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

https://www.wired.com/story/email-clients-are-bad-so-use-vivaldi-mail/

by WithinReason • 4 years ago

242 363 4 years ago

wired.com

danielfoster• 4 years ago

I misread “email clients” as “clients” and silently agreed.

remram3• 4 years 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• 4 years 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• 4 years 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

srvmshr• 4 years 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

toomuchtodo3• 4 years ago

Ideally, Google, MS, etc would deprecate IMAP and replace with JMAP.

https://jmap.io/software.html

Avamander15• 4 years ago

Let's be honest, it's IMAP that sucks bad. What neolithic shit is it that a single letter can't exist in multiple "folders".

themadturk2• 4 years 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• 4 years 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.

Avamander15• 4 years 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.

raxxorraxor6• 4 years 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...

shadowgovt2• 4 years 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.

solarkraft• 4 years 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/6afcfff8d5283cefad40695c9...

sph• 4 years 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.

addicted2• 4 years 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.

hulitu3• 4 years ago

(al)pine is pretty good.

PurpleRamen3• 4 years ago

If the best we can do is Thunderbird

What about KMail/Kontact? Evolution? Sylpheed Claws? The Client of the Vivaldi(?) Browser? Not to forgotten all the commercial clients. Are they all dead or trash?

a slow-moving almost abandonware monolith (have a look at its extension store. It's a ghost town)

To be fair, Thunderbird has a complicated history. The unloved child of Mozilla, survived far too long on it's own, until it got love again, at the time when the parent moved away from XUL, giving the future of Thunderbird-extensions a timelimit. That it's still surviving on high levels is more of a miracle.

wrycoder2• 4 years ago

If you accidentally close that Fastmail tab, just open another one. You will lose nothing.

You can be logged into Fastmail from several devices simultaneously. And I often have several Fastmail tabs open at one time. No problem at all.

The only thing better than Fastmail webmail is the Fastmail app for iOS.

stevekemp• 4 years ago

I wrote a console-based modal email-client, which was written in 50% C++ and 50% Lua for the user-interface and all scripting.

My advice to anybody considering writing an email client would be .. don't. The amount of broken MIME things you'll have to deal with, strong opinions on UI, and similar things will make you go crazy.

I used to use mutt, then my own client. These days there are a few console-based clients that are new such as aerc, but even so writing the basics is easy, but coping with real mail is way harder than you'd expect

PurpleRamen3• 4 years ago

The amount of broken MIME things you'll have to deal with, strong opinions on UI, and similar things will make you go crazy.

Would it make more sense to first build a bunch of libs, to create a common ground, onto which people could more easily build their customized clients?

MomoXenosaga• 4 years ago

People who hate email what is your alternative? What doesn't suck? Carrier pigeons?

hammyhavoc8• 4 years ago

No doubt it's going to be IM for most folks.

addicted2• 4 years 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.

guenthert• 4 years 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.

themadturk2• 4 years ago

IM doesn't work unless everyone you want to keep in touch with is also on IM. I have regular, multiple-times-a-week email correspondents who are never on IM. They don't even keep their phones on enough for texting. It's email or nuthin'.

SailingCactus33• 4 years ago

For IM, there is the wonderful Delta Chat.

charcircuit• 4 years ago

Discord

chiefalchemist• 4 years 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.

hammyhavoc8• 4 years ago

Sounds like the next major version of Thunderbird might suit you.

dotancohen7• 4 years ago

What's in that version?

asdfqwertzxcv• 4 years ago

I pretty much have this setup currently:

Email hosted by a 3rd party (like migadu or purelymail) then moved my cell number over to voip.ms, which sends all texts and voicemails to me via email, where I can now respond to texts via my email client. Then I use feedmail to have all my rss and social feeds email the full text and images to me in either a digest or when they are published.

I have to say I've been loving it. I'm currently setting up notmuch and alot as my mail indexer/sorter and commandline viewer, too.

dotancohen7• 4 years ago

Thunderbird once had a chat extension that worked great. It supported the big protocols - including Yahoo, AOL, XXMP, MS Messenger, and IRC I believe and a whole slew of lesser known protocols. I had to stop using it when the world embraced Skype and everyone moved there, probably around 2006 or so I think.

Today, most chat protocols have the same flaw as Skype: hostility towards third party clients.

waz0wski• 4 years ago

I've been using matterbridge[1] to bring all sorts of 'modern' non-standard-compliant chat services back to my irc client[2]

[1] https://github.com/42wim/matterbridge

[2] https://xkcd.com/1782/

PurpleRamen3• 4 years ago

Thunderbird still has chat-support out of the box. I use it for XMPP and IRC. And it also still supports Newsfeeds, but I would say it could be improved on that part.

jcynix2• 4 years 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.

