[pmlnr]

Email was meant to be kept simple, and Google is making this exponentially hard with every single "design" iteration. Get off Gmail - it'll break your email.

The article has very good points, especially when it touches the issue of "hidden" mail, like the promotions tab: there are labels and tabs. There should be only one system, and no, don't hide things from the user at this level. When there's 17k mails in promotions, eating up 6GB alert them, let them know. (This ties back to how WordPress keeps hiding anything technical from users, which is also bad[^1])

Filtering on Gmail is outrageous, especially when you compare it to Sieve. No option to match on custom header, seriously?

Things like unprintable email is a bad joke. Unprintable? What if I connect to Gmail with mutt? It gives the sense of a false security.

I'm aware of all the arguments against email, but so far nobody could come up with a robust, reliable (see SMTP retries), async, world wide, federated solution, that even touches the level of email.

Here's a revolutionary idea: instead of trying to come up with a new email, stop breaking the current one, and keep using it.

[^1]: https://www.rarst.net/wordpress/technical-responsibility/

[mseebach]

> Email was meant to be

Email isn't a religion and originalism isn't a meaningful framework for analysis.

Email started as a simple answer to a simple question, and has evolved from there to answer increasing hard questions. The original inventors totally failed to anticipate many important realities about email (most significantly, spam, but also encryption and signing), and email has evolved to deal with that.

You're free to keep using email as you believe it should be used, but you have no right to insist that other people hold back in adopting new ways of doing things that they feel suits them better.

[heavenlyblue]

> increasing hard questions

Over the past, what... 30 years? - e-mail remains what it had been in the first place: a protocol for exchanging messages.

You're still sending text. You're still attaching links to your messages if you'd like to send a large file. You're still trying to keep concise in your comm.

What have evolved, exactly? Sans encryption - that's not really a "hard question". Gmail's a great spam-free platform, but it doesn't add anything revolutionary.

[mikeash]

Being spam free was revolutionary when Gmail was new. It also revolutionized email by offering enough space that you could actually keep an archive. When most providers offered maybe 10MB, Gmail offered 1GB.

If those don’t sound revolutionary today, it’s only because Gmail revolutionized things so hard that everyone had to jump on board.

[heavenlyblue]

You're only seeing it from one perspective: from the perspective of a single non-power user - yes, Gmail made the difference.

But in terms of proper e-mail usage: be it through MS Exchange, University campuses, corporate servers - they made no difference. Everyone already had enough space there anyway, and spam filters <mostly> worked - as they had enough email volume to detect attack. And they still use these systems.

[daveFNbuck]

I switched to gmail after losing my college account upon graduation. I'm sure my college is still using this system, but it's not available to me. Neither are the corporate e-mails for jobs I've left. For personal e-mail, almost everyone is a single non-power user.

[Yetanfou]

I worked as a service developer at a large telco in Europe, building - among other things - mail infrastructure. If there was one thing I would not have uttered in that context it would have been '...proper e-mail usage ... through MS Exchange'. We fought tooth and nail to be able to have 'proper email' despite the insistence of corporate to use MS Exchange. In the end we ended up with two machines on each desk, one of them for the sole purpose of communicating with those parts of the company which used MS Exchange.

Things might be less bad nowadays, I don't know. What I know about MS Exchange is enough to keep away from it.

[mikeash]

As a university user at the time, it certainly wasn’t my experience that everyone already had enough space, or that spam filtering worked.

[twblalock]

> You're only seeing it from one perspective: from the perspective of a single non-power user - yes, Gmail made the difference.

That's the perspective of most people. They are not power users, they don't have the technical ability to deal with complicated email systems, and they just want something free that works well.

Your concept of "proper" email usage doesn't cover most of the population.

[toopsss]

> Everyone already had enough space there anyway

Lol my 100mb before the uni (National top 30 research) switched to gmail was definitely plenty of space. And google should have just hired the $7/hr freshman that configured spamassassin instead of wasting all that money on Postini. You’re funny; don’t quit your day job though.

[coldtea]

>Over the past, what... 30 years? - e-mail remains what it had been in the first place: a protocol for exchanging messages.

The difference is (a) those messages started to measure in the hundreds or thousands per day, not 5 of them at most like in the eighties, (b) people started using it for all kinds of work collaboration and organization. Not just some academics exchanging ideas.

