20 years ago Gmail revolutionized email. It's time for a new revolution

https://tuta.com/blog/gmail-20-years-old

by dotcoma • 2 years ago

34 77 2 years ago

claytonjy• 2 years ago

This is the first I've heard of Tuta. How does it compare to the more popular nerd-focused Gmail alternatives like fastmail, proton, or hey?

nyolfen• 2 years ago

similar to protonmail, european, came out of the post-snowden shift towards e2e services

gaganyaan• 2 years ago

I like their mission. I used them for a while and the service was great, but I got annoyed at not being able to use any other client than theirs. I wanted to use Thunderbird, but they don't support IMAP for encryption reasons. I switched to Fastmail and it's been nice, I like that they're fixing the shortcomings of email by pushing for new standards like jmap. I'd probably have stuck with Tuta if they had a plan for a new standard that let them be privacy oriented and also let me use Thunderbird.

nicce• 2 years ago

Yep, it is a bit too big walled garden at the moment. Since it is E2EE almost completely, it is harder to make alternative clients. But still they should offer some specification.

AwaAwa• 2 years ago

They aren't bad at all but be warned that you shouldn't use them for throwaway addresses that are lightly used. They will delete your account if there hasn't been activity for 6 months.

Sounds like a lot of time, but surprising how quickly that time runs out.

Something to be aware of up front.

daft_pink• 2 years ago

My problem having used proton is that the encrypted email services simply don’t integrate well with other services or email clients.

carimura2• 2 years ago

this is in fact annoying with proton cal on a mac. i can only subscribe to it with mac cal (to see alongside my other calendars).

Beijinger5• 2 years ago

Ungoogle yourself. Don't rely on google. I had transferred a quite valuable DID number to my Project Fi phone. Due to unfortunate circumstances I was not able to pay for a while. I lost:

1. The valuable number

2. Access to my Gmail Account. I know my PW but gmail won't let me log into gmail without confirming with the number that I lost. Hence, my gmail account is gone

3. Paid apps. I lost apps I paid for and that were linked to my phone or email, e.g. threma, insync etc.

Had a lawyer write to google. No answer. Don't rely on google for anything important. I have a new gmail for my Android. I don't even know it out of my head since I don't use it. Why would I?

At least Tuta has support. Somebody you can contact. But I prefer to control the domain too. Germany/US Based? I would prefer Switzerland or Iceland compared to EU/US jurisdictions.

2Gkashmiri2• 2 years ago

I seem to have an old yahoo email that I had set up 2fa about 8 years ago. Recently it logged me out abruptly and wont let me back in. That number is with someone else and they are fearing otp hijacking and have blocked me.

I have a considerable number of accounts liked to that so I am kinda in the soup. Urrrgh.

Is there no standardized way to solve these problems ?

I can give details about the email, recovery number, aliases, settings, last emails I remember

Has no one faced these problems ?

beeboobaa32• 2 years ago

The only way to solve it is to own your own domain and to make sure that you always pay for it. The catch is that you have to do this from the start.

I'm hopeful that governments will eventually realize how impactful this is, and mandate email provides to implement forwarding services after an account is closed and they have verified your identity, possibly via government ID.

qingcharles4• 2 years ago

There's no solution I've found yet, and I've expended some serious energy in trying to solve it.

I've thought about taking a tent down to Goog HQ and just setting up there and waiting until someone hears me out.

qingcharles4• 2 years ago

I'm in the same boat, even though I have the email, password and recovery email; and all the emails from the account forward to me.

If all of us who are locked out of our Google accounts got together and made a HN post, we might be able to get it on the front page, which is the only officially-recognized support channel for Google now.

Beijinger5• 2 years ago

I have access too at my recovery email. But without my old phone....

Again, my lawyer wrote them a letter via snail mail. No response.

mukti• 2 years ago

I was considering switching over to Tuta, but haven't spent the time on it yet. Did you end up moving to another provider or hosting your own?

Beijinger5• 2 years ago

Yes. I have domains with internet.bs and buy email hosting separete from https://www.infomaniak.com/en

Just put your domain name for registration. It will say it is registered already but then offers you the option to buy email hosting. I think it is 18 Euros for 5 Email accounts per year. It is based in Switzerland.

