8 ms·

Google's attempt to take over email does not sit with me well. We need better email. But email is too important to be proprietary. We need open standards here.

Google's attempt to take over email does not sit with me well. We need better email. But email is too important to be proprietary. We need open standards here. And we need open source developers to kick it in high gear to create better email clients.

pjc50 12y ago
There's no shortage of mail clients. There's even a decent choice of webmail clients. But Gmail offers free hosting with decent antispam, which are things that otherwise cost money. Unless people want to get syndicalist/cooperative with their email, they'll go with the large free email providers.
Oculus 12y ago
I don't think the issue is as much with the clients as it is with the spam filtering Google provides. The sheer volume of emails they handle allows them to have the best spam filtering in the world. Something, that will be very difficult to duplicate through OSS.
- jimktrains2 12y ago
  The issue is with sending mail. Running my own mail server just feels like a loosing proposition as inevitably it'll be blocked because it's not a well known one.
  - a3_nm 12y ago
    Certainly this is what will happen if everyone thinks the same way as you... (I have been my own SMTP server (hosted by OVH) for a few months now. I was blocked exactly once, by custom filtering from a small provider where the delivery status notification said to appeal to abuse@, I emailed them and they fixed it in minutes.)
    - tedunangst 12y ago
      Similar story. I couldn't email msn (or exchange, etc.) but there was a web form I could fill out. Annoying, but I got to have some fun describing the type of emails I sent to my "list" and its "unsubscribe process".
    - jimktrains2 12y ago
      > Certainly this is what will happen if everyone thinks the same way as you... What will happen? More people will block small providers because fewer exists? The issue is much larger than that. There need to be better ways to deal with email than just dropping it for arbitrary reasons. > I was blocked exactly once ... that you know of I've worked for companies where our internal mail servers just couldn't email some people; we presume their ISP black listed us and never published it on a shared list. (We only know this because people would call because they never got the email with the link to their purchased item.) I do not have the time to worry about if every email I send will get delivered. Many systems don't send you a status notification; they just accept and then drop the message, meaning you may not see an error in the logs. You may not show up on public black lists for days. That's not something I want to be sinking my time into. I'd rather pay someone to run a well-known service that is very unlikely to have delivery issues.
      - a3_nm 12y ago
        Pretending to accept an email and then dropping just seems wrong. Is this something that reputable email providers do? (From my experience, I have never witnessed a situation where an email I had sent to someone had silently been ignored.)
        jimktrains2 12y ago
        Yes, it is a practice that big players do. http://serverfault.com/questions/364132/postfix-says-mail-sent-ok-message-does-not-arrive-in-isps-inbox-no-reject-in-l/364144#364144 http://serverfault.com/questions/364132/postfix-says-mail-se...
        12y ago
  - mhurron 12y ago
    I've never had a problem. I have a VPS I use as a smart relay.
ricardonunez 12y ago
There are couple of problems with the open source clients, one is the front end the other is anti-spam. Many of them are hideous and look like 10 years old. Some of them are functional and look nice, but you still have to deal with bad anti-spam filters.
couchand 12y ago
In case you haven't seen it, you might consider Fastmail [0]. They have a great webmail client, they just released native mobile apps (for both iOS and Android at the same time, wow!), and they are very much working to expand the standards to meet the needs of modern e-mail. [0] https://fastmail.com https://fastmail.com
- Jgrubb 12y ago
  +1 for Fastmail, and thanks for the heads up on the mobile client that I had no idea about.
- danieldk 12y ago
  very much working to expand the standards to meet the needs of modern e-mail. Obligatory links: https://github.com/brong/cyrus-imapd/tree/fastmail https://github.com/brong/cyrus-imapd/tree/fastmail http://jmap.io/ http://jmap.io/
- a3n 12y ago
  Happy fastmail user.
- drdaeman 12y ago
  Privacy-wise, personally, I'd just love to see what are my options for self-hosted email service. Presently it's just Postfix and Dovecot on the physically-owned server and Thunderbird and K9 Mail on desktop and mobile. Quite old-fashioned. I had seen links to some fastmail support branch for cyrus and some jmap.io, but didn't really get what thase are and all on Fastmail's website suggests it's a service, not software. But maybe I had missed something. So... is it for me or not?
debacle 12y ago
Since you can be pretty sure that Google reads and hands over your email just as much as Microsoft does, you should give outlook.com a chance. It has a really nice UI for personal email and, apart from a few UI deviations, is pretty much the same as Gmail was before they started trying to make it "better."

pjc50 12y ago

There's no shortage of mail clients. There's even a decent choice of webmail clients. But Gmail offers free hosting with decent antispam, which are things that otherwise cost money. Unless people want to get syndicalist/cooperative with their email, they'll go with the large free email providers.