[heavenlyblue]

So what collaborative features unique to Gmail does the organisation you work for currently actively uses?

PS: please do not say "Hangouts", as Hangouts are only loosely integrated with Gmail. These are two separate systems and it does seem they are still unsure if these two should be merged together.

[coldtea]

Why do they have to be "unique to Gmail"? The parent's argument was that email is the same thing for 30+ years.

Several mail programs have added integrated calendars and notifications, email snoozing, labels, classification into buckets, context, and so on -- including basics like search.

And of course there are the apps and plugins -- e.g. Asana within Gmail and the like.

[twblalock]

Good spam filters, tags instead of folders, and a lot of storage were the features Gmail brought to the table, for free, that made it so popular.

It was also a nicer web interface than the competition -- so nice that it managed to get a lot of people to use it instead of desktop mail clients, which were the norm at the time.

[coldtea]

>Filtering on Gmail is outrageous, especially when you compare it to Sieve. No option to match on custom header, seriously?

What percentage of users would even know what a custom header is, much less ever attempt to match one?

Is that what one would call a basic feature lacking from Gmail, for its lack to guarantee a "seriously?"?

[jadeklerk]

+1 to this. You have to realize that over a billion users use gmail. You can't possibly imagine that prioritizing .0000000001% of users that know about something like filtering on custom headers is remotely good decision-making against all the other work being done that helps the majority of users.

[pmlnr]

I have Gmail at work, and I can't filter on list ID in the header.

Gmail is not just simple users, it's also corporate who's paying for it.

[coldtea]

It's not like 99% of corporate users know about headers and header filters either.

[jiveturkey]

but you can. isn’t list name filter the list id? works for me.

[Jaruzel]

> Things like unprintable email is a bad joke. Unprintable? What if I connect to Gmail with mutt? It gives the sense of a false security.

I'm not a GMail user, but can someone explains how this 'security' feature works? If a GMail user creates a 'secure' email and sends it to a non-GMail recipient (so it goes over SMTP/TLS), how is the DRM enforced at the other end. I know MS Outlook has DRM features.. but are they compatible with GMail's ?

[mseebach]

It's not "secure" and it's not "enforced", at least not in the strict senses of those words. It's a protection against accidents and carelessness, sensitive information being reply-all'd around in long threads that people aren't reading anymore, the accidental forward to an external party.

Many organisations for whom this is an attractive feature, have long had policies around emailing sensitive information, instead links are emailed, and securing access to the information is handled by the application. If the link is forwarded to the wrong person, all they can see is a login screen.

[amoshi]

If you for example send an expiring email, the recipient will receive an email with a link to some online storage where this expiration will be enforced, the email itself won't contain the content.

[shaklee3]

Gmail is the only one that displays it as an email. All other clients and servers will just see it as a link. That's how they handle the self-destruction.

[Normal_gaussian]

> Things like unprintable email is a bad joke. Unprintable? What if I connect to Gmail with mutt? It gives the sense of a false security.

It also fundamentally breaks with what the user expects. The user expects their email to be theirs, to do with what they will. I know of no situation in which I would like an email which I specifically cannot print; I have no idea how I would explain it to my Grandfather.

[potatoyogurt]

It's not really about ordinary users like you. Google is shifting their strategy for Google Drive more towards enterprise, and this is a useful feature for enterprise users. Have you ever seen one of those email signatures stating "this email is property of XXX corporation, etc. etc." or seen an email sent to a large group of people in a company with strong exhortations not to send it anywhere else? This is a strict improvement over that. Yes, people can actively work around the printing restriction, so it's not 100% secure. But people were already using email for sensitive information, and this decreases the ways the information can get leaked from negligence or active subversion to just subversion.

[spookthesunset]

> Yes, people can actively work around the printing restriction, so it's not 100% secure.

And the people that do work around it in order to violate company policy can be dealt with here in meatspace.

Eg: HR -- "We didn't want you printing that sensitive email.... why did you go out of your way to print it?"

[Normal_gaussian]

And by doing so, it is still violating what the user expects.

[pmlnr]

e-MAIL. The stress is on the mail part. When your Grandfather sends a letter via post, he doesn't expect it to be his anymore, does he?

[Normal_gaussian]

No. He bloody well expects what comes through the door with his name on it to be his to do with as he pleases.