Wowfunhappy2• 4 years 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• 4 years 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.

jcynix2• 4 years ago

In my day job I use Thunderbird on a Mac, with HTML turned off. Because too many colleagues send Office attachments. So you don't need to use a command line to turn HTML off (but neither do you need to be afraid to use it CLI ;-)

Citations:

"HTML Email: Whenever Possible, Turn It Off!" https://subversion.american.edu/aisaac/notes/htmlmail.htm

https://phishingtackle.com/articles/phishing-emails-with-htm...

aendruk5• 4 years ago

Markdown would better serve 95% of the email I see.

gpvos• 4 years ago

What does the command line have to with non-HTML mail? It's perfectly feasible to have a window-based mail client that creates text mails.

blooalien• 4 years ago

95+% of computer users who mention not wanting to use or see a command line are so utterly terrified by the command line "bogeyman" that they imagine command lines appearing in places they would actually never be, or be required.

rsync• 4 years ago

"No, they send their complete state."

Oh, so that is what is happening ?

When I see these extremely long URLs I know, of course, that someone is being clueless and sloppy and I know, of course, that whatever they are embedding could be hashed or compressed to 64 (or fewer) characters ...

But you are saying that what I am witnessing is the entire state of the transaction is being passed in the URL ?

I guess I thought that they were passing multiple third party tracking strings all in the same URL and that different parts of the string were actually for different consumers of that data ...

dinkledunk• 4 years ago

It's not clueless or sloppy. They are most likely using https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JSON_Web_Token which is a well-defined standard and extremely common in the authentication world because it makes a ton of sense. It lets your authentication server be mostly stateless instead of storing tons of sessions unnecessarily.

Avamander15• 4 years ago

I really wish we could send text/markdown emails and have clients support displaying it natively. It would be a nice middle ground.

Anthony-G3• 4 years ago

As a fellow mutt user, I have the same complaints. Sometimes, the confirmation link can be activated by opening the HTML mail in lynx or w3m but in many cases, using the confirmation requires that the browser runs Javascript so I ended up having to copy the link from the terminal emulator, reformat it (remove line breaks and plus symbols) and paste it into Firefox. :(

My other annoyance is Mailchimp users sending emails that have the correct message in the HTML part but old or previous content in the plain-text part. That’s even worse than those who simply omit the plain-text part.

account427• 4 years ago

If wrapping long links causes them to break then does very much sound like an email CLIENT issue.

calvinmorrison• 4 years ago

Here's a talk from one of the heads of Fastmail: "Email Hates the Living"

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.

leephillips3• 4 years 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?

aendruk5• 4 years 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.

leephillips3• 4 years 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.

pwg2• 4 years 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.

remram3• 4 years 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.

welterde2• 4 years ago

IMAP supports keywords/tags that are synchronized among clients. Wouldn't that work for you?

remram3• 4 years 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.

leephillips3• 4 years 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• 4 years 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.

hulitu3• 4 years 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.

squarefoot2• 4 years 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

ldarby• 4 years ago

Sylpheed is still Sylpheed. Claws is a fork of it.

squarefoot2• 4 years ago

You're right. Memory was mislead by the fact that for a while the forked project was named Sylpheed Claws.

ndegruchy• 4 years 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• 4 years ago

Speaking of clients, I like Hey. I just like it, and have discretionary income to spend on an important tool shrug

Arcanum-XIII• 4 years 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• 4 years ago

Same! I’ve been using HEY for a couple years now. I hope they do something similar for my calendar needs.

yesUgotit• 4 years 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.

bravetraveler3• 4 years 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• 4 years ago

Google, Microsoft.. who is the third... Yahoo?

bravetraveler3• 4 years 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-pgp4• 4 years 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

Avamander15• 4 years ago

What are they policing besides the very basics you should be doing anyways?

bravetraveler3• 4 years ago

Plenty, but I'm not in the space to speak to specifics.

A personal friend runs MXRoute and they could go on, and on, and on about how maintaining delivery for them is a very expensive venture -- and I promise you they're doing these 'very basics'

At a minimum you'll need several outbound systems with queuing that leverages them. IP reputation is a full time affair

account427• 4 years ago

Try to send a short and concise email to gmail, especially from a new alias. Instant spam folder. Fill the mail with AI-generated gibberish (or just whatever scam you want) and it's suddenly fine.

Want to send to outlook? Better pony up for a whole /24 or they will drop all your mail from time to time because of a bad neighbor that you have no control over.

That is the kind of policies they are setting.

cm21872• 4 years 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• 4 years 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• 4 years ago

Oh boy, never learn about BGP and you'll be much happier.

Karrot_Kream3• 4 years 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.

Beltalowda7• 4 years 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.

Karrot_Kream3• 4 years ago

Assuming you mean identity verification is handled with GPG keys, nobody actually uses that in practice. Even the people that use Usenet today mostly don't.

