5 ms·

You Can't Afford To Stop Using Mail

20 points by premyslruzicka 13y ago

wyqueshocec 13y ago
Your website's banner is huge. http://imgur.com/Y8V6V14 http://imgur.com/Y8V6V14
- premyslruzicka 13y ago
  You're right. It's suppose to be a stylish kind of thing...
- solarflair 13y ago
  That's how Medium displays a blog post's featured image. More examples: https://medium.com/ https://medium.com/
deanclatworthy 13y ago
I have to say that whilst your site is making some very bold claims, I think it's extremely clear what your goals are. Furthermore, I found it really engaging that your request for an invite form was a little more interesting than simply entering my email. It's nice you're offering a mini service around this, and furthermore the idea of running a mail check on a friend's mail account is a nice way of ensuring some virality. Best of luck, and I really do hope you can solve the problems you outline. I can't wait to try it out!
- premyslruzicka 13y ago
  Wow! Thank you for such a comment. Probably the best thing I've ever read about what we're doing :) It won't be easy but we can see it really happen. It needs to happen. Stay in touch! - Premek
nollidge 13y ago
I think you mean "You can't afford to stop using mail"?
- premyslruzicka 13y ago
  Thanks.
- shawabawa3 13y ago
  I think he means "You can't afford to stop using email" I'm from the UK and I've never heard anybody say mail when they meant email.
  - charonn0 13y ago
    I'm from the US and have never heard that either.
  - nollidge 13y ago
    It was a typo before, used to say "use" instead of "using".
bambax 13y ago
> We have a strategy how to wipe out spam for good. I don't love Gmail and I certainly don't love Google, but using Gmail "wiped out spam for good" for me. In my experience, false positives are close to zero and false negatives extremely rare (and not very annoying), so how is spam not a solved problem?
- bergie 13y ago
  As usual with Google, they're still not handling multilingual situations too well. It has been a long time since I've seen any spam in English, but tens of mails in languages like Finnish and Georgian get through every day. I wonder if the easiest solution would be a language blacklist. I have no legitimate reason to want to receive email in languages I don't understand.
  - baudehlo 13y ago
    This is already available in some SMTP servers. But it's not a cut and dried situation. It's hard to identify language in very short emails. It's quite possible to get false positives too, when you get mail from someone with an accented name. Language detection gives you a probability that it's in a particular language, not a yes/no.
  - bambax 13y ago
    I'm French and receive email in English and French; spam detection seems to work just as well in those two languages.
- premyslruzicka 13y ago
  I hear you. The problem with spam is that the current infrastrucutre allows anyone to distribute spam on a massive level and forces online apps to use expensive third party services to deliver their newsletters to inbox. For a regular end user on Gmail the problem is hidden but not solved. When you have spam, you need spam filters. Spammers get better, you must catch up... We want to solve that by replacing mail as you know it now. It's a long way ahead but we're on it.
jrabone 13y ago
I run a mail server for my own company and my immediate friends and family. I hope you aren't planning on using one of the many ESPs to do your actual delivery; increasingly I am blacklisting them (and by ASN) since despite any claims to the contrary they don't give two shits about spam or UCE. There may or may not be collateral damage but I really don't care anymore; I have a home-grown analysis script that runs daily over my logs and generates pretty HTML summary reports of who got blocked and why, and 6 months in it's looking pretty good. One size fits no-one for email (which is why Spamassassin always fails me sooner or later). There are entire ASNs that have no business talking to me and get the firewall. There are entire countries that (on the basis of GeoIP lookup) get aggressively greylisted. Nobody has ever sent any of my users a legitimate email with a utf8-encoded subject. The list of rules just keeps growing. And finally, if anyone reading this has anything to do with bestpure.co.uk besttip.co.uk bighut.co.uk exclusivetips.co.uk liteme.co.uk officialnow.co.uk opost.co.uk piple.co.uk savertips.co.uk retailrat.co.uk tipmail.co.uk websaveguide.co.uk wepost.co.uk please go and get an proper job. Or die. I don't mind which.
- kijin 13y ago
  > Nobody has ever sent any of my users a legitimate email with a utf8-encoded subject. I suppose you and your users only ever communicate with Westerners. Or are all of your Japanese correspondents (for example) kind enough to encode their subjects in EUC-JP instead of UTF-8?
  - jrabone 13y ago