Australian fastmail may be better - I don't have experience myself - but it starts at 60 dollars a year. Maybe someone who is a user can give feedback here.

Regarding infomaniak: They offer a free email service (without your own domain). Maybe you try it out to get a feel if this is right for you and your domain: https://www.infomaniak.com/en/free-email

And hands off to apps that have a registration code. E.g. pleco. They are not linked to your email and you don't lose them if your gmail is gone...

pavel_lishin2• 2 years ago

Gredier for user data witth age?

Tao33002• 2 years ago

Dall-E crap. If they won't pay an illustrator, I don't really trust their human rights position.

carimura2• 2 years ago

middle english? https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/gredy#Middle_English

pavel_lishin2• 2 years ago

I guess their AI image generator speaks it fluently.

taeric• 2 years ago

Google themselves have tried to build several new revolutions throughout the years. Wave and Inbox are the ones I can easily remember. Workspaces probably should also count?

modeless• 2 years ago

Google Inbox had some issues but I really miss two things about it: the ability to make certain categories of email be hidden for the rest of the day or week after you reviewed them once, and the ability to add tasks to your inbox, either associated with emails or standalone.

They said they would fold the functionality of inbox into Gmail but they never did for those features.

thomascgalvin• 2 years ago

Inbox was a legitimate improvement on "normal" email, and I still miss it.

captn3m0• 2 years ago

Worth remembering that Inbox was created by the Sparrow acquisition. Google hasn't innovated by itself in a long time.

zeroonetwothree• 2 years ago

The reason gmail was successful is that it didn’t revolutionize email. It was just a very good client that worked well but roughly the same as people were already used to.

I’ve seen so many of these revolutionary email clients over the years but they all fail. It’s just too hard to get people to radically change their workflow, and tbh the current one isn’t even that bad.

pupppet• 2 years ago

The 1gb storage space certainly didn’t hurt either, at a time when Hotmail was offering peanuts.

Ekaros2• 2 years ago

From same period I saw mail for my 5 MB box being full... Offering 200 times this was enough...

arcbyte• 2 years ago

I'm curious what your workflow looks like?

I come from the perspective that email is totally broken; both in my personal spam filled inbox and in my corporate information black hole email. So I'm genuinely curious

iancmceachern• 2 years ago

Get good at searching, filters, modifiers, keywords, etc. My I boxes are huge, but I generally find what I need quickly by typing a fee searching filters and keywords

the_snooze2• 2 years ago

I have multiple email aliases that feed into the same box. I filter messages based on what alias they went through and who sent them. Nearly all messages get automatically marked as read; they're there, but I won't get notifed of them. For a few high priority senders who have my high priority alias, they get the star treatment: notification, star, reminder to reply, etc.

Also, if you filter for the word "unsubscribe," you can cut through a good chunk of low-priority automatic messages.

bee_rider• 2 years ago

It is a good replacement for letters, postcards really. It does that well, and that’s enough.

Tao33002• 2 years ago

It was delightfully sparse coming from heavyweight desktop clients. Though now that I'm at 98% capacity, I need to hook up a heavyweight client to do real cleaning...

HNDen213• 2 years ago

Also 1 GB of inbox storage, this was a lot more than others like Yahoo IIRC

globular-toast2• 2 years ago

Wasn't Gmail "unlimited" in the early days?

dventimi• 2 years ago

Yeah, I agree with you. I'm sorry, but whether it was unlimited or only 1GB, it felt unlimited to me at that time and that WAS revolutionary. At the time, GMail seemed vastly superior to the main alternative, Yahoo Mail.

antisthenes• 2 years ago

Speaking of storage, why is Gmail still on 15GB, 11 years later, when hard drive capacities went up by at least a factor of 10x?

At least give us 30GB free, 15GB is just obnoxiously low for how much value G data mines from inboxes.

dotcoma2• 2 years ago

It was 1 GB when Yahoo! was offering I think 5 MB.

pilaf2• 2 years ago

It was just a very good client that worked well but roughly the same as people were already used to.

