News: 1592397014

If "imbox" is 'innovation', then please keep it away from me.

And wash your hands.

Agreed. There's nothing to see here that couldn't be done with a spam blocker and a few email rules.

I agree that spam blocking is far from perfect, but no different to having to approve all the senders for email to be visible in your 'imbox'

Honestly not sure why I'd want to pay that much to view the selection of trash in the demo imbox..

If I'm not getting $99 of value or better from it then I'm damn sure I won't pay for it. I also don't like the idea of linking to a service that can go bust and I lose it all..

is a good idea. Hopefully will be copied by others

Except perhaps they'll have a business plan which doesn't include "when we get to the stage of launching the app let's bitch and moan about apple because they won't drop fees for us because we're super special"

In most mail clients, file -> new folder -> enter "Reply later" in name field. If your IMAP server is not tightly controlled, they can even sync it for you. Setting that up might require a desktop client but a mobile client should be able to add the mailbox if you sync it. Admittedly, having that built in rather than having to create it might be easier for some people, but otherwise it's not that big a feature.

I've heard anecdotal evidence that email is already becoming passé with businesses moving to Slack/Teams/Hangouts/etc and individuals using Facebook/Whatsapp/etc.

With the likes of Google, Microsoft, et al offering free email services, I think paid for email/messaging is a tough market to be in.

The problem with Slack/Teams/Hangouts etc. and FB/WA is that they are all siloed. You have to be on that service.

For example, WhatsApp breaks GDPR and is theoretically illegal to use in Europe (although millions still do). So we use Signal and Threema, but their penetration is small, compared to WA.

For Slack and Teams, when it is internal communication, as long as the user has Teams etc. you can communicate with them. External is more error prone and makes people jump through hoops.

Email is universal. All servers"speak the same language".

That's the problem with any messaging service. You need the recipient of every message to be on that service. Virtually everyone who is on the Internet is available on email, and as it's a fairly well defined standard, you don't need to subscribe to a particular email service to send emails to others. Any sender can send to any receiver.

These services all have their advantages though, as it sounds like "Hey" does. I can see a few problems with it though. If you aren't allowed a signature, that may be a problem for some enterprise customers. Where I work, for instance, we are required to include various statements in our signature, including name, address, telephone or fax number and some pre-defined text.

You can simply copy and paste those various statements at the bottom of your message instead of a signature, can't you ?

Is that GDPR claim based on the contact list uploading thingy I just read about? I've personally never touched the thing, I was hearing about fundamental security issues with its design back in the early days and now it's Just Another Facebook Product.

Email is universal, but it's also old and ropey and heaped with proprietary extensions and headers and other assorted nonsenses. I'm honestly surprised that a gold-standard open source replacement hasn't come to the fore yet. Way too many companies wanting to do their own thing and then also "diversify" into a swamp of unwanted services and bloat. I'm seeing more and more friends pop up on Signal over the past couple of years though, which is nice.

Yes. WhatsApp loads the contacts onto their US servers and shares it with Facebook. That isn't allowed under GDPR.

Signal, on the other hand checks contracts against a hash, AFAIK.

Having battled with Gmail/Gsuite on a daily basis in a corporate environment I can cheerfully say that Google is busily shooting itself in the foot and hastening the demise of email via Gmail. I never thought I'd see the day when I uttered " Come back Outlook, you were great " on such a regular basis.

My Gmail account is just a collecting ground for site registrations that are unimportant and where I suspect it will be bombarded with spam.

Everything else goes to one of my "real" email addresses.

E-mail really just works. If you don't like your provider it's pretty damn easy to move all your old e-mail as long as you control the domain. This is example of why standard protocols are good.

Some people think that these IRC-like services will solve the problem of too much e-mail. Until the network effect kicks in and you're back to square one. Or worse, because chat is really inefficient. On a service which now owns your data: lock-in that you pay for.

Some companies (KLM) are trying to move to WhatsApp for customer service, probably because they benefit from the metadata that Facebook can provide them.

" businesses moving to Slack/Teams/Hangouts/etc "

That's fine for internal communication, I guess, but I don't think you'll find IBM sharing Teams with Apple any time soon.

