26 ms·

Email doesn't suck – it's email clients that need improving

• danielfoster 4y ago
  I misread “email clients” as “clients” and silently agreed.
  • remram 4y ago
    Then I'm reading your silent thoughts ;) Joke aside, a lot of the pain from email seem to come from its users. I have to deal with a lot of people who refuse to reply to the list, add their reply inside of the quoted previous message (not interleaved - I mean inside the blockquote), reply to old unrelated threads with a new question, fail to use the subject field ("question", "inquiry", "please help"), have a questionable sender identity (From: "work account (new) <ad22@example.org>" - whose work account?). I am not sure this can easily be fixed by improving either the protocol or user interface.
• lake_vincent 4y ago
  Agreed. My company uses Google Workspace, and I find the Gmail UI/UX absolutely unbearable in every way. I personally like Outlook (or rather what it used to be), and just wish for a clean Outlook for Gmail integration. But the nightmare that is IMAP has prevented me from ever succeeding in cleanly integrating the two. In fact, the general experience of using Microsoft and Google products together is quite frustrating. I get that they are competitors, but not acknowledging the multi-platform reality of modern work and forcing me to suffer because you can't be healthy adversaries, is really ridiculous and I resent both companies for their user-hostile practices. Looking at you too, Apple.
  • doubled112 4y ago
    Does the Outlook Sync Tool work for you? It has it's own quirks, but you don't have the Google IMAP weirdness. https://support.google.com/a/users/answer/171710?hl=en https://support.google.com/a/users/answer/171710?hl=en
  • srvmshr 4y ago
    As much as Google Workspace email feels convenient, they have sort of broken the IMAP with the label system. Syncing to conventional email clients without label feature just creates multiple copies of emails if they have been labeled with more than 1 label. It is frustrating sometimes
    • toomuchtodo 4y ago
      Ideally, Google, MS, etc would deprecate IMAP and replace with JMAP. https://jmap.io/software.html https://jmap.io/software.html
      • egberts1 4y ago
        JavaScript, embedded, in email is, pejoratively, a bad idea by putting too much power into a transmitted email. Too many security holes, discovered and undiscovered with JavaScript, not to mention JMTP. Better yet, Hashing the local part of the email address and retrofitting mail clients to do the mapping and rejection is the best way to delete unwanted and unsolicited emails. Couple that with new decentralized lookup of sender’s PKI (as well as DKIM). That should add years/decades to SMTP viability and usability.
        • hulitu 4y ago
          > JavaScript, embedded, in email is, pejoratively, a bad idea by putting too much power into a transmitted email The exploits writers would like to politely disagree. /s
        • trevoristall 4y ago
          I was under the impression JMAP was just a sync protocol and had nothing to do with js in email. Is that incorrect?
        • Flimm 4y ago
          JMAP is not JavaScript embedded in email. Are you thinking of something else?
  • themadturk 4y ago
    I want to like Outlook, even on my Mac. But it doesn't handle quoting in replies the way I want it to, and I have several correspondents whose email chains get heavily into replies to replies. I mostly use Apple Mail, which is acceptable, if not great. I guess I need to look at Thunderbird (which I haven't looked at since I've been using a Mac) and, maybe, Vivaldi.
  • black_puppydog 4y ago
    Jup. Even using thunderbird with a gmail account it's not great. Google insists on displaying my emails in multiple locations; among others, sent emails show up in the default inbox folder. WTF google? Anyhow, I am so happy I recently took the time to set up thunderbird for my gsuite account at work. I've been using thunderbird for a long time privately and the UX is just so much better than gmail, it really improved my quality of life during work hours.
    • Avamander 4y ago
      It's not that Google insists, it's that IMAP is antiquated and JMAP doesn't fix it either. Same letter in multiple "folders" should've been added to IMAP/JMAP aeons ago.
      • account42 4y ago
        So why didn't google add it to IMAP when they added the feature to their mail system? There is no point in clients adding support for label-like folders if there is no server using that extension including the servers that do actually have labels. Gmail on the other hand is big enough that by now most non-Outlook clients would have picked up support.
        • Avamander 4y ago
          Because IMAP is not theirs to dictate. Maybe if someone standardised such an extension they'd add support. Considering how ossified email is, they rightfully have little interest to do it alone.
  • raxxorraxor 4y ago
    I don't really understand corporations using gmail. Don't you have fears that your company secrets get leaked? Perhaps that isn't an issue for software but I would not be so sure. AWS does industrial espionage, Google probably does too... Not that the encroaching reliance on Microsoft is much smarter...
    • shadowgovt 4y ago
      It's simply not a concern. Google weaponizing Gmail against competition would be the biggest self-own the company could possibly undertake. Overnight they'd lose the trust of corporations in general, which would cost them the enterprise business, the Cloud business, and a non-insignificant chunk of the ads business. Google is desperate to find a revenue tent-pole that even approaches the value of ads, and they've bet heavily on that tent-pole being Cloud. Any short-term gains they could acquire from cracking open a user's email would be dwarfed by the long-term losses from ruining their reputation as a reliable keeper of secrets, and they need that reputation to trade in the Cloud space at all.
      • raxxorraxor 4y ago
        Maybe. AWS very likely did spy on customers. They met with startups and let them use their infrastructure. Then they launched their own service. They also host data centers for UK spy agencies. Industrial espionage is one of the largest field for these agencies. Doesn't have to be a chip like the Chinese used. And you wouldn't know anyone spied on you.
• solarkraft 4y ago
  I emphatically agree that E-Mail clients suck, to the point of wondering whether I should build an E-Mail client (my answer is "probably not"). Instead I did the second best thing and came up with some user styles to make one of the better hosted E-Mail clients, IO.OX (B2B software used by mailbox.org and Strato), a bit more bearable and almost even comfortable: https://gist.github.com/solarkraft/6afcfff8d5283cefad40695c9df4e343 https://gist.github.com/solarkraft/6afcfff8d5283cefad40695c9...