[Illniyar]

That's the other way around. The grandfather is the one receiving the email that he can't print.

[pmlnr]

I misunderstood the parent. Sorry, and you are right.

[Waterluvian]

If I want to take my 20GB of email out of Gmail and put it elsewhere for the next 15 years without having to think about it, where do I go?

[peatmoss]

You might also consider registering a vanity domain to go with your Fastmail (or other) subscription. It’ll allow you to keep your email address even if Fastmail gets evil / bad in the future.

When I bought my domain, it was before Gmail was as ubiquitous as it is today. My email was hosted by a mom and pop ISP. Then I moved to Gmail and later to Fastmail.

Having my own domain is inexpensive, fun, and lets me maintain email portability over time. Namecheap is a good, easy registrar. I moved to them a while back and was impressed at their documentation and help during that domain transfer.

[techsupporter]

For those reading along at home, I want to strongly second your recommendation for people who really care about their e-mail (and, to some extent, overall identity on the Internet) to buy a custom domain.

Me, my spouse, and my teenaged kid all have our own domains. They're all hosted at Fastmail under a group account and we all can have as many additional addresses tied to our regular accounts as we want.

It does cost a bit more ($15/year/domain at Gandi, my preferred registrar) than just paying Fastmail directly and using one of their domains or sticking with the costs-no-money Gmail offering but it's been worth it in unexpected ways. My kid, for instance, is following in the "family business footsteps" and doing IT work for small clients. Since he had his own domain, he can have prospective clients e-mail him at "[e-mail]" My spouse uses a bazillion aliases for spam and inbound e-mail filtering without tipping off the spammers to the underlying e-mail address by having to use the + notation.

Someday, when my kid strikes out fully on his own, he'll be able to take his domain with him to wherever he wants (even host it on Gmail, if he prefers) without losing any of his addresses or other contacts. My domain has been around for over two decades and has been hosted in easily 20 different places, but my main e-mail address has remained the same.

It's nice and worth the money.

[Waterluvian]

Good advice. I assume I can forward my Gmail because that address has been my address for as long as gmail has existed. This is just like cell numbers. You attach one to everything in your life and transitioning is near impossible. Glad the government forced free number transfer. If only emails worked the same way.

[cdubzzz]

I had a bit of concern about this as well when I moved off Gmail after 12 years. I did not import my mail in to my new service (ProtonMail) and can really only recall one or two times I’ve had to look at the Gmail archive in the past two years.

I think that, similar to cell phone numbers, people get very attached to these contact points and changing them creates anxiety. I happen to have changed both email address and phone number (after five years) recently and I think it makes sense to do once in a while. Otherwise these things become seemingly permenant identifiers and I have enough of those already (:

[zwkrt]

I recently moved email out of Google and it was surprisingly easy to migrate most services to the new address. The tricky ones are the email-as-username services.

[peatmoss]

Yes, I’d forward emails until you can get everyone trained over to using your new email address. I’ve done that in the past with mostly inactive emails that I got through professional or academic associations. Presumably Gmail still makes auto-forwarding reasonably easy.

[distances]

Why not just leave the forwarding on? I still have my first e-mail address from the 90s forwarding all incoming mail to my current one, though it's very rare by now that anything comes.

[peatmoss]

You could! The only reason not to is if you wanted to close the account for some reason.

[StavrosK]

I second Fastmail. Great company, great service, super fast (much faster than Gmail), and the import process is trivial. I've been a happy user for years and recommend them to everyone.

Seriously, migration is as easy as pointing your MX records to them and running their import tool. It takes ten minutes (I thought switching off Gmail would take ages, but no, literal ten minutes).

[toomuchtodo]

This is phenomenal to hear (import process ease). Can’t wait for them to support multiple labels.

[conradk]

That would be great indeed!

I think the problem here is that this is a Gmail-specific, non-standard feature, meaning there is no specification that allows to implement this in a reliable, cross-client way.

However, Fastmail is working on something similar with JMAP.

I found this earlier HN comment to be really interesting: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16372835

[toomuchtodo]

> However, Fastmail is working on something similar with JMAP.