UI-wise, yes, but GMail was also the first mainstream "AJAX" [1] app. Before it the expectation was that clicking on almost anything on the page would cause a full page refresh. GMail was in part revolutionary because of how snappy it felt for a webmail client.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ajax_(programming)

HNDen213• 2 years ago

I remember using OWA (Outlook Web Access) before that.. but you are right this is the one that stands out..... soon after this Digg was created and the onslaught of all the web 2.0 sites like delicious, flickr etc etc

nerdjon• 2 years ago

I mean, even as someone who has now removed google from my life as much as possible including no longer relying on gmail.

I disagree, I think gmail was genuinely a step forward. I remember the yahoo of the time just being extremely clunky. A polished fast UI can be considered a revolution in its own right.

Wasn't it also one of the first to do HTML emails or am I mis-remembering?

The email threads were a really nice quality of life feature.

Of course we have the amount of space it gave you and that weird ticking space thing that made everyone's space go up at a consistent pace.

That being said, the way I see it. Email doesn't really need a revolution at this point in time. It does what it needs to do, it does it well (except for spam), and I feel like attempt to move past that (wasn't it google that showed off some sort of interactive emails?) are ultimately a bad thing.

Personally I like that email has stagnated a bit, let it do its job without tacking on feature after feature.

gsharma3• 2 years ago

HTML emails were there before, but I agree that fast UI and threads was a step up from Yahoo or Hotmail. Labels instead of folders, username+wildcard@ email addresses, filters (at least the UX was better than traditional rules). They also enabled POP and IMAP. IIRC, IMAP used to be a premium feature for email providers at that time.

I’m not sure about revolution, but e-mail can certainly be evolved.

20 years ago, not as many emails were sent, especially transactional emails. User behavior has evolved since then.

For example, storing email receipt of a random Amazon order from 2 years ago doesn’t make much sense these days.

Hey has addressed some of these changes, but there is a lot of room for improvement.

timbit42• 2 years ago

I've been using Gmail since its start and I don't remember it ever having a good client.

Gualdrapo• 2 years ago

I’ve seen so many of these revolutionary email clients over the years but they all fail.

Even their own _Inbox_ app failed, although mostly because Google _Googled_ it.

tivert• 2 years ago

The reason gmail was successful is that it didn’t revolutionize email. It was just a very good client that worked well but roughly the same as people were already used to.

I take it you never had a Hotmail account with 5mb mailbox limit (though by 2005 was a bit larger like maybe 10 or 20mb).

The revolutionary thing about gmail is that it offered 10x-100x more space than its competitors, for free. Everything else about it was whatever.

1vuio0pswjnm7• 2 years ago

"It's just too hard to get people to radically change their workflow, and tbh the current one isn't even that bad."

Gmail's update last month mandating use of Javascript radically changed workflow for me. The difference in speed and resource consumption for me against the faster HTML version is significant, not to mention an increasing cluttered interface. Over time, people get used to the slower speed. Very sad. More of our time and resources stolen by a so-called "tech" company. I thought I was free from this nonsense when I quit using Windows decades ago. I was wrong.

Gmail serves Google first and Gmail users second. When it wants to make changes that benefit Google, it can make them, no matter how "radical". Why. Because it's too difficult for Gmail users to find an alternative mail provider.

karaterobot• 2 years ago

This doesn't get around that boil-the-ocean problem with email. Even if I use a more privacy-focused email service, if the people I'm emailing with are using Gmail or Outlook, my data's out there anyway. You need everyone who's using Gmail to stop using it at the same time, or you're not really avoiding Gmail.

We don’t need to write “Don’t Be Evil” into our code of conduct because it’s in our DNA.

I mean, why not put it in there anyway then? Everybody thinks they're essentially good, including Google on the day they removed Don't Be Evil from their code of conduct.

rcMgD2BwE72F2• 2 years ago

Gmail has stagnated so much, I can't believe it. Fastmail Web and mobile apps are 100x better (fast as hell, much clearer UI, no clutter, no ads…). Idem for Web search, I find Kagi so much better…

I only use Youtube among all Google product nowadays, with lots of uBlock filters to make it simple (and remove all the crazy bad ads and recommendation). A few Google Maps search for location ratings (if only there was a review community for OrganicMaps…).