Oculus 12y ago

I don't think the issue is as much with the clients as it is with the spam filtering Google provides. The sheer volume of emails they handle allows them to have the best spam filtering in the world. Something, that will be very difficult to duplicate through OSS.

jimktrains2 12y ago
The issue is with sending mail. Running my own mail server just feels like a loosing proposition as inevitably it'll be blocked because it's not a well known one.
- a3_nm 12y ago
  Certainly this is what will happen if everyone thinks the same way as you... (I have been my own SMTP server (hosted by OVH) for a few months now. I was blocked exactly once, by custom filtering from a small provider where the delivery status notification said to appeal to abuse@, I emailed them and they fixed it in minutes.)
  - tedunangst 12y ago
    Similar story. I couldn't email msn (or exchange, etc.) but there was a web form I could fill out. Annoying, but I got to have some fun describing the type of emails I sent to my "list" and its "unsubscribe process".
  - jimktrains2 12y ago
    > Certainly this is what will happen if everyone thinks the same way as you... What will happen? More people will block small providers because fewer exists? The issue is much larger than that. There need to be better ways to deal with email than just dropping it for arbitrary reasons. > I was blocked exactly once ... that you know of I've worked for companies where our internal mail servers just couldn't email some people; we presume their ISP black listed us and never published it on a shared list. (We only know this because people would call because they never got the email with the link to their purchased item.) I do not have the time to worry about if every email I send will get delivered. Many systems don't send you a status notification; they just accept and then drop the message, meaning you may not see an error in the logs. You may not show up on public black lists for days. That's not something I want to be sinking my time into. I'd rather pay someone to run a well-known service that is very unlikely to have delivery issues.
    - a3_nm 12y ago
      Pretending to accept an email and then dropping just seems wrong. Is this something that reputable email providers do? (From my experience, I have never witnessed a situation where an email I had sent to someone had silently been ignored.)
      - jimktrains2 12y ago
        Yes, it is a practice that big players do. http://serverfault.com/questions/364132/postfix-says-mail-sent-ok-message-does-not-arrive-in-isps-inbox-no-reject-in-l/364144#364144 http://serverfault.com/questions/364132/postfix-says-mail-se...
        12y ago
- mhurron 12y ago
  I've never had a problem. I have a VPS I use as a smart relay.

ricardonunez 12y ago

There are couple of problems with the open source clients, one is the front end the other is anti-spam. Many of them are hideous and look like 10 years old. Some of them are functional and look nice, but you still have to deal with bad anti-spam filters.

couchand 12y ago

In case you haven't seen it, you might consider Fastmail [0]. They have a great webmail client, they just released native mobile apps (for both iOS and Android at the same time, wow!), and they are very much working to expand the standards to meet the needs of modern e-mail. [0] https://fastmail.com https://fastmail.com

Jgrubb 12y ago
+1 for Fastmail, and thanks for the heads up on the mobile client that I had no idea about.
danieldk 12y ago
very much working to expand the standards to meet the needs of modern e-mail. Obligatory links: https://github.com/brong/cyrus-imapd/tree/fastmail https://github.com/brong/cyrus-imapd/tree/fastmail http://jmap.io/ http://jmap.io/
a3n 12y ago
Happy fastmail user.
drdaeman 12y ago
Privacy-wise, personally, I'd just love to see what are my options for self-hosted email service. Presently it's just Postfix and Dovecot on the physically-owned server and Thunderbird and K9 Mail on desktop and mobile. Quite old-fashioned. I had seen links to some fastmail support branch for cyrus and some jmap.io, but didn't really get what thase are and all on Fastmail's website suggests it's a service, not software. But maybe I had missed something. So... is it for me or not?

debacle 12y ago

Since you can be pretty sure that Google reads and hands over your email just as much as Microsoft does, you should give outlook.com a chance. It has a really nice UI for personal email and, apart from a few UI deviations, is pretty much the same as Gmail was before they started trying to make it "better."