Recently I was on a cruise ship, and out in the waters only my carriers “maritime” plan was available - for those that don’t know, the rates are eye watering. $4 pr MB - and the onboard Wi-Fi was either completely down, or down in the low tens Kbps speed.
The difference between having a bare-bones HTML page, versus a bloated one, could make a significant price difference.
With that said, I’m sure that’s just an extreme edge case - but still a legit one. If you’re stuck out in nowhere with low and/or prohibitively expensive internet, you want a fast and small alternative.
Not an extreme case. There are times when I can barely get above 100kbps in spotty areas in some buildings. Loading the gmail web page is painful. HTML button appears immediately at the bottom while the website is struggling to load and clicking it will load emails. Very helpful if you ask me.
It is incredibly inconvenient to log in on such device, especially if your primary one isn't available. I ended up writing down backup authenticator codes in my diary. Of course it kinda defeats the purpose and of course it's hard for users to figure out.
If you can even do that, since they [e-mail hosts] go out of their way to make it difficult - even impossible, in some cases - to push people to use their own app.
Yeah... if only that worked with GMail. You cannot do proper authentication with GMail anymore. You need an elaborate dance, which will depend on how old your GMail account is (they became bolder with time and started to require more personal data from users), you will need to procure a special permit for your IMAP program to connect to GMail, and the way to do that changed over time. Also, newer GMail accounts cannot be registered without MFA, so you'll have to figure out how to deal with that.
Having a very old GMail account, I still hold on to it, because I can still use IMAP in Gnus. But, should I lose that, or should Google finally curb my tiny freedoms... I'll have to look for alternatives too.
sdf.org is splendid and their webmail is squirrelmail. $36 for lifetime membership is pretty good, and it is a considerably more ethical and private alternative than gmail.
It's become pretty clear that a lot of developers never test their websites or apps in low bandwidth environments.
Testing over a heavily throttled connection that drops packets should be a mandatory part of usability testing for anything intended to be used over the Internet.
The NPR One app used to chew through a few hundred mb of data in "caching" every time you started it. No way to restrict this function to wifi only. And no, you can't select bit rates.
Also Zoom has little ability to minimize the audio or video data usage (but I've learned you can reduce how much of others video is sent to you by reducing the window size). Just wish I could set myself to 480p to be present but not destroy my data while working at the cabin.
I always found zoom much better at saving bits than other video conferencing systems. The fact that when you intermittently dropped out you catch up on the sped up audio always seemed neat (although I'm unsure if that was an intended feature, or just a side effect).
> I always found zoom much better at saving bits than other video conferencing systems.
Likely true. Zoom doesn't chew up much bandwidth. I always find it funny when people think they need to upgrade their home internet bandwidth because a family "works & studies from home". Unless you're up/downloading huge media files, several instances of Zoom and virtual desktops will consume less than a 4k Netflix stream.
MS Teams is terrible at this too, I need it to only send me audio and ignore video, because a lot of times I am at sea with poor connection - these are company ships, so it's needed for a lot of folks at work...
No idea if there’s a native way to do this in Zoom since I don’t have that problem, but if you’re concerned about your upload bitrate, you can use OBS to downsample your camera and configure Zoom to use OBS’s virtual camera instead.
In India on TVs, (where people use 4g to watch content) Google added a data saver mode in Android TV. They just shape the trafic down (to 500kBps iirc?). I guess that was easier than trying to convince app developers to reduce their data usage on a system flag. That's stupid for a lot of reasons, but I guess in your case that would work.
I strongly disagree that this is in the hands of the developers.
People used to say the same about accessibility until the ADA lawsuits started coming in forcing businesses to take it seriously.
There needs to be a business incentive to spend developer time on low bandwidth. Progressive web apps that cache stuff are about all you're gonna get for now.
> Testing over a heavily throttled connection that drops packets should be a mandatory part of usability testing for anything intended to be used over the Internet.
And this is actually easy to do, as Google Chrome Devtools can simulate this environment with a click.
Because the higherups who OK these decisions and designs and demand every user sees a shiny animation or popover that drives their next promotion have an idealistic vision in their mind of a user who is 'always connected', always online, using a perfectly calibrated high resolution screen, and the latest modern high power device purchased with a quarter million dollar yearly salary just like them.
His point is, there are data limited environments.
This point stands, no matter what you think of his cruise?
Also, who can decide, what is really necessary? And I don't have hard data at hand, but I cannot imagine a cruise to be more expensive in its impact, compared to flying somewhere for vacation.