Between companies, you still need regular old email.

And as for individuals, God preserve me from a day where I have to have a FaceBook account to send my daughter or my wife something. I don't see how giving my life up to that slimeball is better than email.

The Google and Apple app stores, with their fat margins, are obvious targets for being fragmented on monopoly grounds.

It'd be a good idea for them to start providing better resources to reduce malware etc and more flexible terms to reduce the clamour for change from developers... but maybe they'll just decide that fat profits in the short term is the best approach.

Now where have I seen something like that? I know, a text only e-mail client that allows filtering of incoming mail into various sub-folders that you can define and even allow moving a mail to one of those folders. Strange I have been using that since the mid 1990s. The fact it is text only prevents the 'click on a link' problem and I can see the full url although the spam filter tends to sort them out now after years of learning.

Oh, I forgot, it is PMMail/2 running on OS/2.

Ah, the OS/2 nostalgia wave that just broke on me...

If you'll excuse me I'm going to go get my big OS/2 box out of the cupboard and give it a big hug. Then probably go for a quick cry...

I'm sure people have been doing this with mutt since the 1970s…

I'm currently using MailMate on MacOS for this kind of thing and [1]Andew Cannion wrote a nice article on how to do the kind of things with MailMate (and SaneBox for the pattern-matched based stuff)

[1] https://blog.andrewcanion.com/2020/06/16/replicating-heycom-features.html

Same advantages for pine (now alpine) - all text, no crap. Email from people is text, and I read it. Email from Corporate Entities is generally an attempt to reproduce a Corporate Web Page, and I decline to view that sort of drek. Especially likely to be seen as unwanted are those propaganda missives that include -only- an HTML part, as if their particular shouty message could only be expressed with the garish and vulgar typography they invariably select ("web designers"). Words have always been the best way for me to express and understand complex concepts, so if you're sending me pictures of Shiny Things and your words are "Buy This!", then you've made yourself rather unattractive in the competition for my attention.

Perhaps worse - and certainly highly irritating - is the corporate habit of sending emails which are carefully formatted to look as if they are on the company headed paper and are too wide to fit in the viewing window of the company mandated viewer... and naturally, won't reflow as text ought to.

A triumph of style over substance - though it's only in rare cases that the substance is anything to worry about...

These guys never heard of Whatsapp or what?

How on earth do you organise anything with WhatsApp?

Hey, come on now. It's pretty common knowledge that the Government, and Parliament more widely, use WhatsApp groups for a wide range of different…oh right, I see now

I thought it was just to be spammed by people going ZOMG SIGN UP TO THIS MESSAGING APP on my corporate phone number.

People often stop responding to me when I ask if they have read the EULA (Top tip to get people to leave you alone!).

" Hansson claims Apple's App Store practices are "capricious, exploitive, and inconsistent." "

Says the gobshite who can't be arsed getting it to work with standard email clients, and ransoms you to $99 as it stops him selling your data.

Shove your imbox up your marse.

The only outrageous demand is the $99 per year that these guys want for what is basically a few filters.

So the story here appears to be CEO of company doesn't mind proving he's a total idiot in public.

Apple charge 30% on the AppStore. So do Google on Play. This has been the case since day one and everyone knows it.

Pay it or don't publish on those stores.

Not exactly. If you use in-app purchasing, they do, and that's common knowledge. However, there are lots of apps that do not do that and yet get money. You sign up for an account, add a payment method in that account, and use the app to access the account. There are lots of those out there, and they don't get evicted. I'm guessing they don't get evicted because Apple doesn't want grumpy users of what are primarily apps created by big businesses. The fact remains, however, that many apps are out there which receive money from inside the app or require a subscription where none of the revenue goes directly to Apple. As much as I don't care about this app, there is a reason to complain if they tried the same model and got removed without consistency. Since Apple won't talk about exactly what they used to make the decision and this app will always try to present their actions in the best light, I cannot know if what I presume is true.

Right, so how are you going to get your software installed on the massive user base who use iOS?