  • sph 4y ago
    Email clients are absolutely terrible. If the best we can do is Thunderbird, a slow-moving almost abandonware monolith (have a look at its extension store. It's a ghost town), the situation is dire. Webmail is good enough, but PWA implementation across operating systems is terrible as well. I keep Fastmail pinned in a browser tab, and let's hope I don't close the browser. I hear CLI email clients are great, but the latest startup newsletter didn't get the memo and I keep receiving HTML emails with images, and I don't want to live in the terminal either.
    • addicted 4y ago
      Thunderbird isn’t almost abandonware. It literally was abandonware for several years. It was only recently resurrected by 1-2 devs a few years ago and they’ve had to rebuild the community, funding and contributor support. The fact that Thunderbird worked perfectly well even while being abandonware is a testament to Thunderbird and email. I think the last part they really need to get completed is separation from the Firefox code. We’re already seeing accelerating delivery of features which should hopefully improve.
      • CogitoCogito 4y ago
        I've used Thunderbird for probably like 15 years now and this is the first time I'm hearing that it ever was abandonware. At no point during that time did I not like it much better than all alternatives. Pretty impressive given that it apparently wasn't being developed for several years.
• MomoXenosaga 4y ago
  People who hate email what is your alternative? What doesn't suck? Carrier pigeons?
  • hammyhavoc 4y ago
    No doubt it's going to be IM for most folks.
    • addicted 4y ago
      IM sucks hard. IM used to be great when it was based on open protocols so you could download Trillian on Windows or Adium on Mac and choose your client and communicate across a wide variety of protocols from the same context. Now you have to download and run massive resource hogging apps like Team and Slack to simply communicate on 2 protocols.
      • hammyhavoc 4y ago
        Matrix protocol has over 60m publicly addressable accounts, and that's not even including all the EU gov, healthcare, military or emergency services. You can even bridge closed protocol apps like Messenger, WhatsApp, Discord et al to your own Matrix Synapse server and get it all in a single client. Works great. Been using it for over a year, can even send files back and forth to people still on Messenger.
    • guenthert 4y ago
      There is just no single universally and actually used IM ecosystem and with the expression of unchecked capitalism Web 2.0 has become (see what happened to XMPP), there is no chance there will be one. Besides that the asynchronous nature of e-mail is a highly desirable feature for everyone who has actually things to do. e-mail is here to stay.
      • hammyhavoc 4y ago
        60m publicly addressable users on Matrix protocol, not even including EU gov, healthcare, military, emergency services. Nobody is saying email is going anywhere.
• chiefalchemist 4y ago
  What I want is a unified (?) comms client. Email, SMS, RSS, notifications, etc. in a single dashboard. They all have the very similar properties. Sender / source, subject, body, attachments, etc. And I want to make it easy to tag / organize them. Maybe a tab for each type + tags within each. Search across all (since too often I forget the medium of a particular msg) Finally, I don't want the provider of this service / client reading the content and generally probing the sphincter of my privacy.
  • hammyhavoc 4y ago
    Sounds like the next major version of Thunderbird might suit you.
    • dotancohen 4y ago
      What's in that version?
      • zaik 4y ago
        XMPP support
      • hammyhavoc 4y ago
        Check out the roadmap.
        • dotancohen 4y ago
          Here are the features mentioned in the GP post: * Unified client for Email, SMS, RSS, notifications * Easy to tag / organize mail. * Service provider cannot read content Here is the roadmap: * https://developer.thunderbird.net/planning/roadmap Here are the features mentioned in the roadmap: * Firefox Sync (Expected Delivery: Q4 2022) * Unified Toolbar (Expected Delivery: Q4 2022) * App Menu (Expected Delivery: Q3 2022) * Mail Tab Redesign (Expected Delivery: Q4 2022 / Q1 2023) * Link Preview Card Improvements (Expected Delivery: Q4 2022) * Account Setup Hub (Expected Delivery: Q4 2022) * Customizable Shortcuts (Expected Delivery: Q4 2022) * Calendar UI (Expected Delivery: Q1 2023) Where is the overlap? Thanks.
• jcynix 4y ago
  Email does suck, at least HTML email. And that's not just because HTML was and still is the wrong markup tool for email. I'm reading most of my mail with mutt on the command line and that works quite well. Until … some email with a confirmation link for something shows up. Or with the wrong MIME structure. Because these confirmation links more often than not are execessivly long, state-carrying links, which wrap around even in my 99 (or more) columns wide windows. Because lazy web designers don't use a short SHA key, which would relate to a database entry of the full data. No, they send their complete state. Oh, and did I mention those MIME emails with the wrong structure? Where the first part is the text part telling me that my MUA cannot display their fine mail? It can (easily formatted with external helpers like w3m) but I have to select the 2nd or 3rd part of their "fine" mail first by hand.
  • Wowfunhappy 4y ago
    > Email does suck, at least HTML email. And that's not just because HTML was and still is the wrong markup tool for email. I mean, citation needed. I’m ready to consider the idea but give me a reason! 95+% of computer users will not want to use a command line.
    • GrumpySloth 4y ago
      Forsaking HTML doesn't imply embracing command line. In my experience, most mails don't actually use any styling beyond the automatic blockquote for the endless quote chains that mail clients automatically add. So people are wasting storage and transfer for something they don't really use. When I see a mail which could actually use some styling, it's usually something involving maths and HTML is not suitable for that case. People usually send LaTeX snippets in plain text in this case. And while I'm at it, the endless quote chains are another thing which has no reason for existing. Each mail in a thread steadily grows in size, because mail clients "conveniently" always quote everything and put the text cursor above it so that the user doesn't stop for a moment to look at the size of what they're sending and consider the absurdity of the situation, when their client is perfectly capable of reconstructing the whole thread without copying all mails in each message. Quoting should be opt-in on a case-by-case basis. As they function in the wild today, the quotes are just useless garbage attached to everything.