Cruise ships directly introduce pollutants into the local maritime environment. These include oily bilge water, grey water, and others, not including sulfur emissions from the engines
If you have to search to see if the Devil’s Advocate alternative you’re trying to gotcha OP on, who is being presumptive? Maybe you could’ve searched first?
The vast majority of cruises are pretty shitty for the environment and treatment of people. Also tax avoidant. People just really don’t want to hear that so they can keep doing them and not think about the down sides.
If you have to search to see if the Devil’s Advocate alternative you’re trying to gotcha OP on, who is being presumptive? Maybe you could’ve searched first?
My point had to do with the extreme accusatory nature of the post, without data to back it up.
My post was absolutely the reverse of presumptive, for I asked is someone was being so, not asserting that they were.
A green cruise ship is like a green aircraft or a green car: it does not really exist. Just building it is already costly, and so is operating it. Filters and tanks are just shifting the problem, as well.
But that’s beside the point anyway, as it was just raised as an ad hominem argument against the guy who wanted websites to work on poor connections, and rightly so.
My imagination is augmented by some physic education, so I know how much fuel a starting plane consumes, as well as flying around the globe with ~1000 km/h.
A ship on the other hand is very fuel efficient. But it maybe runs longer, if it is a cruise. Still, 2 flights forn1 week vacation are likely way worse, than 1 week cruise.
(And I will likely go by train towards my vacation, but this is not always possible)
> A ship on the other hand is very fuel efficient.
They also run on absolutely terrible fuel, very low quality and with lots of impurities. Pollution is not only greenhouse gases. I am not saying planes are much better, but both are really quite bad.
I'm on an ship doing oceanographic survey work in the arctic. StarLink is $5000 for 5 TB. Without it, we're on iridium, which both eye-wateringly expensive and slow (1MB up and down). Low bandwidth mode would be hella appreciated right now.
Interestingly, one of the major sucks for these LEO systems does not appear to be bandwidth. It's the route. We throttled the ship down to 2 Mbps for a while (100 pax) and Google properties are actually quite snappy while everything else is dead slow to the point of timing out. Turns out Google arranged to have Starlink ground stations installed in their data centers. That takes off a lot of hops. Amazon was one of the few other things that would load.
I hate to sound like a shill for big tech, but I get the sense Google and Amazon actually give a shit about speed. When you measure your bandwidth bill in billions, you can afford to?
There are other affordances though: the fleet can now have a legitimate chance of standardizing on a coherent software platform, reduce the network admins afloat (which cost way more), improve cybersecurity, etc.
How much "overhead" for the controls should a page contain beyond the content of the email itself? My instinct says several KB up to tens of KB would be reasonable, but apparently the non-basic version of Gmail uses several orders of magnitude more --- tens of MB.
> With that said, I’m sure that’s just an extreme edge case - but still a legit one. If you’re stuck out in nowhere with low and/or prohibitively expensive internet, you want a fast and small alternative.
I don't know. Internet on a cruise ship in the middle of the Ocean is a bit like complaining you don't have good wine on your camels when backpacking through the Sahara.
In any case, it absolutely is an edge case for now so there should be a minimum of preparations before the trip (setting IMAP instead of webmail for instance, if you need heavy bandwidth site content then set a proxy that only keeps the actual content and access that instead of the original source, etc.).
Same with the beach house or the cottage lost in the woods not zoom-compatible. Well...
It's weird to me how when this subject surfaces on HN a lot of people defend they are entitled to the same capabilities when they are in white spots than when they are at home.
The difference between having a bare-bones HTML page, versus a bloated one, could make a significant price difference.
A well designed Single Page App should be downloading a small-as-possible initial bundle with the page HTML and CSS, and then only downloading the data necessary for any given page. In theory that results in less bandwidth used if you're looking at a reasonably large number of pages compared to downloading a server rendered HTML page for each page because you only download the HTML once in the SPA version compared to every page you load with the SSR version. This is literally the reason why SPAs became popular in the first place.
In badly built apps this isn't the case - the data is bloated, the bundle isn't optimized, etc. I imagine in the case of Gmail this is the case though - you probably only need to read a couple of dozen moderately large emails before the JS version starts to win out. This is something you'd need to test rather than making an assumption though.
That said, a native app will win over both because it's already on your device so the bandwidth used is only the email data.
With continuous deployment, that cached SPA may frequently be replaced though. Depending on the team, but I've seen people deploying to production several times a week. That means a lot more JS and asset downloads as well.