I normally give the Fruity company a general nod, but their App Store is just a money machine for them and verging on the monopolistic when you look at how many people use iPhones and want to install apps. Bad Apple. It doesn't cost them much to host an app on their store, but they regard it as a cash cow.

FFS, why isn't their cut something more reasonable like 1%?

Because they make more money if it is 30%, and they don't give a toss about the developers or customers as long as they get the money? Seems like a possibility to me.

"Hey describes itself as a "full email service provider" with a few key features.": Let's look at them.

"You have to approve senders, who until then are listed in a "first-time senders" section. If rejected, subsequent emails go directly into a spam box.": So I have two sections. Emails from people I know and other ones. And, just like most other clients, there's a button to block the sender. Good to know.

"You can enable a sender to bypass the quarantine by giving them a code; these can be regenerated to prevent leaked codes causing trouble.": So if I understand this correctly, I'll be talking to someone else who wants to email me. I'll give them my email address, but then I'll also have to say "Wait a minute. My email is paranoid and will block you so I'm going to generate a number on my phone. Please put that number into your email in some place, I'm not really sure, and you'll bypass my system's filters". This is somehow more difficult than just going to see them in the first-time senders box?

"The inbox is renamed the "Imbox" on the basis that anything that makes it is Important.": Maybe it's just me, but that sounds childish.

"File attachments that you send are not included with the email, but sent as links to files stored on Basecamp's servers.": So it triggers spam filters that see a link to an unfamiliar server, huh? And it probably tracks people who access my attachments, exactly when or how many times, etc. The attachments don't get autostored on my recipients system like they usually do, so they might try to access it later only to find the server's deleted it. If I want to send them a link, I'll upload my own file somewhere I control, thank you very much.

"You can rename or merge email threads;": Sounds handy. I assume this is retroactive, not just what I can do during a reply. Maybe a useful feature.

"and email trackers, which tell the sender when you opened the message, are mostly blocked. "We bulk strip everything that even smells like a spy pixel,": Good job. How does this compare to the don't-load-remote-content feature on mail clients?

"In addition, all images are routed through the Hey servers so that the recipient's IP address is never revealed.": This is a nice privacy feature. I already have it by not loading the content, plus there are other mailservers which already do that.

"No automated signatures or footers are allowed." ... "The email already says it's from you. If someone needs your phone number, they can ask,": I'm restricted in what I can put into my own emails? Not that you strip the signatures from incoming emails when I wouldn't want them, but you strip them out of my own emails? Do you understand what user choice is? If I want to have a signature that gives someone alternate methods of contacting me in an emergency, or other people who might be better able to handle their question, I certainly will and getting in my way is ill-advised.

"The system does not show numbers of unread messages as this is an unnecessary distraction.": Or it's a method of finding out if you have new emails without the notification sound turned on. If you leave any messages unread, a flag will be up, and if you get some new ones, the number is higher. I can see it at a glance.

"Notifications are off, though you can enable notifications for specific senders or threads.": This is nice. I don't know many mail clients that allow me to tailor my notifications by specific message characteristics. I'd also like it if I could set different sounds or vibrations for that as well. That's a feature worth having.

"Attachments are filed automatically in an attachment library.": I'm not sure exactly what this means, but if it's just a window to see all attachments, why not.

"A "Reply later" folder lets you store emails for attention at another time – better than the common technique of marking an email unread, according to Basecamp.": Create any extra folders you want. I can do that too.

"Another feature is the ability to expand all unread emails in a single action so you can scroll through without opening each one individually.": I don't need that, but I can see why someone might.

"There is also a technique for managing frequent senders: you can bundle all their messages together so "they'll only take up a single row in your Imbox.": Possibly useful feature.

This looks like four useful features, five detrimental features, and three neutral features that are already possible. I have a suggestion for you guys. Ditch the server part. That's where most of your detrimental features are. Just implement a mail client program with the features you like, which includes all of the useful ones, and we can look at getting it later. No annual fee, perhaps, but maybe people will agree to buy it. I'd try to be less heavy-handed with your preferences, though.

As part of my job is to find new and interesting apps, I've seen enough mail apps that promise to save us from email. Just keep searching... Nothing checks enough of the boxes to pass muster.

....is something that everyone needs.