    You suppose correct; obviously that might change, but for now it's the case that in 20 years of email not one single legitimate message has had a non-7 bit ASCII subject line, whereas there's always plenty of ⋎Іǎḡɾǎ, ѵἲàɠṝà and ѷἰẫǧʀẫ to go around (in the form =?utf-8?Q?=E2=8B=8E=D0=86=C7=8E=E1=B8=A1=C9=BE=C7=8E?= of course) Pro tip: if anyone is trying to block this shit without blocking legitimate Unicode, you'll be wanting Unicode::Normalize and something like utf8::decode($rawSubject); my $normalised = NFKD($rawSubject); $normalised =~ s/\p{NonspacingMark}//g; to strip the composing diacritics before you reach for the regexes. Good luck.
- 13y ago
noinput 13y ago
Looking forward to trying it, however requested an invite and the scanner on the Thank You screen mentions my @gmail.com account got a thumbs down for Deliverability and being 'weakly secured'. Kind of a bold statement to make about gmail, no?
- premyslruzicka 13y ago
  I appreciate your interest. :) That check looks for blacklisted IPs of your provider. Gmail is blacklisted very often, thus making deliverability of your messages to some servers lower. Might be a poor wording on our side. We'll take a look at that.
  - noinput 13y ago
    Thanks for the clarity, probably best to explain it on your site just as you did here. Good luck with the rollout/launch.
    - premyslruzicka 13y ago
      Thanks! :)
awwstn 13y ago
1. See Mailbox launch on HN and TechCrunch and immediately sell for $100mm. 2. Launch mail app on HN. 3. $$$?
- premyslruzicka 13y ago
  I assure you we're not for sale. There's a lot to be done to replace e-mail and I can't see anyone trying.
ctdonath 13y ago
Here's a thought to toss out and see if it sticks (or has been done): How about an email app which groups messages by frequency/familiarity of sender? If someone sends me messages often, or has sent stuff on occasion over a very long time, group it at one end of the inbox; if seldom and not known for long, somewhere in the middle; if sender (&/| reply-to) has never been seen before, shove it to the other end. Maybe also track how long I read their messages: if I spend time on what's sent (relative to content size), it's important; if it's straight to trash or less than a half-second, put it in the "junk to screen" pile. VIP/white/black-lists are a pain because I have to screen every address listed; do some probabilistic sorting for me! don't just list things in a linear or threaded by-receipt-date line.
- julian37 13y ago
  do some probabilistic sorting for me! Gmail's Priority Inbox does this, and it works reasonably well. https://support.google.com/mail/answer/186531?hl=en https://support.google.com/mail/answer/186531?hl=en if sender (&/| reply-to) has never been seen before, shove it to the other end That would only be helpful in a world where you never make new contacts.
- dmbaggett 13y ago
  Inky (http://inky.com http://inky.com) already lets you sort by relevance. It's much more useful than VIP/whitelist/blacklist but we're continuing to play with the relevance metric to further improve it. It does take sender frequency into account.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
kijin 13y ago
Things I like: - Delivery tracking. This is the single most exciting feature that I found in your screenshots (welovemail.com). Mass mailing solutions and Transactional email services have had this feature for ages, and it's about time regular email got it, too. No more need to parse the incoherent ramblings of MAILER-DAEMON, hooray! - Three-column view. (Or was it four-column?) I'm not particularly fond of 16:9 widescreens, but I might as well use all the space since I can't seem to buy anything else anyway. - Managing multiple accounts. - "The only way we can build a product that we can go and use without any stress today is to make the best out of what’s already available." -- Absolutely agreed. Email is email. It's not a todo list, it's not an instant messaging protocol. I'm glad you're taking this seriously. - "Get a receipt from a local store directly to your inbox formatted the way for use in an accounting app." -- Wonderful. Don't stop with a pretty app, please go ahead and write an RFC that defines the standard markup for electronic invoices, receipts, to-do list items, etc. Then we'll be able to use SMTP, HTTP, or any other protocol to ship them around. Things I'm not sure I'm going to like, although it seems early to make a judgment: - "How simple a life could be if every citizen would own a mail account allowing them to vote in any election from anywhere in our solar system." -- What does email have to do with voting? My email account is not my identity, no matter how hard Mozilla Persona et al. tries to shoehorn identities into email addresses. It's just an address that I happen to be occupying at the moment, and that I can leave behind whenever I want. So please don't try to sell your product as a candidate for universal adoption from the first day. You'll be disappointed. - Managing multiple accounts. Although I also mentioned this