That's true but it can be mitigated by code-splitting to an extent. Making a vendor bundle out of any dependencies separately to your own code limits any app changes to a single part of the download unless you update a dependency version.
Not rare, I do sometimes check my email in the airplane and can tell, although it’s usually per X time rather than the MB, but it still slow to load on the web UI. Better just to use an email client.
Could you please elaborate?
I had infomaniak email with external (non infomaniak) domain. They don't seem to offer plain email hosting anymore. Please advise.
Thanks for the rec, I'm paying $13/mo for proton right now that includes just 500 gigs cloud storage, looks like infomaniak will do 3TB for half that.
Do you use them as your domain registrar as well? They say to have a custom domain to transfer the domain to them, seems a bit extreme but I wouldn't mind consolidating my services.
No, I got my domains at OVH ages ago and via force of laziness I keep them there (though once I checked, and they still have nice pricing so there's that)
That's how it works. By default it does cache all the mail headers and additionally all the message content if you allow it to. If the message are limited to say, the last 90 days, it will ask to load more from server. First way is content but store heavy.
What options are there for mail servers that offer tagging and search? The prospect of downloading my entire mail index just to offer ostensibly basic functionality seems pretty miserable.
IMAP supports server side searching. IMAP also supports custom flags (similar to GMail's labels) which can also be searched on. However, unfortunately, most email clients don't seem to support IMAP custom flags (Evolution and Thunderbird do).
I use Evolution with custom flags and virtual folders + imapfilter to automatically add custom flags. It works great.
I was never able to get my mail without HTML view. I don't know how the settings work, but they don't appear. Probably doing something dumb, but I went to the "support forum", followed their instructions, and still nothing. Of course they never replied afterwards. So, if google kills HTML view, I am fully migrating to protonmail or something.
This is hypocrit: years ago they forced the usage of a Big Tech web engine in order to "re-authenticate" your account, so you noscript/basic (x)html was broken years ago.
This is a dark pattern, stuff which justifies to fine those companies at their scale and to force them to keep interop with small tech via regulation.
Personally, I did quit gmail at that time and I am now self-hosted.
You could argue that Gmail’s new UI is slow. That’s fine and correct. Arguing that they should maintain an outdated view forever seems to forget that that’s not how any of the web works. It’s already weird that the view survived past 2009
No. I'm arguing that it's Google's deliberate choice, and we should be angry about that.
Whether or not a trillion-dollar company with 170 000 employees can afford to maintain two views for a product with 2 billion MAU or make it not suck, now that is really irrelevant.
Imagine an organization which wants to buy Google's package for organization. Perhaps some government body. And that body has a regulation that requires certain accessibility features from services provided by contractors. So, even if very few, or even if nobody in that government body needs good accessibility, the IT will not buy a service from Google because one day someone will come and sue them for buying stuff they shouldn't have.
So, it doesn't matter what fraction of users actually needs the "basic HTML" view. The new one sucks from usability perspective, and especially from accessibility perspective. If they cancel the better version they have... well, I'd be all for suing the government agency that decided to use GMail.
Is the new version actually inaccessible or it’s just that you don’t like its bloat? It would sound strange to me that one of the most used apps in the world is completely inaccessible, especially considering that the non-basic-html Gmail has global shortcuts, which are surely faster than tabbing around a page.
Deprecating any tags in the post HTML5 world requires WHATWG approval and noscript is more of a fallback mechanism than a "security" feature or means to convey an opinion. There's no good reason to get rid of it.
Creating a page that doesn't display content without javascript is literally the single worst thing you can do for SEO on Google or any search engine. Noscript has nothing to do with the issue you all are talking about.
Google: Please make your pages easy to scrape, we’ll incentivise you to do so
Also Google: If we detect you’re scraping us or any of our “partners” (read: the public web) we’ll shut you down. We have ways of ensuring we’re the only bot capable of indexing the web. Heard of web fingerprinting?
Google does not have control over WHATWG. That's the point of its existence.
Javascript can fail to load for a lot more reasons than just the user disabling it. Noscript is the only way to let the user know that's occurred or to ensure some functionality doesn't break. In fact Google Analytics uses a noscript tag containing an iframe as a fallback to keep the data flowing even when stuff like a content security policy or bad network request causes the javascript to fail.
The accessible and compatible Web is alive and well in my little corner of it, where I strive to accommodate each and every user the same way as a five-star hotel would to a top client, and a building architect would for a wheelchair user. I think that this is the only way, and everything else is, to be perfectly honest, just sloppy and lazy. But I tend to visit those parts of the Web less and less as they close themselves off to me.