Email identity is handled de facto by a web of trust anchored by the big domains with no possibility of creating a new trust anchor. You're either managed by Google, Microsoft, or Apple and inherit their trust or you play endless games to not get your mails blocked by default. It's a sad world and didn't need to be this way, but there's no real urge to fix things because the only people who are clamoring to fix email are people who want to encourage folks to use niche experiences like mutt and PRs by mail while the incumbents like Google have no incentive to adopt decentralized trust.

cm21872• 4 years ago

If you create a smtpv2 that can guarantee encryption (ok, who cares) but mostly that guarantees the origin of the email, then the gmails of this world should go softer on classifying those emails as spam, and it won’t take long before only spammers and some forgotten box in a closet are using the old smtp, then its death would be imminent.

notabee3• 4 years ago

TLS without the certificate verification is still vulnerable to MITM. You get basically the same security level with gpg and plaintext email as you do from email over TLS if someone is trying to MITM.

Even this REQUIRETLS that you mention that I didn't know about before looks iffy. If the problem is that upgrading all the world's email servers is too onerous, that still would pretty much have to happen here to support the new smtp extension. DNSSEC for the MX record or this MTA-STS record. It would require each hop in the path to be equally strict in implementing REQUIRETLS unless you want to randomly drop that assurance somewhere in the middle of the route. If all the servers have to be updated to do this, is it really that much more difficult to just switch to a new protocol entirely to be secure by default?

Not to mention that as a store and forward protocol, any server hop along the way may store or copy the message at rest in plaintext. If DKIM isn't used to checksum the message, it can be modified too unless there's some mechanism here for that that I'm missing.

If every email server needs an infinity gauntlet full of plugins and extensions and DNS records to just have some assurance of the sender's or recipient's validity, how is that really better than just making something new?

It's just not made to be a secure protocol. Someone please correct me if I'm misreading the RFC, but can we please, please let smtp die some day?

Avamander15• 4 years ago

There's no MUA-STS, there's no good way to enforce TLS for email clients. Most allow errors to be trivially bypassable.

MTA-STS between MTA's does help, but IMHO MTA-MTA is not the biggest issue.

account427• 4 years ago

Dysfunctional encryption (as in optional, easily downgradable)

Better than the HTTP mess where all URLs had to change until people realized that that didn't solve it anyway and had to bolt on HSTS and HSTS preload lists - we just need to add those for SMTP and optional encryption is no longer an issue.

nmstoker• 4 years 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)

pwg2• 4 years 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=50...

SaltyBackendGuy• 4 years ago

Thank you for this bit of history! Looks the benevolent dictator wins again.

n3storm• 4 years ago

Check thunderbird beta. Is amazing

awill• 4 years ago

is it substantially different from the stable build?

nixonpjoshua1• 4 years ago

The Outlook web interface is substantially better than the desktop app at this point for UX

wjamesg• 4 years ago

For this reason, I use OWA exclusively

coffeeling• 4 years ago

I've been using OWA for a while as my primary work email and it's nice. I probably pin too much shit, but it's overall a good app. And since MS is web tech obsessed, OWA will replace Outlook at some point in the future. Project Monarch / One Outlook is still super half baked and predictably an awful RAM hog compared to the native app, but the writing is on the wall.

owlninja• 4 years ago

I had an issue logging into my work account on the actual outlook application recently so I tried the web version in the interim and it really is a lot better. I am not saying it is a world-beater but when they couldn't figure out my issue, I just let the ticket close.

thebitstick• 4 years ago

Still waiting for them to replace the desktop app on macOS with an Electron app. The fact that no mobile/desktop client for Outlook doesn't have the like feature like Outlook Web is frustrating.

PascLeRasc• 4 years ago

Check out the Outlook web interface, it's so much better. They got the navigation delay down to 3-4 seconds! Also they have this safety feature where the delete button doesn't work unless you first archive and un-archive the message. The actual content view gets closer to a third of the screen space too, which is almost enough to load someone's 5 paragraph email signature. Now that's Enterprise Ready!

GraphenePants• 4 years ago

It's incorrect to assume that a Windows application will open the Find interface via the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+F. In Microsoft Word that shortcut opens the Navigation interface, and Find is now Advanced Find, which can be opened simply and intuitively via Ctrl+H - Alt+D.

Frequent revalidation training in the leverage of Microsoft products is something that would have helped your person avoid looking unprofessional.

pen2l• 4 years ago

- remarkably unhelpful use of space in the inbox views,

I agree with you here. The one time we saw a progression with Google Inbox (which showed cards of events, photo-previews, etc.: https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/vRLmb7RDrySSxylcMGIoV7dWTK8=...), it was quickly followed by a regression: they closed it, I suspect because the previews were costing them too much bandwidth. The day I see a well-made OSS replica of Google Inbox is the day I go back to doing my own email.

Tagbert4• 4 years ago

“ 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”

That seems like an odd use case that I have never needed to do. Not sure why there would be default support for that when you could just start your search with “to:”

djhn• 4 years ago

Im not sure I agree: sometimes it's easier to remember the names of your colleagues that were a part of a certain conversation. Especially if the sender is from outside your organisation, say a client, a journalist, a subcontractor.