• calvinmorrison 4y ago
  Here's a talk from one of the heads of Fastmail: "Email Hates the Living" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4s9IjkMAmns https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4s9IjkMAmns Email itself is a very weird quirk filled system. If you want to read about the insanity behind some of the protocols watch that talk. That's why things like JMAP are being developed.
• leephillips 4y ago
  I liked the article. The author seems to have the same attitudes and preferences about software that I do. But, does Wired have a policy that forbids linking to anything that’s not another Wired article? The piece contains only two hyperlinks, both pointing to Wired. One of the main points of the Web is that it’s a web of information. Every piece of software he talks about has a web page, and plenty of good articles and tutorials about it; there are certainly other interesting articles talking about the issues the author talks about. Why does Wired hate the web?
  • aendruk 4y ago
    Not to mention the auto-playing video stuffed between two paragraphs. I wanted to upvote the article for its message but I can’t in good faith recommend anyone visit this site with its current aggression.
    • leephillips 4y ago
      Yeah, that was ridiculous. A random video that has nothing to do with the article. Contempt for the reader and for the author and the material. Publishers will respond to criticism like this by claiming that economic realities force them to avoid linking outside the site and to use obtrusive advertising and self-promotion. But there are plenty of counterexamples: LWN, for example, links extensively in every article to destinations all over the web and uses none of these user-hostile techniques—and their content is varied and at a consistently high level.
    • pwg 4y ago
      With uBlock Origin blocking (by default) the javascript that wired serves, I read the whole article and was only aware of an auto-play video even being present when I read your comment.
      • aendruk 4y ago
        Good for us? (Yes, I too browse without scripting.) Their offense still exists and we should be careful not to shift blame and the burden of defense to users.
• remram 4y ago
  I'd love to use a non-web-based email client, but I do need it to sync between my devices, including labels, and search to be available over the entire corpus. Really surprising to see an article about email clients seemingly ignoring the fact that people have multiple devices. You can set your client however you like, sure, but for most people that's useless if it doesn't work the way you like consistently. E.g. if my labels show up as clunky folder-ish things, no thank you.
  • welterde 4y ago
    IMAP supports keywords/tags that are synchronized among clients. Wouldn't that work for you?
    • remram 4y ago
      I can do another survey of email clients and see if support is good enough. Last I did, it wasn't. The fact that I am using Gmail today will also be a problem, unless Gmail now uses those tags instead of folders to report its labels.
  • leephillips 4y ago
    I use mutt from my desktops and phone through ssh to my email server running IMAP. (Mutt supports labels.) This way there’s never an issue of synchronization.
• phone8675309 4y ago
  Email does suck. It's an insecure mess that is impossible to secure by its very nature. All it takes is one small mistake and your email is sent in plaintext. It needs to die yesterday.
  • hulitu 4y ago
    My work computer has a SSL cert from the employer installed allong with the other ones. I don't see any improvement from plaintext. If we need secrecy we need to use encryption.
• squarefoot 4y ago
  I use Claws Mail since ..uh.. forever (it was called Sylpheed back then) and never felt the need to change. It's fast, and I mean really fast; I keep all my email since day one online so I can quickly search among all messages exchanged since 1997 (I migrated the earlier mailboxes from Windows/Eudora flawlessly) and find everything, including spam filled with vintage Windows malware or those watermarked Viagra/Cialis banners. It's tens of thousand messages and searches in indexed fields is next to instantaneous. If you think web based mail sucks and console clients are too much for non tech users, Claws Mail might be a middle ground worth of consideration. https://claws-mail.org/downloads.php https://claws-mail.org/downloads.php
  • ldarby 4y ago
    Sylpheed is still Sylpheed. Claws is a fork of it.
    • squarefoot 4y ago
      You're right. Memory was mislead by the fact that for a while the forked project was named Sylpheed Claws.
• ndegruchy 4y ago
  I'm kind of surprised no one has mentioned "Hey!" the email service from the Basecamp folks. I haven't had an opportunity to try it, but the UI looks like something that could be replicated locally. There is also likely some major pushback from people who already have their workflows set just so and any major deviation from "list of items" is going to break that.
• adamisom 4y ago
  Speaking of clients, I like Hey. I just like it, and have discretionary income to spend on an important tool shrug
  • Arcanum-XIII 4y ago
    The same here. I use it with the wife, and we even use it for her mother’s shop. Worked great, except for the need of having an smtp server for available to sent email from services ( calendar notification, error, printer message, nas update…) Still, love Hey. Expensive, but so good.
  • zwilliamson 4y ago
    Same! I’ve been using HEY for a couple years now. I hope they do something similar for my calendar needs.
• yesUgotit 4y ago
  I don’t see the point in debating protocols when “the suckiness” always comes down to UI/UX UX that works for async comms and real time comms can be “backed by” HTTP. One does not literally need the data model to conform to the presentation in mind. “Email” view might be a good default. “Chat view” could be a toggle for when the group is online at the same time. UX needs a rethink in general. What a designer finds trendy in the moment is user hostile. I want flexibility and customization at the presentation layer. Give me an API key and I’ll build my own UX in Docker containers, thanks.
• bravetraveler 4y ago
  Email clients suck, but we can't pretend that like three major organizations setting the spam policing rules is a good thing for the protocol
  • mongol 4y ago
    Google, Microsoft.. who is the third... Yahoo?