in "things I like", one of the reasons I keep multiple accounts is to put firewalls between them. For example, my primary email account is never accessed from a mobile device, I use a "proxy" account for that. The password recovery address is yet another account at a different provider. If one of my accounts get compromised, I don't want the attacker to gain access to any other account. How is your app going to manage user credentials and flow of information to/from your servers to minimize vulnerabilities? Some questions/suggestions about the UI mockup: - Social media integration, from Facebook/Twitter in the sidebar to nicely cropped photos for all your correspondents. Please tell me this can be turned off. When FastMail.fm rolled out its new interface a few months ago, there was a significant outcry from privacy-sensitive users who discovered that the webapp was pulling in everyone's Gravatar. - Where's the metadata, like those ugly CC/BCC/Reply-To lines, "display source" links, and the message size? If you leave them out, you'll be lacking some of the features that email pros can't live without, and therefore earn the criticism that you're trying to replace email with something less. On the other hand, if you put them back in the UI, it won't be as neat as your screenshots currently are. - Can I compose full-screen, or do I have to live with 100px of darkened, unusable space around your cute pop-up whenever I'm trying to write something? - Is this a hosted web service? iOS/Android app? OSX/Windows program? All of the above? /edited
peterwwillis 13y ago
Some thoughts: "We have a strategy how to wipe out spam for good. [...] Phishing is going to be just a story too." Whitelisting pretty much solves this. (Multiple accounts also help; one you give to people directly, and one you use for everything online, helps bump personal communication to the top) "Are your important messages always delivered? We will guarantee a delivery in less than a second." Those are two different things. Immediate delivery has nothing to do with guaranteed delivery. "Get a receipt from a local store directly to your inbox formatted the way for use in an accounting app." Are you writing RFCs for receipts? If not, this probably won't be picked up by anyone but customers of the accounting app.
- dmbaggett 13y ago
  In our experience, whitelisting really doesn't solve the problem. I often get email from people I don't know about things I want to read about ("hey, I'm a VC who wants to give you money!"). Automagically parsing receipts is certainly cool, and several mail vendors are working on it, including us (Inky). Guaranteed delivery isn't really possible without controlling both sender and recipient's client; nor is immediate delivery.
  - premyslruzicka 13y ago
    You're right about delivery. This is something we are going to work on. Don't think of us as a competitor. We want to create an infrastructure and we need client solutions to work with us ;-)
- premyslruzicka 13y ago
  - We have a plan to replace current infrastructure that will make it impossible for spam even occur. - True. There needs to be both. How email works today is laughable. - Parsing receipts or anything that is possible to and will make life easier is something we all want. We fully understand the difficulty of all this to happen but we will start lean. All this is just the future, not so distant though.
abgoldberg 13y ago
It looks like this is not a general purpose mail client, but rather something specific to your own hosted domain. If you're looking for a usable IMAP/POP mail client today, try Inky (http://inky.com http://inky.com), which has a lot of these features already and many more on the roadmap. It's available for Mac and Windows right now, with Linux support coming soon (http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2013/05/inky-pens-linux-support-on-roadmap http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2013/05/inky-pens-linux-support-o...)
- premyslruzicka 13y ago
  Yes, we're not trying to be a mail client. Our focus is also on the server side. You need to own a domain to be able to use our service. Inky is a cool solution.
Sujan 13y ago
Interesting: > Thank you ...@gmail.com > One more thing. We took a look at your current mail's health: > Deliverability of your messages (thumbsdown) > Your server is weakly secured and could be used for sending spam. Seems like a false positive.
- premyslruzicka 13y ago
  That check looks for blacklisted IPs of your provider. Gmail is blacklisted very often, thus making deliverability of your messages to some servers lower. Might be a poor wording on our side. We'll take a look at that.
pit 13y ago
hi@welovemail.com So we took a look at the mail's health: Deliverability of the messages thumbsdown Misuse of the address thumbsup Redundancy for incoming messages thumbsup Tracking of sent messages thumbsdown It seems the owner needs our service really badly. Please, let them now.