_fat_santa• 4 years ago

I will say that it sucks just as a much from the developer front. I had to build some email templates for a project a few weeks ago and I was shocked how wired it was compared to regular webdev.

Using a framework is almost a requirement if you don't want to spend all your time on little differences between email clients. The layout is really wired too, with the recommendation to use a ton of nested tables. Not to mention wired bugs like Apple Mail not rendering a background unless you have an image on the page.

The best solution I've found thus far is to use MJML React [1]. This sorta normalizes things and lets you write normal react code that gets transpiled into some abomination that Outlook can read. But it sucks that the only two options that are actually worth a damn seem to be MJML[2] and Foundation[3].

And even with those frameworks it's no silver bullet. I noticed an issue with one provider where they did not respect the `display` css property, making my mobile and desktop layouts both render on the page.

If someone works on these clients I would love to know why there is such difficulty in rendering email?

[1] https://github.com/wix-incubator/mjml-react

[2] https://mjml.io/

[3] https://get.foundation/emails.html

harikb• 4 years 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.

PainfullyNormal3• 4 years ago

Do we need better email/calendar integration? Or do we need more separation? Why are we relying on email to get meeting invites?

wizofaus7• 4 years ago

What's the alternative?

altrum• 4 years ago

Okay so how do you solve for calendar <-> inbox integration?

jimmar• 4 years 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• 4 years ago

The same problem exists with physical mail. I don't need advertisement flyers. I want a realtime spreadsheet with updated prices and discounts.

BeetleB5• 4 years 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.

wswope2• 4 years 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• 4 years 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.

karencarits• 4 years ago

Good email client UI may help facilitate a better information sharing practice

Sometimes I wonder why the email client doesn't look more like Facebook with groups (=mailing lists) and posts/threads and DMs etc

BeetleB5• 4 years ago

Almost all clients have blacklists, instead of whitelists, which is the problem.

Email should be "block" by default. If you want to send me an email, your email address/account should first request to be allowed to email me, and once I approve your emails can come through. If I ever get sick of you, I should be able to block you with a keystroke.

You can implement this flow. It makes a huge difference:

http://blog.nawaz.org/posts/2018/Sep/solving-my-email-proble...

Gigachad• 4 years ago

I don't want to have to configure blacklists and whitelists. My current workflow which seems to be inline with the rest of the world is if the message is junk, send it to my email. If its important, send it to me via Teams/Slack.

At least everything sent to me via IM apps comes from a real person.

PaulDavisThe1st3• 4 years ago

So you sign up at my website for something. We send you an email. Your blocking system rejects it. I'm not going to send a suitably-formatted request to you.

hahajk• 4 years ago

Maybe the problem is that culturally, email is treated like face-to-face talking. We often talk to each other just to be pleasant. It wouldn't be weird for someone to remind you about a meeting if they saw you, or to ask if you're going to the company picnic. Actually, it would be weirder if they just posted it on the calendar and said nothing else.

So, maybe email clients aren't the issue, people are the issue (like most problems).

tuatoru• 4 years ago

email is treated like face-to-face talking.

Really? I tell everyone who emails me that emails are postcards written in granite. Anyone might be able to see them, forever, from now on.

I also tell them that I check my emails once a day. If something is really urgent, stand in front of me.

Zambyte• 4 years 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.

It sounds like you haven't tried an email client where filtering is ergonomic. I use mu / mu4e for filtering and reading emails. At my inbox, I press `s`, enter a search term, and instantly get matches. I can press `S` (capital s) to further refine the search with another term if the previous was too broad. Filtering is incredibly powerful and useful if it is presented in an accessible way in the client.

Spivak2• 4 years ago

The fact that we all need such advanced filtering to make email usable at all should be the canary in the coal mine that we’ve lost our way.

mikek• 4 years 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• 4 years ago

That's why you need to write your own email client, or help me to polish mine:

https://github.com/derek-zhou/liv

alexklarjr• 4 years 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.

jawns2• 4 years 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• 4 years ago

Corporate spammers love rich formatting and dynamic elements. Nobody else wants that crap.

Karrot_Kream3• 4 years 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.)

krageon4• 4 years 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.

jawns2• 4 years ago

I don't think it's necessarily an either/or.

If I go to the Washington Post website, it obviously has a distinctive style that is different from other newspapers. If I download a Washington Post mobile app, it's got that same distinctive style.

Why should the email experience be inconsistent with the style of those other digital applications?

What might seem like a silly, arbitrary "5 pixels to the left" style choice to you can be extremely useful in helping email users distinguish between a trusted brand, like a newspaper they subscribe to, and a knock-off or spam message. When plain text is the only cue, that's somewhat harder to do.

ori_b2• 4 years ago

and many consumers appreciate it.