I benefit somehow from AOSP through LineageOS but without any of the Google tracking and useless products' bundling.

I hope my past investments don't make me too biases (shareholder from 2004 to 2012) but for the past decade, I feel like their products and services have become worse and worse.

I wish more people could afford paid services like Fastmail and Kagi, I'm sure Google would try a little to compete and improve their apps. But I believe they'll have to die before they start doing more than passively exploiting their monopoly to passively generate profits from ads powered by big (never really consented) data collection. I wish.

arbitrage• 2 years ago

Fastmail is a paid solution, and you are comparing it to the ad-laden version of gmail. They are absolutely going to be different experiences.

You do in fact appear to be heavily biased based on your previous involvement with google, it shows.

crisply5706• 2 years ago

Gmail is also a paid solution, and it's pure concentrated garbage whether or not you pay for it.

rcMgD2BwE72F2• 2 years ago

I have to use Gmail at work and we are definitely paying for this crap.

We're actually looking at replacing Google Workspace with Fastmail or some alternatives.

We'll only miss Google Sheet but we'll still have to use some of their development tools and services (due to Android being completely closed – no way you can publish apps without Google Play Services these times).

delduca2• 2 years ago

There's no such thing as free; when you don't pay for something, you're the product.

pif• 2 years ago

Yeah, it was a very nice revolution to look at all those ads matching the content of your email so well...

We definitely need another such a step towards the Hell!

mxuribe2• 2 years ago

I wish there was a new universal messaging platform that is:

* based on open protocols (to foster choice in clients, system providers, etc.)

* but whose encryption and security features are included from the ground up

* plus the platform and associated protocols would support both short-term/brief/ephemeral style messaging like texting, instant messaging, chat...Plus, the slower-style messaging of emails.

* finally, would be really great if the prime use-case was peer-to-peer communication *first* and only fall back to having a server (or server-related infra.) in those cases of bounce-back style issues, etc.

...But, maybe i'm asking too much in this age of blockchain, super-powered computing in phone-sized bricks, virtual/augmented reality, social media access to many global users, and AI.

I know, i know, I've pretty much showcased the theme of XKCD 927 [https://xkcd.com/927/] ...but what can i say, it feels like in this day and age, we shouldn't be where we are with messaging. ;-)

loudmax• 2 years ago

You do want server-related infrastructure, at least so the clients can find each other.

I think Matrix fits most of what you describe. I'd really like commercial Matrix offerings to become commonplace. I think there could be a market opportunity here, but most businesses would rather lock you into a proprietary service.

mxuribe2• 2 years ago

You're right that a server, or at least some server-like gateway node/mechanism (for discovery, client connections and likely other reasons - even if only temporary) would be needed.

Also, as far as matrix, yeah i count myself as a super-duper fan boy of matrix...so, you're preaching to the choir here! :-) I so badly want matrix to keep gaining more mindshare and keep evolving its protocols, etc. I guess it could be used for "slower" style messaging like email too i suppose. I guess that would be managed/controlled all in the UX for a particular desktop/web/mobile client.

Hmmm....I wonder what an email-style client would look like with matrix messaging underneath?

EDIT: By the way, @loudmax i failed to mention that there are already some matrix commercial hosting/service providers...but its still early days for them. I think it will take time before they are more plentiful and as you noted more commonplace (I look forward to that!). See: https://matrix.org/ecosystem/hosting/

blowski• 2 years ago

This seems like a generic advert for a generic email product, that's only posted here because it says "Google is bad". I don't disagree with the sentiment, but let's face it, if this company got the same level of traction as Google, we'd be talking about how they're now the bad guys and how do we migrate away from them.

delduca2• 2 years ago

I used Gmail for almost 18 years, but recently I switched to an email with my own domain and now use Apple Mail to read and send emails. It's not perfect, but Gmail was wearing me out. Even though I was paying for One, I was still being shown ads, which I find unacceptable.

20 years ago Gmail revolutionized email. It's time for a new revolution

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