Your website's banner is huge. http://imgur.com/Y8V6V14 http://imgur.com/Y8V6V14

premyslruzicka 13y ago
You're right. It's suppose to be a stylish kind of thing...
solarflair 13y ago
That's how Medium displays a blog post's featured image. More examples: https://medium.com/ https://medium.com/

I have to say that whilst your site is making some very bold claims, I think it's extremely clear what your goals are. Furthermore, I found it really engaging that your request for an invite form was a little more interesting than simply entering my email. It's nice you're offering a mini service around this, and furthermore the idea of running a mail check on a friend's mail account is a nice way of ensuring some virality. Best of luck, and I really do hope you can solve the problems you outline. I can't wait to try it out!

premyslruzicka 13y ago
Wow! Thank you for such a comment. Probably the best thing I've ever read about what we're doing :) It won't be easy but we can see it really happen. It needs to happen. Stay in touch! - Premek

nollidge 13y ago

I think you mean "You can't afford to stop using mail"?

premyslruzicka 13y ago
Thanks.
shawabawa3 13y ago
I think he means "You can't afford to stop using email" I'm from the UK and I've never heard anybody say mail when they meant email.
- charonn0 13y ago
  I'm from the US and have never heard that either.
- nollidge 13y ago
  It was a typo before, used to say "use" instead of "using".

bambax 13y ago

> We have a strategy how to wipe out spam for good. I don't love Gmail and I certainly don't love Google, but using Gmail "wiped out spam for good" for me. In my experience, false positives are close to zero and false negatives extremely rare (and not very annoying), so how is spam not a solved problem?

bergie 13y ago
As usual with Google, they're still not handling multilingual situations too well. It has been a long time since I've seen any spam in English, but tens of mails in languages like Finnish and Georgian get through every day. I wonder if the easiest solution would be a language blacklist. I have no legitimate reason to want to receive email in languages I don't understand.
- baudehlo 13y ago
  This is already available in some SMTP servers. But it's not a cut and dried situation. It's hard to identify language in very short emails. It's quite possible to get false positives too, when you get mail from someone with an accented name. Language detection gives you a probability that it's in a particular language, not a yes/no.
- bambax 13y ago
  I'm French and receive email in English and French; spam detection seems to work just as well in those two languages.
premyslruzicka 13y ago
I hear you. The problem with spam is that the current infrastrucutre allows anyone to distribute spam on a massive level and forces online apps to use expensive third party services to deliver their newsletters to inbox. For a regular end user on Gmail the problem is hidden but not solved. When you have spam, you need spam filters. Spammers get better, you must catch up... We want to solve that by replacing mail as you know it now. It's a long way ahead but we're on it.

jrabone 13y ago

I run a mail server for my own company and my immediate friends and family. I hope you aren't planning on using one of the many ESPs to do your actual delivery; increasingly I am blacklisting them (and by ASN) since despite any claims to the contrary they don't give two shits about spam or UCE. There may or may not be collateral damage but I really don't care anymore; I have a home-grown analysis script that runs daily over my logs and generates pretty HTML summary reports of who got blocked and why, and 6 months in it's looking pretty good. One size fits no-one for email (which is why Spamassassin always fails me sooner or later). There are entire ASNs that have no business talking to me and get the firewall. There are entire countries that (on the basis of GeoIP lookup) get aggressively greylisted. Nobody has ever sent any of my users a legitimate email with a utf8-encoded subject. The list of rules just keeps growing. And finally, if anyone reading this has anything to do with bestpure.co.uk besttip.co.uk bighut.co.uk exclusivetips.co.uk liteme.co.uk officialnow.co.uk opost.co.uk piple.co.uk savertips.co.uk retailrat.co.uk tipmail.co.uk websaveguide.co.uk wepost.co.uk please go and get an proper job. Or die. I don't mind which.