I sure do -- if I get an email that has a ton of money spent on branding, it's a useful signal that the email is unimportant, and can be ignored.

defulmere• 4 years 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• 4 years ago

What suck is what people came to do with email.

Using it as notification system? That is a big no to me.

kuon3• 4 years 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

dane-pgp4• 4 years 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.

kuon3• 4 years 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.

fmajid2• 4 years 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.

PainfullyNormal3• 4 years 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.

fmajid2• 4 years 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.

freemint3• 4 years ago

Any recommendations for an Android email client besides K9?

zaik2• 4 years ago

FairEmail: https://f-droid.org/packages/eu.faircode.email/

freemint3• 4 years ago

Thanks installed that one. So much better than K9

encryptluks2• 4 years 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• 4 years ago

ActivityPub is a better email than email. Wait and see.

eins1234• 4 years 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), 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• 4 years ago

In the context of email, why does multiple-second latency matter?

smiley1437• 4 years 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__panic4• 4 years 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_223• 4 years 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• 4 years 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.

dont__panic4• 4 years ago

Are outlook-hosted email accounts incompatible with Thunderbird? That's been a solid choice for me in the past, even with their recent stagnant period of development. I do agree that there are a lot of crappy email clients out there, but if you have freedom of choice of the client you use, why not switch?

Shank• 4 years ago

Email works remarkably well when you can easily control who gets your address. It works absolutely abysmally for anyone who gets subjected to a constant deluge of random semi-reasonable emails from unknown senders. Some are outright spam, some are actually legitimate professional inquiries, and some are a blend between the two.

I think fundamentally the problem is that email works great if you aren't the subject of a random influx. If you create an address and never tell anyone except a handful of good sites, you're okay! If your address is everywhere, ends up in a data breach, or ends up on a marketing list for "important business people / decision makers to try to pitch products to" then you're in for a much different experience.

Why not just use filters? It's truly random who sends what when. The only email provider that I truly appreciate is HEY, which has deny-by-default email. You explicitly allow people to contact you, which is a different and very nice approach. It has other problems, though, which make it hard for me to suggest it as a solution.

djbusby• 4 years ago

Grey listing in Postfix does a similar thing, and works amazing! Drawback is senders have to try at least twice - spammer don't (usually) and all proper/legit does.

eropple• 4 years ago

FWIW, you can cut down a lot of the B2B spam by unsubscribing on Apollo. (IME, it does work.)

https://www.apollo.io/privacy-policy/remove/

giantrobot• 4 years ago

I don't think you're wrong, I too use Apple's Mail. It works pretty well. It's got a good filtering system that can sort incoming mail properly. It doesn't try to make e-mail into anything but e-mail. It also integrates into Spotlight/QuickLook so searching for mail messages can happen outside of Mail and has all the expressiveness of Spotlight.

From memories long ago of using Outlook and Thunderbird I think I can see where people get a hate for e-mail clients. I don't remember either of those being particularly good clients. They've likely changed over the years and could be better but I have no desire to drop Apple Mail.

throwaway892238• 4 years ago

There's nothing wrong with you. The same people who complain about talking to someone on the phone are the ones who can't deal with e-mail. Ironically they prefer chat, which is probably the worst way to manage information, but definitely the least-effort.

That said, some e-mail clients are worse than others. Outlook for Mac is the worst client I've used in years. It doesn't even use Mac's notification system.

wruza2• 4 years ago

Can’t see really how phone anxiety may connect to email issues.

Tagbert4• 4 years ago

What problems do you see with Mac OS Outlook. It works well for me. Of course I would never have email notifications enabled anyway, so I don’t see that as a problem. Everything else works well.

The biggest complain I have is that it can’t open Windows EML files that some people forward as attachments. I have to go into the web version to see those. Just a weird miss there.

AtlasBarfed2• 4 years ago

Email issues;

- spam spam spam of the utterly firehose type

- spam spam spam of the corporate "unsubscribe in these easy 10 steps"

- attachment viruses (sometimes without you opening it!)

- even conversation organization is inferior to searchable chat where it's just a history stream

- email addresses obscure the users, chat apps are far better at this

- email addresses are a PITA in general

- no indication of being online

- emoticons are still a bit iffy, certainly worse than chat

- smartphone experience is far worse (could be bad clients... but...)

- legally it's a paper trail, chat is... not?

- attachments are not as smooth as chat, although it's a lot better than it used to be (drag n drop to browsers/clients are a LOT better)

- chat clients can support "undeliver" a bit more easily

That said, email is:

- open standard

- ubiquitous

Email seems fundamentally broken because of lack of regulation, just like the POTS (plain old telephone) system is utterly overridden.

And it would really really be nice if governments would make official email addresses for citizens for official communication and delivery. Or some means for me making money from incoming spam by charging a delivery fee.

The fact there are so many email campaign startups still to this day is depressing. There is zero chance they aren't effectively keeping email unusable. So I guess that's another annoying aspect of email: it will always be attacked by corporations, ceaselessly.