They are! [1]

"It really is coming in JMAP! Come along to IETF in London to have a play, or I'll be pushing out links to updated JMAP Proxy in the next couple of weeks and you can play with it there :)"

Once they've got JMAP nailed down, they'd just need to support Gmail's native API [2] for retrieving rich message data for their import process.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16375101

[2] https://developers.google.com/gmail/api/guides/

[StavrosK]

Yeah, it was really easy. You basically give them IMAP credentials and that's it. They even do some clever stuff about putting your mail in the folders it should be when importing from Gmail, although now I forget exactly what.

[zitterbewegung]

I would use fastmail https://www.fastmail.com/pricing/

I used to use it for awhile. Then I got some AWS credit so I setup Amazon Work Mail.

[eikenberry]

Lots of recommendations for Fastmail and while there is nothing wrong with them, here are some alternatives in case you want to shop around.

runbox.com (cheapest for >1 user)

rackspace.com/email-hosting

zoho.com/mail

www.gandi.net (free w/ domain registration)

[bluedino]

Pull it all out with IMAP and then stick it wherever you want after that

[moltar]

FastMail

[ShorsHammer]

> like the promotions tab

Settings >> Inbox type >> Unread first

Suddenly all that junk previously ignored is prominent again. Within a week I had unsubscribed from 95% of unwanted correspondence. Was quite liberating to have a real inbox again.

[michaelmior]

My understanding is that if you connect with a non-Gmail client or send to a non-Gmail user, the email is just a link to a webpage that enforces the restrictions.

[pletnes]

Printscreen.

Photograph your screen with your phone.

It’s still just a «please don’t print».

[jclos]

It's not meant to stop malicious users, it's meant to stop careless ones. Malicious users will always find a way.

[0x00000000]

> Things like unprintable email is a bad joke. Unprintable? What if I connect to Gmail with mutt? It gives the sense of a false security

Funny when you look at Chrome where they don't protect saved passwords to avoid giving users a "false sense of security and encouraging dangerous behavior"[1], which seems to be a valid argument here too

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6166886

[hshehehjdjdjd]

What possible protection could you have in a non-master password scenario? If you’ve decided that you don’t want the user to have to enter a password, it’s game over from a perspective of trying to keep the password from being retrieved by an attacker with local execution. Even with a master password, you’re only safe until you enter it, then the attacker has that info as well.

[arkitaip]

It used to be that you had to use Chrome's dev tools to inspect a password field and change it to a text field to see someone's password. These days not even that is required as the password is plainly visible as a element attribute called data-initial-value.

[ghaff]

I agree that things like unprintability probably give a false sense of security. But as far as how email is “supposed” to be I used an email system in the late eighties or so that had security features like that. They meant more then because it was originally a centralized terminal based system. Not everything was Unix.

[jasode]

>Email was meant to be kept simple, [...] instead of trying to come up with a new email, stop breaking the current one, and keep using it.

The "email was meant to be kept simple" can't be stated in isolation. Many suffering recipients of email see the outside world stuffing their inbox as making "email complicated". They can't control how others misuse email.

Paul Graham explained that email has become overwhelming for him and his peers.[1]

What's your recommendation for their pain points with the current email system?

[1] from 7m29s to 11m50s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9ITLdmfdLI&feature=youtu.be...

[cup-of-tea]

It seems like he's talking about a very specific use of email. I can't be the only person who actually writes letters to people using email and not expecting anything to end up on their "todo list".

[jasode]

>I can't be the only person who actually writes letters to people using email and not expecting anything to end up on their "todo list".

Many like you definitely exist but your "pure 100% communications only" usage isn't what the Gmail enhancements (that many dislike) were trying to solve.

The blog author, Avi Ashkenazi, wrote:

>From a business perspective I understand that there are more people using Gmail than Calendar, Keep or the new Tasks, but the way Google has attempted to bring people into the fold and have them use add-ons and the rest of their products is just crazy.

There is overlap between the non-communication features that Avi Ashkenazi mentioned and what Paul Graham is talking about. PG recommends creating a new and different protocol. Avi Ashkenazi is saying don't try to shoehorn things like "tasks" into the Gmail UI/UX because it makes it complicated. Google/Alphabet apparently is working from a different philosophical base: many people use Gmail as the central dashboard so let's put everything there.

[heavenlyblue]

The issue with this approach is that quite frankly - email by itself should be just like our water supply.

Better water exists, but it's not much better than the usual one. You can use water for many things, but it doesn't matter whose supply you're using.

