Hard to split conversations into separate threads when two topics diverge. An UI/UX design issue. If the subject is no longer the same, one could provide an UI feature that allows them to be viewed separately. > Leaving a conversation isn't just your decision: you have to both reply all and hope that no one else replies all using a previous email in the thread. Leaving a conversation is my decision. I just stop replying and create a rule to delete all further emails using the same topic from the group of senders. > In a corporate email, inability to prevent mass emails from other employees. Hard to do for personal email too. In some emails clients, specially corporate ones, it is possible to customize how send, reply and reply-all work, either via group policies or custom plugins. GMail has not wanted to, which is quite different from being able to.
  - JasonFruit 9y ago
    Email does work fine. We have a similar solution for encryption: PGP. If you do the encryption yourself instead of relying on your email client to handle it, it works fine. Type your text, encrypt it, then put it in an email; get a response, decrypt it, and read it — it's easy, and it works. People who say PGP is too hard to use are usually relying on a plugin for their email client, or some other unreliable, "encryption magic" tool that tries to hide how PGP works behind an incompatible abstraction. Simple tools that do one thing well are almost always best.
    - KozmoNau7 9y ago
      That is absolutely not the way to get people to use it. Very few people can be bothered to muck about with PGP manually. The few geeks who want it or need it are already doing that. What we need is a way to make E2E encryption easy and straightforward, like Signal or Wire, where it's easy, automatic and default enabled.
      - JasonFruit 9y ago
        Did I say that was the way to get people to use it? No. I said it's the way to make it work. I want it to work when people need it, not to get more people to encrypt their shopping lists.
        KozmoNau7 9y ago
        The more people encrypt their everyday communication, the easier it is for your confidential emails to hide in the noise.
      - rakoo 9y ago
        That's what autocrypt (https://autocrypt.org/ https://autocrypt.org/) is going to solve. Automatic opportunistic encryption using existing standards.
  - paxys 9y ago
    Email does not work fine. There is no standard for encryption or any other information security mechanism. No server identity verification. No delivery confirmation. No push standard. No concept of groups or other ways to categories and manage access between users in a domain. Every provider has their own implementation of threaded conversations. No major provider supports non-ASCII addresses. Servers can't even agree on simple message formatting. Most things that make email actually useful are outside the spec and tacked on by each individual provider. Email is one of the last widely used open communication protocols, and it is sad that people are so resistant to its evolution because that is exactly what is accelerating its demise in favor of proprietary software.
    - yjftsjthsd-h 9y ago
      > There is no standard for encryption or any other information security mechanism. I agree that SSL in transit and GPG could stand to be improved, but they do exist. > No server identity verification. What do you want that SPF+DKIM doesn't cover? > No delivery confirmation. Good? That sounds like asking for abuse. And in any event, it's no different than inline remote images (which of course are blocked for the same reason that delivery confirmation is a bad idea). Unless you just mean being sure that the message got to the target server, in which case I agree that the best we can do is delivering it directly to the target MX and see that it confirmed that it received the message. > No push standard. Temporarily true, pending JMAP (which I suppose strengthens your point about needing innovation). > No concept of groups or other ways to categories and manage access between users in a domain. Not quite sure what this means. Do you want something like shared mailboxes and tags? > Every provider has their own implementation of threaded conversations. True, though in a message-centric format I'm not sure that it's a bug. > No major provider supports non-ASCII addresses. Not a bug in email, only arbitrary restrictions by certain providers. Also opens you up to unicode normalization attacks (phishing is easier if you can fake characters). > Servers can't even agree on simple message formatting. I'm not sure what formatting servers even care about (email is just some blobs of text strung together), but I can't really refute this without knowing what you refer to more specifically. > Most things that make email actually useful are outside the spec and tacked on by each individual provider. Email is useful because it lets us send arbitrary stuff (usually a text body and zero or more attachments) between federated providers. It's a simple-ish protocol that is stable and just works. EDIT: In summary, I vastly prefer email as it is: A simple protocol that can include arbitrary information, which allows people to extend it however they want. Of course, this means that extensions are arbitrary and at best non-required, but that keeps it flexible and back-compatible.
- _o_ 9y ago
  Dont fix what aint broken ;) Email is not doomed. Actually it is getting more and more relevant, this picture might shed some light: https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/chat_systems.png https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/chat_systems.png All the chat programs are making all the communication pain in the neck and the only way of communicating that you can rely to are old school phone calls, sms and email. There is also other side, with email you actually think what you are writting as you don't want to flood someone, with chatting it is all about smileys or everybody would be still using irc, I still need to see chat program catching the amount of irc features (actually I would bet Telegram is just front end for irc servers in backend). And just to mention this gmail feature, it is just nonsense, it will work in their cough spy.. cough ..ing... email system, immediately when it leaves it, it is probably just a mime header which I will gladely ignore. And self respecting techie shouldn't use the gmail (and should be proud not to use it ;) ) anyway.