    • bravetraveler 4y ago
      I pulled the number out of the air, but sure -- let's call it Yahoo or 'everyone else' I feel like Google/MS cover the bulk of recipients, the main barriers to running your own MTA
  • dane-pgp 4y ago
    > but we can't pretend Just watch me! Here's what I imagine: These ~three major organizations all get together and announce that from now on, if you register a new domain with an MX record, you have to also put up a bond which can be slashed if they detect you sending spam from your domain. Okay, there are obviously problems with this, but to address the main ones: * All existing domains are grandfathered in, so this system only harms businesses that don't exist yet (and thus aren't around to complain) * The cabal could instead delegate the bond-slashing power to some group of 5 or 9 guardians of the internet, who could be voted on each year by the ITU, with one vote per country * This would require all domains to support DKIM signing, so that any evidence of spamming could be cryptographically verified, and let's mandate TLS while we're at it * To make this system truly global, decentralized, and transparent, it will probably have to be implemented using a distributed ledger, which will also prevent a dependency on any specific national currency or banking networks
  • Avamander 4y ago
    What are they policing besides the very basics you should be doing anyways?
    • 4y ago
• cm2187 4y ago
  smtp sucks hard though. Pretty much the only major protocol that never got upgraded (along DNS until DNS over https). Dysfunctional encryption (as in optional, easily downgradable), no assurance on the identity of the sender, bad interoperability (the likes of gmail sending directly to spam folder half of the domains).
  • geocrasher 4y ago
    This. SMTP was built upon FTP originally, and it's a protocol designed for ARPAnet, not Internet. SMTP is inherently the wrong protocol for the job. But it keeps working and is the gold standard for email communication and is dead simple to implement, so it keeps being used.
  • ink_13 4y ago
    Oh boy, never learn about BGP and you'll be much happier.
    • Karrot_Kream 4y ago
      Well at least BGP is basically an old boy's club so adherence to group rules, not any technical controls, keep the system in check.
  • Beltalowda 4y ago
    It's not quite that bad; you can use SMTP over TLS (without the downgradable STARTTLS, plus there's REQUIRETLS now), and there's been plenty of extensions over the years (like SMTPUTF8). Identity verification has been handled in another layer (the message itself); you could argue that's not the best place, but it is there. And gmail's problems are gmail's problems. The entire world still runs on DNS; as an end-user you can now use DNS-over-HTTPS and that's nice, but that's mostly a frontend for DNS, which as a whole hasn't really been "upgraded". Upgrading SMTP to something new would require upgrading all the world's email servers, otherwise mail.server1.com can't communicate with mail.server2.com. This will probably happen at the same speed as IPv6.
    • 4y ago
• nmstoker 4y ago
  Part of what makes it worse is that many of the pain points are such low hanging fruit. Being stuck with Outlook due to corporate inertia, most days i run into simple silly things that have been inconvenient for years: - non standard shortcuts (what modern windows app doesn't use Ctrl F for Find which you would think would let you search an open email for text except it does something else! - fragmented unintuitive disttribution of functions over tabs - remarkably unhelpful use of space in the inbox views, such that columns rarely show enough of what you need to see - annoying assumptions (eg typing a user name into the inbox search defaults to using From: when i frequently need to search with it as To: when I've got folders of email where I'm a co-recipient and need to search who the mail was address to)
  • pwg 4y ago
    > what modern windows app doesn't use Ctrl F for Find For this, in Outlook, the explanation is (per Raymond Chen): Bill Gates https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20140715-00/?p=503 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20140715-00/?p=50...
    • SaltyBackendGuy 4y ago
      Thank you for this bit of history! Looks the benevolent dictator wins again.
      • tomjakubowski 4y ago
        Not so benevolent at that time :)
        • shermozle 4y ago
          Not so benevolent now: https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/24/waivers-for-me-not-for-thee/#vaccine-apartheid https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/24/waivers-for-me-not-for-th...
          • 4y ago
• harikb 4y ago
  While talking about email, don't underestimate the need for calendar integration. There are many projects that start solving "Inbox" before they get in to the abyss that is calendar management and fall flat.
  • altrum 4y ago
    Okay so how do you solve for calendar <-> inbox integration?
  • PainfullyNormal 4y ago
    Do we need better email/calendar integration? Or do we need more separation? Why are we relying on email to get meeting invites?
    • wizofaus 4y ago
      What's the alternative?
• jimmar 4y ago
  I strongly disagree that the problem with email is clients. We simply get too much information sent to us via email. I don't want to have to filter my inbox--I want to receive just as much information that I need. For example, my company sends me an email everyday telling me about company-sponsored social events. Often, the emails contain information they've already sent at least 5 times. Email is the wrong way to communicate this information. They should have a shared calendar or web page that lists this information. No email client UI can resolve poor information sharing practices.
  • vt100 4y ago
    The same problem exists with physical mail. I don't need advertisement flyers. I want a realtime spreadsheet with updated prices and discounts.
    • BeetleB 4y ago
      > The same problem exists with physical mail. I get way less physical mail than email. People have to pay money to send me physical mail. It's not a lot of money, but it 99% of email spammers would not be able to afford to physical spam me.
      • Tagbert 4y ago
        True, but I can automate throwing the email into the trash, I have to manually pickup the snail mail at least 3 times a week to keep the mailbox from overflowing. I have a sorting table right next to the trash can. Most days, it all goes into the trash.
  • wswope 4y ago
    Hmmm… someone should really make an email client with user-friendly filters to let you sinkhole that junk into a folder you never look at ;).
    • jasode 4y ago
      >someone should really make an email client with user-friendly filters to let you sinkhole that junk into a folder you never look at If you read past it, he actually wrote "I don't want to have to filter my inbox". I also agree with him. I never use email clients' software filtering "rules" or "smart folders" because that's extra digital housekeeping work I don't want to do. Doesn't matter if the email client filtering UI is "user-friendly". I still don't want to mess with it.