E-mail must be kept that way: there's nothing to invent in terms of email itself. You can only invent on top of it. It's just like HTTP: HTTP/2 exists, but it doesn't change the idea of HTTP, it only evolves it.

[pmlnr]

Use CalDAV for tasks sync, keep email for communication?

Again, stop breaking it.

[jasode]

>, keep email for communication? Again, stop breaking it.

It's a matter of a different perspective and "breaking it" is in the eye of the beholder.

For many end users of email (and Google Inc's point-of-view apparently), it's the other users sending me emails that's "breaking it" beyond SMTP's original design intentions.

>Use CalDAV for tasks sync,

E.g. it's the other users who send "tasks" and "appointments" inside a freeform email instead of strictly using CalDAV. Their abuses of email has broken the SMTP system. If overloaded email usage by other humans who don't categorize what they send into strict protocols such as CalDAV is a fact of life, the Google response is to add some complexity to the UX/UI to let users conveniently copy paste it into the sidebars for Tasks and Calendar. Google may be wrong (as the blog post argues) but I think it's worth entertaining the idea that the multipurpose usage of email has already "broken email".

For many people, your suggestion of putting 17k of emails into a single namespace alongside other important emails is not acceptable. They want a UX/UI to make a first crude pass at filtering it into a hierarchy. This does have a negative side effect if "hiding" it from some users who don't notice it's there.

[hota_mazi]

Get off Gmail and get on... what?

You're only offering non constructive criticism. Gmail is light years ahead of any other email client I have tried so far.

[pmlnr]

It's really not, nor the web client, nor the provider, and the options are plenty, mentioned even in this very thread.

Fastmail, self hosted iredmail, protonmail, etc., are fine providers.

Geary, rainloop, macos mail, k9, are very nice clients.

Have you actually tried any alternative clients, before you made this comment?

[always_good]

Protonmail doesn't even have fulltext search (truly a joke). Fastmail just feels like a worse Gmail client, only redeeming if you particularly care about paying for a service.

I have to agree with them.

Also, pretty weak rhetoric to suggest someone hasn't tried the alternatives. Can I assume you haven't tried Protonmail because I can't understand how someone can say email without search is better than Gmail.

[pmlnr]

I run my mail server, I tried out rainloop, roundcube, pine, mutt, evolution, geary, thunderbird, claws recently, used to do outlook, outlook express, horde, even squirelmail. By comparison, gmail is not superior, and isn't, by far, capable of everything thunderbird can be with a few addons.

[criddell]

I too would leave GMail (Inbox) if I could find a web client I like as well.

For work, I use Thunderbird because I need Enigmail for PGP and I absolutely hate it.

Inbox does an almost perfect job of catching spam and sorting my mail. It has saved me many hours over the years.

[twblalock]

Do you honestly believe that self-hosting email is a valid solution for normal people?

[pmlnr]

Not for them to be run personally, but say, a friend can set up an raspberry pi like box, with yunohost or iredmail even at their home, turn unattended upgrades on centos, that's done for ~7 years.

[Mister_Snuggles]

Gmail is not just an email client though, it's also the email provider.

If you want to get off of Gmail the client, you can use an IMAP client like Apple Mail, Thunderbird, etc. There are quirks with how the IMAP protocol's concepts get mapped to Gmail's concepts though.

If you want to get off of Gmail the provider, that's a different story. There are many free and paid providers, but there's still a large effort to switch since you have to ask people to update your email address and probably keep the old one around (and forwarding to the new one) for a long time. If you have your own domain that's backended by Gmail, this is a lot easier.

[333c]

Regarding getting off of Gmail:

I switched away from Gmail at the start of 2018. So far everything has gone smoothly. My new email provider (Fastmail) has a tool to import all emails from another provider, which ran overnight. I forward all mail from my Gmail address to my new address. One feature of Gmail which makes it particularly easy to switch away from is that it's free, so I can keep my Gmail account open indefinitely to forward mail.

Asking people to update my address hasn't been a huge problem. Even when they email me at the old one, I still get their messages.

[nasredin]

One more stupid design:

Deleting an email in a thread:

Find a small button. Click. Find "delete". It is in the middle of the list. This is just simply stupid. Click.

BTW you should delete your email. IIRC after 6 month (?) the government doesn't need a warrant to access it.

[pmlnr]

> the government

Which country?

[ReverseCold]

https://www.aclu.org/youre-not-gonna-need-warrant