At least chat apps have corporate defenders (while they make you the product) but life is about choosing among non-ideal options.

bo10242• 4 years ago

1, you bothered to use a good desktop client, putting you ahead of 95% of people. 2, you got a choice of which client to use, not always true in the workplace.

3, how many emails do you get? I averaged 60 emails per day in 2021, or probably 80-90 work emails per work day. More than half don't need to be read, but even spending 30 seconds per email would be a problem. Many people probably get a lot more.

dredmorbius8• 4 years 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.

memling• 4 years ago

I more or less diagree with you, but the comment was lovely, and for some reason I find myself craving lobster thermidor.

dredmorbius8• 4 years ago

<https://yewtu.be/watch?v=_bW4vEo1F4E>

tecoholic2• 4 years ago

This. I have been facing this issue recently more and more. Account creation emails aren't arriving to my custom domain recently. Some software companies seem to not send emails to custom domains. I use a well known commercial provider with DKIM and everything setup. Yet. I am beginning to use my custom domain only for human communication and all else gets directed into Gmail.

snazz2• 4 years ago

Huh—I wonder if that has to do with your TLD? I’ve been using custom domains for a few years and I have more issues with my .xyz domain than I do with my .com for both sending and receiving. Both have all the authentication DNS records set up.

Semaphor3• 4 years ago

I have zero issues with mail not arriving on my custom .me domain, and I’ve been using it for email for close to 10 years.

Do you have an example of sites where account creation mails do not arrive?

smeagull2• 4 years ago

The second worst thing about email after spam, is all the solutions dedicated to fixing spam.

I've had to setup DKIM, update records and keep up with changes to it just to keep my custom domain.

derefr2• 4 years ago

Some software companies seem to not send emails to custom domains.

As someone who operates a SaaS that does auto-block some account registrations based on email address, I feel like I should speak to this. We're actually fine with custom domains — and I imagine this is true for most SaaS companies. All our business customers use custom domains; and we're not about to blow holes in our funnel by making it harder to acquire new business customers. There's no logic in our codebase that especially favors the big email providers; no whitelist with gmail/outlook/etc. on it. (And we haven't found that any of the lifecycle-mail sending services we've tried have had trouble with custom domains, either.)

Instead, what we're mostly trying to stop is registrations using what you might call vanity or proxy domains — domains created by people who are only trying to obscure their real email address, but who aren't willing to invest the effort to make their domain into a "real" domain that has working email deliverability in both directions and maybe a web presence to go along with it.

Businesses almost always have such "real" domains; but people registering for illicit purposes (spamming, ban evasion, etc) almost never do, instead only bothering to set up e.g. an SMTP forwarding proxy that has no ability to originate mail. (Often they get such a service as a value add from their domain registrar; though there are independent services for this as well.)

To detect these, we check things like:

- Is your domain a known temporary email provider? (Immediate fail)

- Is your domain's MX record shared with one used by known temporary email providers? (Also an immediate fail; and zero false positives from this, surprisingly)

- Does your domain have SPF and DKIM records? (Good)

- Do your MX record hostname(s) resolve to the IP ranges of some skeezy VPS host, or to an IaaS's ephemeral-allocation IP ranges? (Bad)

- Does your NS record, or your MX record's NS record, point to a domain registrar that's well-known to be used for discovering + acquiring short nonsense domain names in bulk? (Bad)

- Does your domain have an apex A record? (Good) Is there a website there? (Good) Is that website a domain-parking page? (Very, very bad)

- How recently does your WHOIS record say that your domain was last transferred/acquired? Last 14 days? (Somewhat bad, but not as bad as the other things)

I would guess that if you're having problems, it's with one of these heuristics, or one in a similar vein.

If you jump through all the same hoops a business would jump through to make your custom domain "real", then any heuristics SaaS companies come up with to differentiate business domains from spam domains, should work out in your favor. (My own custom domain — which truly is just a vanity domain — passes all these tests easily; mostly by just doing the default stuff Google Workspace recommended I do when I set it up. Because that's all businesses are doing, too.)

jjav2• 4 years ago

Account creation emails aren't arriving to my custom domain recently.

What do you mean by custom domain? Anything not @gmail.com? How could that be, since every corporation everywhere has a custom domain. Must be something else going on.

thayne2• 4 years ago

You forgot about the mess that is SPF, DKIM, and DMARC.

dredmorbius8• 4 years ago

Spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, eggs, bacon, spam, and spam.

dredmorbius8• 4 years ago

FWIW, I also omitted what's perhaps the most telling sign: increasingly it is not possible to find an email address for an entity or know whether or not a found address is useful or monitored.

That is: organisations are increasingly abandoning email, at least for public-facing work.

Ironically, Google are perhaps most notorious for this (HN is one of numerous Google-email-contact alternatives for problem resolution).