• mikek 4y ago
  > A stand-alone email client gives you the same advantages all native applications have over their web-based counterparts: speed, grace, and offline accessibility. That exactly describes Superhuman.
• derekzhouzhen 4y ago
  That's why you need to write your own email client, or help me to polish mine: https://github.com/derek-zhou/liv https://github.com/derek-zhou/liv
• alexklarjr 4y ago
  Approach to email suck, instead of async communication it is became information duplication and hoarding. I suspect it is come from usenet times. And of course enterprise, managers (and Microsoft) made it 100x worse. There were attempts to make it sane - like Lotus Notes. Long gone and forgotten.
• jawns 4y ago
  I am surprised that few commenters have criticized the tech-curmudgeon perspective that underlies most of the author's preferences. His rigid view of what email should consist of is not really mainstream. For personal and some business correspondence, sure, plain-text messages are fine. For transactional messages, structured metadata becomes more important. For anything from a brand, rich formatting helps convey information in a way that's consistent with the rest of the brand's digital presence -- which may not be important to him, but is important enough to enough other people that companies spend a lot of money to make it so, and many consumers appreciate it. Dynamic elements, like calendar integrations, also have their place, and it feels like a lot of this stuff gets written off as cruft in his article, whereas it's not cruft to a lot of people. If anything, I would like email to become even more advanced and fluid, rather than scaled back to fit in the little box he has crammed it into.
  • guelo 4y ago
    Corporate spammers love rich formatting and dynamic elements. Nobody else wants that crap.
  • Karrot_Kream 4y ago
    There's a large overlap between people that want to use email as a central part of their lives and people who think everything other than text is just unnecessary waste. It's not really a technical thing, but a cultural tie. Think suckless folks or the Gemini project people. I think a good argument could be made for Email being a federated, open substrate to send and receive non-real-time messages but not many people who make that argument want to see rich messages even though it's technically an easily solvable problem (albeit hopefully not the way MIME has done it today.)
  • krageon 4y ago
    > brand's digital presence Yeah, ok. You lost me there. Technology should exist to enable people, not some marketing asshole that thinks a button would look significantly better five pixels to the left.
    • jawns 4y ago
• defulmere 4y ago
  > Email doesn't suck – it's email clients that need improving The wretched hive of scum and villainy that is my postfix quarantine begs to differ.
• prmoustache 4y ago
  What suck is what people came to do with email. Using it as notification system? That is a big no to me.
• kuon 4y ago
  Well, e-mail has different uses, I do use mutt and I send plain text email, but I understand sending newsletter with "nice" format in HTML. I am happy that many includes a "view link" I can just open in my browser if I want to read it. I use lynx for html formatting, which works, except with long confirmation link, for this I use urlscan[1] which let me browse and open links. I don't think email must be loved or hated, it's not black and white, it is an old protocol with lots of problems, but it's also the only working federated protocol (and I do operate my own email server with 0 issues, google/ms never rejected me) which is an important freedom. I agree that many client have bad UX, but many have nice UX, and you are free to use what you want, even if you have a gmail account. [1]: https://github.com/firecat53/urlscan https://github.com/firecat53/urlscan
  • dane-pgp 4y ago
    > the only working federated protocol Even if you're going to discount HTTP, DNS, and IRC for failing to meet various criteria from some definition of "federated", I think we mustn't overlook Matrix here. Sure, you can claim that email is the most popular working federated protocol, or the oldest, or the best, and you could make some weird restriction like "only popular federated store-and-forward protocol", but I'm not sure if that's a helpful distinction. The rest of what you say makes perfect sense though, thank you.
    • kuon 4y ago
      Yes I did not mention DNS or BGP but I could have. I do not agree about IRC because networks are not connected together, yes it is not stricly the protocol fault. I do agree with matrix, but it still has a lot to improve before I would consider it working. I tried multiple time to get non technical users on it but it is too hard for them. And it is not a client problem but more an account problem.
      • dane-pgp 4y ago
        > And it is not a client problem but more an account problem. That's interesting, thank you. For what it's worth, it looks like Matrix is going to become much more user-friendly in the coming months[0], and it will be worth taking another look at this "account problem" once they support Open ID Connect (which is also mentioned in that blog post, and has a dedicated progress page[1]). [0] https://matrix.org/blog/2022/08/15/the-matrix-summer-special-2022/ https://matrix.org/blog/2022/08/15/the-matrix-summer-special... [1] https://areweoidcyet.com/ https://areweoidcyet.com/
• fmajid 4y ago
  No. It’s not UI that causes people to hate email. Email users need to be trained on how to use it effectively within the context of an organization, and it is not a replacement for structured systems like ticketing systems. Cal Newport has some great articles on this, including the odd fact companies supply no training. All messaging platforms devolve to the same dysfunctional mess eventually. I do share the author’s hatred of webmail, however.
  • PainfullyNormal 4y ago
    I disagree. You need to seriously re-evaluate things anytime you find yourself saying something along the lines of "X is just fine, we just need to educate and/or train people to use it more effectively." That's a subtle hint that the system you're talking about will never get any better than it is right now. There are two reasons for that: 1) There are people you can't instruct. Aristotle made that observation 2000 years ago and it's still true today. 2) There are bad actors out there who profit from abusing the system. I'd really like to see the flow control of email completely reversed, where the only people who can send me email are the addresses I have whitelisted. For example, instead of subscribing to an email list, I add the email list's email address to my whitelist. A notification of some sort is then automatically sent to the email list requesting access. The email list can then accept or decline. It would work exactly the same way between two people, getting receipts, etc. Either side could revoke access at any time. Then you could automatically have email from certain accounts go into certain folders, tags, etc.