  - dingo_bat 9y ago
    > immediately when it leaves it, it is probably just a mime header which I will gladely ignore Apparently it isn't so easy. They send you a link, which you click. Then the message opens in a web page.
    - KozmoNau7 9y ago
      In which case the response will be "I can't read your mail, please resend in plain text".
      - _o_ 9y ago
        Exactly. Or wget on smtp server side, recrafting it into email attachement (removing all remote links) and sending it to the user. Link like this is another way of privacy violation from google and I wont tolerate it. #abandongmail
- nulltarget 9y ago
  It seems like it would be worth all the effort if there were a fork that solved every authentication and encryption problem, and also addressed some less important things like: hey, maybe don’t use the Microsoft Word rendering engine for html. But that would require all the transfer agents, delivery agents, and user agents to agree on the new spec, implement it in some standard/predictable backwards compatible way, and then support a legacy mode for the next 5-10 years.
- dingo_bat 9y ago
  I wish more things were as stable as email. It just works. It has worked perfectly for 20 years. Email I received 10 years ago is easily readable today. Email I send today will be readable for the next decade and more. In other words, it's a feature, not a bug. I wish people who want to "advance" the standard went off and used something else. Go use allo or hangouts or whatever new locked-down app google is pushing this week. I suspect there will always be people who are content with email.

Someone1234 9y ago

Email is doomed either way. The standard is indefinitely stuck in "IE6" mode, where there's few if any improvements, updates, or fixes. Everyone time anyone suggests significant improvements one of the big players (Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, etc) says no and it stalls. If email gets a "HTML5"-like major refresh at some point then I'd be proven wrong but that hasn't happened yet in my lifetime. Microsoft in particular between Outlook.com, 365, and Exchange/Outlook Desktop are a major hindrance to any advancement. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simple_Mail_Transfer_Protocol#Related_requests_for_comments https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simple_Mail_Transfer_Protocol#...

bad_user 9y ago
Not having improvements is a feature. Yes, please leave email the way it is, because it works fine. It’s one of the few things that does. The only feature I want is end to end encryption. Google will never make encryption easy on their own because they’ve got perverse incentives not to.
- euyyn 9y ago
  It works fine for some definition of "fine".
  - benrbray 9y ago
    What's wrong with it?
    - euyyn 9y ago
      That come to mind: Hard to separate pending tasks from just conversations. Hard to split conversations into separate threads when two topics diverge. Leaving a conversation isn't just your decision: you have to both reply all and hope that no one else replies all using a previous email in the thread. In a corporate email, inability to prevent mass emails from other employees. Hard to do for personal email too. EDIT: I'm a huge fan, e.g., of the "travel bundles" Inbox creates. It's a giant win in usability for the use case of getting confirmation emails of booked trips. But you can see how it's a battle uphill that Inbox fights against the protocol, as the AI isn't always able to bundle all relevant information together, or extract key pieces of info from the email bodies.
      - pjmlp 9y ago
        Those are email client specific issues.
        euyyn 9y ago
        How would you solve them in the client, that GMail hasn't been able to?
        pjmlp 9y ago
        > Hard to separate pending tasks from just conversations. Emails aren't tasks. In any case, Outlook allows for assigning tasks to emails and organize them. > Hard to split conversations into separate threads when two topics diverge. An UI/UX design issue. If the subject is no longer the same, one could provide an UI feature that allows them to be viewed separately. > Leaving a conversation isn't just your decision: you have to both reply all and hope that no one else replies all using a previous email in the thread. Leaving a conversation is my decision. I just stop replying and create a rule to delete all further emails using the same topic from the group of senders. > In a corporate email, inability to prevent mass emails from other employees. Hard to do for personal email too. In some emails clients, specially corporate ones, it is possible to customize how send, reply and reply-all work, either via group policies or custom plugins. GMail has not wanted to, which is quite different from being able to.
- JasonFruit 9y ago
  Email does work fine. We have a similar solution for encryption: PGP. If you do the encryption yourself instead of relying on your email client to handle it, it works fine. Type your text, encrypt it, then put it in an email; get a response, decrypt it, and read it — it's easy, and it works. People who say PGP is too hard to use are usually relying on a plugin for their email client, or some other unreliable, "encryption magic" tool that tries to hide how PGP works behind an incompatible abstraction. Simple tools that do one thing well are almost always best.
  - KozmoNau7 9y ago
    That is absolutely not the way to get people to use it. Very few people can be bothered to muck about with PGP manually. The few geeks who want it or need it are already doing that. What we need is a way to make E2E encryption easy and straightforward, like Signal or Wire, where it's easy, automatic and default enabled.