More generally, the end state of any universal communications medium of unlimited reach and access ... is abandonment. Absent some viable mechanism for curtailing usage, the only viable options become either shutting off the system entirely, or at best, randomly sampling from amongst submissions.

Conversation, and communication, both scale poorly.

phil294• 4 years 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• 4 years 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

jrumbut3• 4 years ago

I suppose I agree for the narrower claim that a protocol which allows anyone to message anyone is going to inevitably have spam.

That said I can count on my fingers and toes the number of spam messages (via hijacked accounts) that have reached my Facebook Messenger/Instagram inboxes and have received zero spam in several years on Snapchat.

Walled gardens have many downsides, but there are upsides as well.

dredmorbius8• 4 years ago

Whether spam is or isn't email's fault, or a consequence of its architectural naivete, is arguable.

What's not arguable is that spam is email's problem.

What responses to my quite off-the-cuff though apparently resonating comment has (mostly) failed to recognise though is that spam is a problem not only for email users but across the spectrum for operators, administrators, senders, application designers, and a whole host of others. The fact, volume, and consequences of spam have a tremendous set of knock-on effects which are hard to express with any degree of coherence and sufficiency.

walrus01• 4 years ago

I am happy to deal with the spam problem (through appropriate use of spamassassin content scoring, and RBLs and spamassassin DKIM/SPF scoring) on my own smtpd in exchange for the great advantage of having a truly decentralized communication method that isn't controlled by any one company.

My email works as long as I keep my domain name renewed and my personal postfix+dovecot server online and running properly.

Nearly every other possible asynchronous, text based two way communications system that people say is a "possible replacement for email" requires centralizing communications through something run by some specific company.

Email's great advantage is that it's a truly level playing field. Yes that also allows spammers to send outgoing shit smtp traffic, but I can deal with that.

If you are greatly troubled by spam and it's an actual ongoing problem in your inboxes I would say that your inbound smtp content filtering and spam scoring is not set up properly.

jjav2• 4 years ago

Email's great advantage is that it's a truly level playing field. Yes that also allows spammers to send outgoing shit smtp traffic, but I can deal with that.

Agree so much.

I really don't get the spam complaint anymore. Commercial providers like gmail do get a lot of spam (I have a gmail account as well, it gets more spam than ham) but it doesn't need to be that way.

I run all my own email infrastructure and spam is a non-issue. My primary email has been around very publicly since the mid-90s and is surely on every spam list ever but between a strict postfix configuration and a bayesian spam filter, spam is not a thing anymore.

I'm trying to think the last time I got a spam email in my inbox and can't remember. It's so rare.

mcv2• 4 years ago

While I mostly agree, I'm not sure it's possible to set up spam scoring properly. Either spam gets through, or some non-spam doesn't.

There's legitimate email that consistently gets marked as potential spam, and I don't know how to tell my mailreader to always trust that source. The tax service regularly mails me that there's a new message for me in my message box at the tax service site where I need to log in, which is a terrible way to communicate. Their paper mail does contain everything I need to know, but their email cannot because email is so insecure.

Something like email, but with authentication and encryption built in from the start, would be a really nice improvement.

neeleshs• 4 years ago

Re: spam - I have given up on my inbox altogether. I found that if there is a really important message that needs my attention, it tends to make its way through other channels (slack, voicemail, people just walking over to me etc).

Rest of it, is apparently not important to make a difference to me in any way.

somenameforme• 4 years ago

By contrast I've also had email for decades, and suffer effectively zero spam. Perhaps one difference is that I use two emails. One I use exclusively for messaging friends/family and the other I use for everything else. And I don't use the former email on any mobile device either.

The email I use for registering on sites, or using on mobile, is absolutely bombarded with spam. The email I use privately receives near zero spam (that isn't trivially filtered) even though it's a simple and common two word combination at a major mail server. Notably, I'm not registering for dodgy sites or anything like that on the spammed email. It's all major and ostensibly reputable sites. For sites I don't trust or care to receive a message from, I use throw-aways.

I simply assume any site you register on is going to sell, leak, or accidentally expose your email (or any other information you offer them). Similarly for mobile devices. And that seems to be a consistently validated assumption.

cobbaut2• 4 years ago

Somewhere in 1999 I started using unique email addresses for every single service or registration. For example, if I would register with Reddit today, then I would use 20220825_reddit_registration@example.com.

This makes it really easy to filter out spam (and I also know who sold my address). It's also trivial to block unwanted 'subscriptions'.

I use Thunderbird and create an identity for every one of these mails that require a reply (most don't) and TB automatically uses the unique address when replying.

mro_name2• 4 years ago

postal services are awesome but tend to be forgotten. We need to use them more for personal, relevant things. Ideally handwritten.

The contemplative nature of reading paper is a bliss.

mro_name2• 4 years ago

You were a trendsetter back then and are now, I guess.

krageon4• 4 years ago

Spam is not this big of an issue - filters for it are easily available and work well, even if you host your own.

dredmorbius8• 4 years ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32590389

raxxorraxor6• 4 years ago

Consolidation of "trusted" mail providers (as if Google is trustworthy with its scanning of mails) is a real threat to federated mail. One can only hope that IT isn't stupid or greedy enough to sell it as that. To forbid the usage of Gmail should be sensible policy for any enterprise.