kijin 13y ago
> Nobody has ever sent any of my users a legitimate email with a utf8-encoded subject. I suppose you and your users only ever communicate with Westerners. Or are all of your Japanese correspondents (for example) kind enough to encode their subjects in EUC-JP instead of UTF-8?
- jrabone 13y ago
  You suppose correct; obviously that might change, but for now it's the case that in 20 years of email not one single legitimate message has had a non-7 bit ASCII subject line, whereas there's always plenty of ⋎Іǎḡɾǎ, ѵἲàɠṝà and ѷἰẫǧʀẫ to go around (in the form =?utf-8?Q?=E2=8B=8E=D0=86=C7=8E=E1=B8=A1=C9=BE=C7=8E?= of course) Pro tip: if anyone is trying to block this shit without blocking legitimate Unicode, you'll be wanting Unicode::Normalize and something like utf8::decode($rawSubject); my $normalised = NFKD($rawSubject); $normalised =~ s/\p{NonspacingMark}//g; to strip the composing diacritics before you reach for the regexes. Good luck.
13y ago

noinput 13y ago

Looking forward to trying it, however requested an invite and the scanner on the Thank You screen mentions my @gmail.com account got a thumbs down for Deliverability and being 'weakly secured'. Kind of a bold statement to make about gmail, no?

premyslruzicka 13y ago
I appreciate your interest. :) That check looks for blacklisted IPs of your provider. Gmail is blacklisted very often, thus making deliverability of your messages to some servers lower. Might be a poor wording on our side. We'll take a look at that.
- noinput 13y ago
  Thanks for the clarity, probably best to explain it on your site just as you did here. Good luck with the rollout/launch.
  - premyslruzicka 13y ago
    Thanks! :)

awwstn 13y ago

1. See Mailbox launch on HN and TechCrunch and immediately sell for $100mm. 2. Launch mail app on HN. 3. $$$?

premyslruzicka 13y ago
I assure you we're not for sale. There's a lot to be done to replace e-mail and I can't see anyone trying.

ctdonath 13y ago

Here's a thought to toss out and see if it sticks (or has been done): How about an email app which groups messages by frequency/familiarity of sender? If someone sends me messages often, or has sent stuff on occasion over a very long time, group it at one end of the inbox; if seldom and not known for long, somewhere in the middle; if sender (&/| reply-to) has never been seen before, shove it to the other end. Maybe also track how long I read their messages: if I spend time on what's sent (relative to content size), it's important; if it's straight to trash or less than a half-second, put it in the "junk to screen" pile. VIP/white/black-lists are a pain because I have to screen every address listed; do some probabilistic sorting for me! don't just list things in a linear or threaded by-receipt-date line.

julian37 13y ago
do some probabilistic sorting for me! Gmail's Priority Inbox does this, and it works reasonably well. https://support.google.com/mail/answer/186531?hl=en https://support.google.com/mail/answer/186531?hl=en if sender (&/| reply-to) has never been seen before, shove it to the other end That would only be helpful in a world where you never make new contacts.
dmbaggett 13y ago
Inky (http://inky.com http://inky.com) already lets you sort by relevance. It's much more useful than VIP/whitelist/blacklist but we're continuing to play with the relevance metric to further improve it. It does take sender frequency into account.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]