    • fmajid 4y ago
      There were indeed proposals to use RSS pull style polling to replace push style email. But the main drag on productivity of email in a business setting is not external spam, but internal occupational spam from colleagues misusing email and overly verbose automated emails, whether out of cluelessness, incompetence, CYA or whatever other reason. A company would be perfectly justified in settings standards for appropriate use of email.
      • PainfullyNormal 4y ago
• freemint 4y ago
  Any recommendations for an Android email client besides K9?
  • zaik 4y ago
    FairEmail: https://f-droid.org/packages/eu.faircode.email/ https://f-droid.org/packages/eu.faircode.email/
    • freemint 4y ago
      Thanks installed that one. So much better than K9
• encryptluks2 4y ago
  IMAPv4 definitely could use some improvements and I think there is room for new standards, like JMAP. Email servers should use some form of checksumming on emails to determine changes between clients.
• fallat 4y ago
  ActivityPub is a better email than email. Wait and see.
• eins1234 4y ago
  I don't know a whole lot about how email works under the hood but... When the best vendors out there proudly advertise multiple whole integer seconds in average latency in the best case (https://postmarkapp.com/why https://postmarkapp.com/why), I can only assume there's a lot of room for improvement for the protocol itself, and it's not just an issue with clients. Sending text between servers on the internet shouldn't take this long in 2022. (And holy crap what's with Apple's 99s latency?)
  • anamexis 4y ago
    In the context of email, why does multiple-second latency matter?
    • smiley1437 4y ago
      I believe the response times of IM chats - something that looks superficially similar to email - affects people's expectations of response times in email.
• dont__panic 4y ago
  Who are all of these people who struggle with email? What's causing so many problems? I use the built-in macOS Mail app, and it works brilliantly. It threads conversations, and I can quickly mark multiple messages as read. It's responsive and native, and even themes non-HTML email in a reliably readable dark mode. I have a few filters set up to send annoying things to spam or a dedicated folder (alas, dear JIRA, I have never wanted to read one of your notifications). But my personal account works perfectly without any kind of filters or folders at all. I even use my protonmail accounts through the protonmail app and those work fine. Is there something wrong with me? Am _I_ the one using email wrong? But it works well for me, and I seem consistently better at responding to messages, so... I'm mostly just confused. I use read/unread as a means of triaging "email I have to deal with" and "email I've already dealt with", but that's basically my only system. Seriously, can someone explain this problem? In my eyes, email and RSS are pretty much the only internet protocols that have JUST WORKED for 20-30 years, my entire life. Everything else has been infected by adware and spyware and garbage. Maybe they're stagnant... or maybe they're just mature?
  • thrown_22 4y ago
    >Who are all of these people who struggle with email? The default outlook app is terrible. It keeps hiding important emails from me and putting unimportant ones front and center. It's bad enough I use thunderbird exclusively to manage those mail boxes and read emails only on the desktop/laptop.
    • n8cpdx 4y ago
      You can turn off focus mode in settings. Nothing will be hidden. I personally find Gmail is much worse at hiding things. I try to be responsive but for whatever reason the way they handle threading tends to cause me not just to neglect to read, but to not know that there is something there. I think the difference is Outlook shows all of the emails (from all folders) in a thread in a way that makes sense. Google randomly chooses a point in the middle of the list to just stop showing a bunch of emails and you have to manually click to see. I constantly hear that gmail is better but I just can’t see it. Not in a matter of taste way, but like if people said they preferred being stabbed in the face repeatedly with a dull knife to eating their favorite food. I just can’t understand or empathize and I wish I did. It is kind of lonely being one of the few who not just likes email, but likes the Outlook approach to email.
• dredmorbius 4y ago
  I'm sorry, but no, and as a mutt user myself: email sucks. Spam. The protocol is insecure. Consolidation of major webmail providers is a huge problem on multiple fronts (censorship, third-party acceptance (of both delivery and non-GmailMicrosoftYahoo email accounts --- my Protonmail service can't talk to GetPocket's support email on Gmail for months, f'rex), spam, account hacking, authentication, repudiability (yes, that coin has two sides), workflow integrations, proprietary workflows, spam, account lockouts, lack of common email formatting and practice standards, HTML email, spam, pervasive surveillance, attachments, spam, mobile access, spam, spam, infinite diversity in proprietary messaging systems and platforms each fractally worse than email in a myrad ways, spam, spam, spam, inbox overflow, spam, spam, spam, spam, email bankruptcy. I've had an email account nearly continuously since the mid-1980s. I've all but abandoned it in the past decade. There is no viable replacement on the horizon, though postal mail is looking increasingly attractive.
  • phil294 4y ago
    Spam is not Email's fault, but the mere result of its success/importance, which has only been possible due to its interoperability, which in turn facilitates spam. It would be the same if we had all been using - say- XMPP for the last 20 years.
    • ChadNauseam 4y ago
      Spam is totally email’s fault. They should have had disposable email addresses built into the protocol so they would be easy to support. Then when an address starts getting spam, run the spam filter more aggressively on emails to that address or block it entirely. Or they should have included PoW so it takes a little bit of CPU time to send an email (wouldn’t do anything about botnets, but not every spammer has a botnet handy.) I can’t think of any other ideas off the top of my head, but it’s absolutely true that there are ways that email could have been designed to be less of a problem
      • shadowofneptune 4y ago
        I mean, with the networks and processing speed of computers back when email was standardized, sending the email itself would be proof of work, no?
• NoPicklez 4y ago
  My email problems would be sorted if I wasn't getting tons of spam all of a sudden. I don't see how my email client can fix persistent spam from random accounts that constantly change their domains.
  • Avamander 4y ago
    Your email client can't, but your email provider can. They can start using more modern filtering software e.g. rspamd, it can become very accurate. Requiring SPF and an MX server works the best against large majority of throwaway domain spammers.