Spam is a problem, but honestly 15 year old slightly trained spam filter with a sensible config can filter all without any false positives.

Not that mail is not without its problems, but any modern alternative will suck much more. It will be a service attached to a corporation you will again make yourself dependent on. I feel for those whose Google accounts get locked, but to a large degree it is their own fault.

I don't know a lot of corps that block unknown mail servers. Have it sign outgoing mail with your known domains and your mail will not land in some sandbox or spam filter.

shadowgovt2• 4 years ago

To forbid the usage of Gmail should be sensible policy for any enterprise.

Instead, more than 60% of mid-sized companies use Gmail.

https://emailanalytics.com/gmail-statistics/

wizofaus7• 4 years ago

15 year old slightly trained spam filter with a sensible config can filter all without any false positives.

If it were that easy why do all the big players do it so badly? I'd rather get more spam in my inbox than miss the false positives (in fact most of what's in my spam folder is technically legitimate, but usually just broadcast emails from organizations I happen to have used my email address for at some point in the past). But I haven't found a way to sufficiently lower the threshold for spam detection for any email service I've used to avoid that problem.

falcolas• 4 years ago

If you don't like spam, postal mail is not any better. Worse, really, because there are no automated filters for it. Four out of five trips to the mailbox result in nothing but junk mail.

Yaa101• 4 years ago

The biggest problem of email is non verifiable routing due to header manipulation and lack of source authorization.

If these were in place then it would be able to send all spam back to sender, instead of putting it a spam folder due to filtering, your email client just would send it back to the origin address.

It also would help if each send would cost a token (of some monetary system) that would be returned on delivery at the legitimate destination. This would help against bulk sending.

Email is a system that will always cripple at some point if there aren't real world cost incentives in place.

People are the biggest problem with email, which is hard to solve with mere technical solutions.

NoPicklez2• 4 years 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.

Avamander15• 4 years 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.

NoPicklez2• 4 years ago

Hence my point, the problems I have are with the provider, not the client.

karaterobot• 4 years 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.

wkdneidbwf3• 4 years 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• 4 years ago

You can use hey with your own domain now: https://www.hey.com/custom-domains/

adamsiem2• 4 years ago

As of yesterday, you can receive and respond via your Gmail address using Hey.com's client. https://bit.ly/3RdtmsR

Thadeust• 4 years ago

I have the same problem as you. So I just forward my email from Gmail to Hey.

Hey gets most of it right. I just wish they bundled emails automatically (similar to how Inbox did)

henry_bone3• 4 years 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• 4 years ago

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_bone3• 4 years 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• 4 years ago

Outlook by and large does this. It’s also a bloated piece of a desktop app, so pick your poison.

iluzone• 4 years ago

https://www.uniboxapp.com/ has been around for quite long time.

henry_bone3• 4 years ago

Yep, that's the basic idea. Not suitable for me though as I am not an Apple user.

acidburnNSA• 4 years ago

Cool idea. Looks like there's a thunderbird extension for this but it's woefully out of date and hasn't been updated since 2011. Maybe you can revive it?

https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/addon/gathe...

cobbaut2• 4 years ago

This is easy in Thunderbird, right? I have filters that put around 35 specific senders (bank, ISP, VPS-provider, ...) each in their own folder. Thunderbird makes these folders bold when a mail arrives, indicating the number of unread messages. Whenever an important mail arrives, I immediately notice it.

wizofaus7• 4 years ago

35 specific filter rules doesn't sound "easy" to most people. I'd probably have about 50 addresses I'd treat that way too.

rakoo• 4 years ago

You basically want something closer to an IM UX. Delta chat does this: https://delta.chat/en/

Only issue: Delta Chat doesn't allow to change the subject, so your conversation with someone is going to be a looooong unique thread.

I am myself thinking about doing something closer to what zulip does, with subjects as "channels". Yet another side project.

flas9sd• 4 years ago

yes, it's an eye opener. "chat(view) over smtp" has untapped potential - against all obituary writers of email.

nmaleki• 4 years 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• 4 years 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• 4 years ago

Thunderbird is awesome. One feature I love is that you can use Darkreader to make emails dark mode.

bxparks• 4 years 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• 4 years 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.

thayne2• 4 years 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• 4 years 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• 4 years 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• 4 years 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?

wruza2• 4 years 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• 4 years 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• 4 years 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• 4 years 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.

kkfx2• 4 years 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.

Avamander15• 4 years 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.

kkfx2• 4 years 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• 4 years 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.

Avamander15• 4 years 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• 4 years 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• 4 years 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• 4 years 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• 4 years ago

A protocol is only as good as its available clients

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

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