    - JasonFruit 9y ago
      Did I say that was the way to get people to use it? No. I said it's the way to make it work. I want it to work when people need it, not to get more people to encrypt their shopping lists.
      - KozmoNau7 9y ago
        The more people encrypt their everyday communication, the easier it is for your confidential emails to hide in the noise.
    - rakoo 9y ago
      That's what autocrypt (https://autocrypt.org/ https://autocrypt.org/) is going to solve. Automatic opportunistic encryption using existing standards.
- paxys 9y ago
  Email does not work fine. There is no standard for encryption or any other information security mechanism. No server identity verification. No delivery confirmation. No push standard. No concept of groups or other ways to categories and manage access between users in a domain. Every provider has their own implementation of threaded conversations. No major provider supports non-ASCII addresses. Servers can't even agree on simple message formatting. Most things that make email actually useful are outside the spec and tacked on by each individual provider. Email is one of the last widely used open communication protocols, and it is sad that people are so resistant to its evolution because that is exactly what is accelerating its demise in favor of proprietary software.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 9y ago
    > There is no standard for encryption or any other information security mechanism. I agree that SSL in transit and GPG could stand to be improved, but they do exist. > No server identity verification. What do you want that SPF+DKIM doesn't cover? > No delivery confirmation. Good? That sounds like asking for abuse. And in any event, it's no different than inline remote images (which of course are blocked for the same reason that delivery confirmation is a bad idea). Unless you just mean being sure that the message got to the target server, in which case I agree that the best we can do is delivering it directly to the target MX and see that it confirmed that it received the message. > No push standard. Temporarily true, pending JMAP (which I suppose strengthens your point about needing innovation). > No concept of groups or other ways to categories and manage access between users in a domain. Not quite sure what this means. Do you want something like shared mailboxes and tags? > Every provider has their own implementation of threaded conversations. True, though in a message-centric format I'm not sure that it's a bug. > No major provider supports non-ASCII addresses. Not a bug in email, only arbitrary restrictions by certain providers. Also opens you up to unicode normalization attacks (phishing is easier if you can fake characters). > Servers can't even agree on simple message formatting. I'm not sure what formatting servers even care about (email is just some blobs of text strung together), but I can't really refute this without knowing what you refer to more specifically. > Most things that make email actually useful are outside the spec and tacked on by each individual provider. Email is useful because it lets us send arbitrary stuff (usually a text body and zero or more attachments) between federated providers. It's a simple-ish protocol that is stable and just works. EDIT: In summary, I vastly prefer email as it is: A simple protocol that can include arbitrary information, which allows people to extend it however they want. Of course, this means that extensions are arbitrary and at best non-required, but that keeps it flexible and back-compatible.
_o_ 9y ago
Dont fix what aint broken ;) Email is not doomed. Actually it is getting more and more relevant, this picture might shed some light: https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/chat_systems.png https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/chat_systems.png All the chat programs are making all the communication pain in the neck and the only way of communicating that you can rely to are old school phone calls, sms and email. There is also other side, with email you actually think what you are writting as you don't want to flood someone, with chatting it is all about smileys or everybody would be still using irc, I still need to see chat program catching the amount of irc features (actually I would bet Telegram is just front end for irc servers in backend). And just to mention this gmail feature, it is just nonsense, it will work in their cough spy.. cough ..ing... email system, immediately when it leaves it, it is probably just a mime header which I will gladely ignore. And self respecting techie shouldn't use the gmail (and should be proud not to use it ;) ) anyway.
- dingo_bat 9y ago
  > immediately when it leaves it, it is probably just a mime header which I will gladely ignore Apparently it isn't so easy. They send you a link, which you click. Then the message opens in a web page.
  - KozmoNau7 9y ago
    In which case the response will be "I can't read your mail, please resend in plain text".
    - _o_ 9y ago
      Exactly. Or wget on smtp server side, recrafting it into email attachement (removing all remote links) and sending it to the user. Link like this is another way of privacy violation from google and I wont tolerate it. #abandongmail
nulltarget 9y ago
It seems like it would be worth all the effort if there were a fork that solved every authentication and encryption problem, and also addressed some less important things like: hey, maybe don’t use the Microsoft Word rendering engine for html. But that would require all the transfer agents, delivery agents, and user agents to agree on the new spec, implement it in some standard/predictable backwards compatible way, and then support a legacy mode for the next 5-10 years.
dingo_bat 9y ago
I wish more things were as stable as email. It just works. It has worked perfectly for 20 years. Email I received 10 years ago is easily readable today. Email I send today will be readable for the next decade and more. In other words, it's a feature, not a bug. I wish people who want to "advance" the standard went off and used something else. Go use allo or hangouts or whatever new locked-down app google is pushing this week. I suspect there will always be people who are content with email.