    • NoPicklez 4y ago
      Hence my point, the problems I have are with the provider, not the client.
• karaterobot 4y ago
  For one brief shining moment, Google Inbox existed. It was the best mail client I've used, dating back to Eudora. Simple, focused. Not everybody liked it, but it was one of the few apps that I immediately loved, and that made me more productive. Then Google sunsetted it, and folded some of the best features from it into Gmail. Heads up: you don't fix an overly-complex application by adding the features from a very simple application to it.
  • wkdneidbwf 4y ago
    it’s batshit crazy they got rid of it. it was perfectly focused on just the messages and nothing else. when i’m done reading something i don’t give a single fuck about where it goes as long as there’s a great search feature to let me find it again. it kills me there is no spiritual successor. i’ve stripped down mac os mail.app to more or less work like that, but it’s not quite the same. the hey.com client gets a lot of things right imo, but ive had the same gmail account for the past 17-18 years—and there's just no way im going to switch over to a hey.com address that requires that i keep paying for it or have it be deleted.
    • patches11 4y ago
      You can use hey with your own domain now: https://www.hey.com/custom-domains/ https://www.hey.com/custom-domains/
    • adamsiem 4y ago
      As of yesterday, you can receive and respond via your Gmail address using Hey.com's client. https://bit.ly/3RdtmsR https://bit.ly/3RdtmsR
      • wkdneidbwf 4y ago
        got a link that works? i don’t see anything on their site about this.
        • adamsiem 4y ago
• henry_bone 4y ago
  I want my email organised by sender, not by message. I want a list of senders with unread messages when I open the client. I may want some way to indicate which senders are more important so that they are displayed more prominently in some way. Maybe this has been tried and it's shit. I dunno, but I like the sound of it. I think it might be a good way to cut through the noise of the inbox. When I get snail mail I will quickly sort by sender (then read the tedious shite first :-) ). I should try and write it for myself.
  • btown 4y ago
    https://www.shortwave.com/ https://www.shortwave.com/ might be of interest to you! Each sender (or group-of-recipients as group conversation) is bundled together into a thread-of-threads, and you can favorite senders or groups of interest. It's fast and thoughtfully built, by the team behind Firebase. Not affiliated, just happy to have found something that made me actually enjoy email again!
    • henry_bone 4y ago
      Thanks, shortwave does look interesting. I'm not really a gmail user though, but shortwave does appear to allow for more group or sender oriented presentation of messages.
  • dgfitz 4y ago
    Outlook by and large does this. It’s also a bloated piece of a desktop app, so pick your poison.
  • iluzone 4y ago
    https://www.uniboxapp.com/ https://www.uniboxapp.com/ has been around for quite long time.
    • henry_bone 4y ago
      Yep, that's the basic idea. Not suitable for me though as I am not an Apple user.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• nmaleki 4y ago
  Any other popular email clients deteriorating? Yesterday I tried to search between 2 dates on gmail and it wouldn't work. I tried using their UI to set the dates and it wouldn't work. I had to manually click through 3 years of emails to get to the dates I wanted. BTW, I only read the title.
• pc2g4d 4y ago
  Recently switched from the Gmail web UI to Thunderbird (backed by Gmail IMAP). I don't think I could ever go back---for the first time in many years my inbox is getting the attention it deserves. I've cleaned up the junk mail, added a bunch of folders and filters, and it's a whole different world. Definitely Thunderbird could be better than it is. But it's definitely better than what it's replacing, at least for my use.
  • derac 4y ago
    Thunderbird is awesome. One feature I love is that you can use Darkreader to make emails dark mode.
  • bxparks 4y ago
    I haven't used Thunderbird in 10-20 years. Why does Thunderbird allow you do that, but not Gmail? My personal Gmail account has ~350 folders (labels) and ~300 filter rules. One of my previous work GSuite accounts had probably 1000-2000 labels and filters. I migrated from Outlook to Gmail, and I found that I could process 2-4X the amount of emails as I could on Outlook. The key feature for me was the vi-key bindings in Gmail.
• bachmeier 4y ago
  > But the biggest win with stand-alone mail clients is that you can make them work the way you want. Most email clients, especially web-based clients like Gmail, have a workflow in mind. If it’s not your workflow, too bad. You can bend them a little bit, but you never really get the freedom to use them the way you want. Vivaldi Mail has some sensible defaults, but just like the web browser it lives inside of, the settings are fully customizable. > This is the first step in improving your productivity—establishing a software workflow that conforms to your brain’s specific contours. Well, I don't think any email client will solve my email problems. I forward email messages into my project management apps and deal with them there. I've never found email clients to be particularly good at managing projects.
• thayne 4y ago
  While I agree that email clients pretty much all leave something to be desired, it is far from the only problem with email. The article even alludes to one of the biggest of these problems: lack of encryption.
• stereoradonc 4y ago
  It reads like an advert for Vivaldi. I dont have any issues with Vivaldi, but the content of the article is clearly "clickbait" with "Mutt" for the comparison. Highly avoidable write up.
• rbc 4y ago
  I used Apple Mail for years, followed by Thunderbird, Claws Mail, and Outlook on Windows. The switch to Windows was precipitated by the use of some banking apps that only work on Windows. After about 20 years, I've switched back to using Rmail under Emacs. I don't recall the reason for leaving it before, but it's nice to be using it again.
• throwaway290 4y ago
  Since this article is mostly about Vivaldi, anyone had significant experience with it? I'm seeing it's based on Electron, weighs half a gigabyte, immediately requests notification permission and fires up a bunch of requests (including to Google's domains, probably safe browsing related) at startup. How does it fare in long-term use?