kijin 13y ago

Things I like: - Delivery tracking. This is the single most exciting feature that I found in your screenshots (welovemail.com). Mass mailing solutions and Transactional email services have had this feature for ages, and it's about time regular email got it, too. No more need to parse the incoherent ramblings of MAILER-DAEMON, hooray! - Three-column view. (Or was it four-column?) I'm not particularly fond of 16:9 widescreens, but I might as well use all the space since I can't seem to buy anything else anyway. - Managing multiple accounts. - "The only way we can build a product that we can go and use without any stress today is to make the best out of what’s already available." -- Absolutely agreed. Email is email. It's not a todo list, it's not an instant messaging protocol. I'm glad you're taking this seriously. - "Get a receipt from a local store directly to your inbox formatted the way for use in an accounting app." -- Wonderful. Don't stop with a pretty app, please go ahead and write an RFC that defines the standard markup for electronic invoices, receipts, to-do list items, etc. Then we'll be able to use SMTP, HTTP, or any other protocol to ship them around. Things I'm not sure I'm going to like, although it seems early to make a judgment: - "How simple a life could be if every citizen would own a mail account allowing them to vote in any election from anywhere in our solar system." -- What does email have to do with voting? My email account is not my identity, no matter how hard Mozilla Persona et al. tries to shoehorn identities into email addresses. It's just an address that I happen to be occupying at the moment, and that I can leave behind whenever I want. So please don't try to sell your product as a candidate for universal adoption from the first day. You'll be disappointed. - Managing multiple accounts. Although I also mentioned this in "things I like", one of the reasons I keep multiple accounts is to put firewalls between them. For example, my primary email account is never accessed from a mobile device, I use a "proxy" account for that. The password recovery address is yet another account at a different provider. If one of my accounts get compromised, I don't want the attacker to gain access to any other account. How is your app going to manage user credentials and flow of information to/from your servers to minimize vulnerabilities? Some questions/suggestions about the UI mockup: - Social media integration, from Facebook/Twitter in the sidebar to nicely cropped photos for all your correspondents. Please tell me this can be turned off. When FastMail.fm rolled out its new interface a few months ago, there was a significant outcry from privacy-sensitive users who discovered that the webapp was pulling in everyone's Gravatar. - Where's the metadata, like those ugly CC/BCC/Reply-To lines, "display source" links, and the message size? If you leave them out, you'll be lacking some of the features that email pros can't live without, and therefore earn the criticism that you're trying to replace email with something less. On the other hand, if you put them back in the UI, it won't be as neat as your screenshots currently are. - Can I compose full-screen, or do I have to live with 100px of darkened, unusable space around your cute pop-up whenever I'm trying to write something? - Is this a hosted web service? iOS/Android app? OSX/Windows program? All of the above? /edited

peterwwillis 13y ago

Some thoughts: "We have a strategy how to wipe out spam for good. [...] Phishing is going to be just a story too." Whitelisting pretty much solves this. (Multiple accounts also help; one you give to people directly, and one you use for everything online, helps bump personal communication to the top) "Are your important messages always delivered? We will guarantee a delivery in less than a second." Those are two different things. Immediate delivery has nothing to do with guaranteed delivery. "Get a receipt from a local store directly to your inbox formatted the way for use in an accounting app." Are you writing RFCs for receipts? If not, this probably won't be picked up by anyone but customers of the accounting app.

dmbaggett 13y ago
In our experience, whitelisting really doesn't solve the problem. I often get email from people I don't know about things I want to read about ("hey, I'm a VC who wants to give you money!"). Automagically parsing receipts is certainly cool, and several mail vendors are working on it, including us (Inky). Guaranteed delivery isn't really possible without controlling both sender and recipient's client; nor is immediate delivery.
- premyslruzicka 13y ago
  You're right about delivery. This is something we are going to work on. Don't think of us as a competitor. We want to create an infrastructure and we need client solutions to work with us ;-)
premyslruzicka 13y ago
- We have a plan to replace current infrastructure that will make it impossible for spam even occur. - True. There needs to be both. How email works today is laughable. - Parsing receipts or anything that is possible to and will make life easier is something we all want. We fully understand the difficulty of all this to happen but we will start lean. All this is just the future, not so distant though.

abgoldberg 13y ago

It looks like this is not a general purpose mail client, but rather something specific to your own hosted domain. If you're looking for a usable IMAP/POP mail client today, try Inky (http://inky.com http://inky.com), which has a lot of these features already and many more on the roadmap. It's available for Mac and Windows right now, with Linux support coming soon (http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2013/05/inky-pens-linux-support-on-roadmap http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2013/05/inky-pens-linux-support-o...)

premyslruzicka 13y ago
Yes, we're not trying to be a mail client. Our focus is also on the server side. You need to own a domain to be able to use our service. Inky is a cool solution.

Sujan 13y ago

Interesting: > Thank you ...@gmail.com > One more thing. We took a look at your current mail's health: > Deliverability of your messages (thumbsdown) > Your server is weakly secured and could be used for sending spam. Seems like a false positive.

premyslruzicka 13y ago
That check looks for blacklisted IPs of your provider. Gmail is blacklisted very often, thus making deliverability of your messages to some servers lower. Might be a poor wording on our side. We'll take a look at that.

pit 13y ago

hi@welovemail.com So we took a look at the mail's health: Deliverability of the messages thumbsdown Misuse of the address thumbsup Redundancy for incoming messages thumbsup Tracking of sent messages thumbsdown It seems the owner needs our service really badly. Please, let them now.