• wruza 4y ago
  But the biggest win with stand-alone mail clients is that you can make them work the way you want I want my email to show me a list of contacts a-z (no mru). I can filter this list by: have unread messages, are unknown, etc. Sort however I want. Group however I want, “smart” or manually. Omnisearch at the top. No “inbox”, “trash”, “sent”. I can select a contact just like an icq/wa/tg chat and see messages with it to the right. Maybe group messages by subj maybe not. Subj is not mandatory. The client should remove all of the top and bottom auto-citation, automatically extract and update contact info from signatures, remove them and show messages’ meat in bubbles, mine to the right, theirs to the left. Replies, and forwards have links to their “parent”. I can join two email addresses into one contact card, maybe create a subtree. The envelope encryption just works, because the server has a pubkey, either mine or autogenerated and published, or both. I can choose between local storage and cloud storage per device. I can send files >> 20mb, including archives, executables, js files. My known contacts can see if I received/read their message and vice versa. I can ban, mute, hide contacts. I can change/add my address, phone, position, name, etc and contacts will pick that easily, if I allow them see it at all. So no, I don’t think I can make any email client to work the way I want. If you think that all of this was inspired by modern messengers, nope. It’s just common sense. The fact is, messengers f’ing nailed it and email as a whole is mostly a slow and unreliable bloatware and doesn’t make much sense. If it were decently designed, there would be no whatsapp and other pure-messaging systems, because we’d already have one.
• SoftTalker 4y ago
  I use emacs as my mail client, with notmuch to search/organize it. w3m to render HTML messages. Nothing else even comes close as far as being able to efficiently handle any volume of email I've ever received.
• kovac 4y ago
  Just like with web over something like gopher or modern messengers over IRCs, I think the major problem is that too many fancy features are attached to email like html, calendars, calendar invites. Once you stop using them, emails are very pleasant to use. But becomes less convenient as you have to manually intervene to use a calendar invite or view a link or manage contacts. I'm happy with the "less convenient" way of using it.
• tpoacher 4y ago
  I'd go a step further and say organizational policies are a layer of hassle far above implementations. In theory if one client sucks you can change client. Not so if your organization throws hissy fits unless you use "web outlook or else because 2FA sth sth". So on my slow tiny laptop with a shitty connection, instead of using my lovely alpine client which would have been perfect for this laptop, I'm forced to choose between "zoom out until you can't see shit" vs "zoom in until the menu leaves no space for actual email" mode.
• kkfx 4y ago
  Email is bad for various reasons, but being open and universal is far better than anything else. MUAs on contrary suck because people have never touched the power of desktops and so they shift blindly and acritically toward webmails for the sake of few giants and as a result most MUAs are stuck in the late '90s at best. Modern ones are just small projects by very small community (like notmuch, mu), too small and geeky to develop a full automation to give something working out-of-the-box for most users. Another problem is that people still fail to understand their assets. They understand something physical they own, like cash money in their pockets, but they fail with digital assets, so most people fails to understand the value of their mails, from address/domain (like a personal one vs some from GAFAM&alike) to messages and so fails to comprehend why having local mails is important... We need, for the sake of the society, to improve people knowledge/culture about the tools they need in current daily life, otherwise even a modern MUA will simply be a big effort of few with not much future.
  • Avamander 4y ago
    I agree with a lot of what you said. I think quite a few MUAs could absolutely be rescued from their shadow death, if funded properly (and if they're capable of being funded). It's just that I personally haven't seen a strong candidate yet. I don't like any of them, they are irritating. Aerc is promising, but CLI is simply not for everyone. Then Thunderbird was on life support for a while, maybe if it gains some speed again? I'm not sure. So lack of support from users is one side of the coin. But the other side, developers and companies doing email, I don't know if that can be fixed. Sidelined maybe. There's just an immense amount of feet-dragging and archaisms in the ecosystem. "We can't because others don't" - everyone. Can't enforce TLS, can't enforce SPF, can't enforce basically any standards that would improve the quality of the ecosystem. When was the last email-related flag day? Enough of that rant, it's just a bit frustrating. Forced to use with no visible QoL improvements.
    • kkfx 4y ago
      Try notmuch-emacs to see a modern one: - search based, entirely - tags, like GMail labels NOT folders, while they are equally integrated in search (just folder: instead of tag:) The issue: - does not embed ANYTHING to fetch your mails, so you need something else to do so, like OfflineIMAP/mbsync or fetchmail etc - does not touch files so you need wrappers to delete/refile etc them Why? Because no one have felt the need to integrate to help new users... Similarly no modern UI, there is a semi-abandoned WebUI, Astroid a webkit/GTk GUI, but almost no one develop them...
• a_square_peg 4y ago
  I've been thinking that a digital stamp could help a lot with email spams. Price it low enough so that it's not a big deal (maybe $0.01 per address on the receiver side?) but enough to enforce cost for spam + marketing emails. Email is an example where the cost of spam is mostly borne by the receiver in terms of time and effort.
  • Avamander 4y ago
    What you're describing does exist in a way. Depending on the TLD, domains do cost money. The cheaper the domain, the more positive signals it requires to exit spam folder.
• Kukumber 4y ago
  Is he trying to push an agenda? Nobody ever said "email sucks", email is the best medium for online communication, look at the countless of projects using mailing lists, you can easily go back in time and follow the discussions, it is so good What sucks nowadays is spam, that's it
• permalac 4y ago
  I'm surprised nobody is mentioning mailmate. I've used for a year now, life changing. It just works. Write markdown, send html. I just write and becomes nice stuff.
• coffeedan 4y ago
  “I also love email, which I’ve always thought of as the digital equivalent of a postcard.” Postcards would be the equivalent of email if they didn’t require a stamp. And then your mailbox would be full of 5,000 postcards every day from people you don’t know. You can change the mailbox (client) all you want, but it will still be full of junk.
• Orochikaku 4y ago
  A protocol is only as good as its available clients