What you are saying is akin to saying, "stairs and accessibility are not exclusives". No, they certainly are not.
But there are some people who go to buildings every day who need an alternative to stairs. People in wheelchairs, with walkers, with strollers, transporting something heavy on wheels, and other scenarios I can't even think of right now, all rely on ramps to access areas that others access through stairs, and may find stairs to be more accessible. They are often a relatively small percentage of the population, but they exist, and as a society, we have decided that they deserve access to our buildings.
Similarly, there are visitors to my websites who require an alternative accommodation to JavaScript, such as people with slower devices which don't perform well with JS enabled, people who are concerned about security and privacy, people who are using a text-mode browser, people who are using something like wget to archive the site for later reading, and so on. There are, just like with the ramps, scenarios I can't even think of right now, but that are accommodated by allowing no-JS access.
And I'm going to continue choosing to accommodate them, bending over backwards to do everything I can to ensure that each and every visitor is treated like they are visiting a five-star hotel, not a prison.
Of course, this philosophy is not for everyone, obviously not for the Gmail team, and perhaps not for you either, but it works for me and my conscience.
Google lost messaging and social network but Google won email and owns it. Now I don’t know how, because email is much more fragmented than XMPP, but they’ll do that it with Gmail as well. They have already been doing that by blocking providers at whims and fancy.
Hey, I really want Gmail alternatives, is the best approach going for Apple Icloud account? Are there better services that are expected to last a long time? Thanks!
I do, and I am happy with it. I don’t use the Web interface very often but it does the job just fine when I need it. It certainly does not have many features Gmail has, though. Some bits of iCloud are wonky but email works just fine.
I've been using iCloud since they announced support for custom domains. You can have up to 5 custom domains, catch all and 3 aliases for each domain as low as $0.99/mo
I bought a full fast mail account to try it out. It seemed pretty insecure coming from protonmail. They require location data for example. No need for that I can think of for the user. They also don’t do E2E or even what passes for e2e. I wasn’t super impressed at the time. I’ll have to log back in and see if any of it changed.
They haven’t asked for location data for me in iOS. It’s a different intent to proton mail. Most emails I send are not end to end encrypted as the other end wouldn’t accept it. For any E2E encryption needs I use proton or a messenger service.
I've been using iCloud Mail since like 2012 and never felt the need to use any other service, let alone the much uglier (in comparison) Gmail UI!
Besides the ads, Gmail also has that annoying "YourRealAddress+alias" which makes aliases useless, whereas iCloud aliases have saved me from a lot of spam, and it's infinitely better now with their new "Hide My Email" feature that lets you create a different address each time.
You're on hacker news, which means you're technically capable and probably make about $400k/year from google. That means you can do this right.
Setup an AS and buy a /24 (roughly $10k), buy a server and router for BGP, colo them in a datacenter (roughly $1k/mo + $500 initial cost for used servers and setup).
From there, it should be a simple matter to install your preferred email setup, such as postfix + dovecot or such (probably 2 hours if you've done this before, and maybe 2 days if you haven't).
> I should have just bought a Mac a decade earlier.
Can confirm: I have never sysadminned for myself recreationally. After I bungled an Arch upgrade (by failing to read the notes) I bought a Mac and haven't looked back. Yeah, it ships with a weird awk, and the GNU tools it comes with are pretty dated, but it's close enough for basically everything I want it to do.
IMO, most of people who always flex bout their skill on using arch or kali linux doesn't really use it and don't have basic knowledge about unix/linux. As a DevOps and sometimes be sysadmin, I've interviewed a lot of self-proclaimed "hacker" (most of them are young) and most of them lack of fundamental knowledge about process, memory and networking, when they are the most important thing to do anything seriously in linux/unix.
> it's close enough for basically everything I want it to do.
People has been making argument for years about the best distro and which distro makes them look like a god. Now, anything which helps me do my job as fast as I can is the best and I think Debian/Ubuntu is the best distro to work with. Large user base, familiar interface and pretty up-to-date software is the selling point of Debian/Ubuntu.
> I should have just bought a Mac a decade earlier.
I switched to Macs nearly 20 years ago from Windows and have been mostly very satisfied. But a recent upgrade from Mohave to Monterey has changed my opinion. It deleted all directories at the root level that the system didn't know about, including my backup (which I had to recover from Backblaze B2), deleted emacs, protected all the system directories to the point where, if you build things in weird system directories, forget it - it's impossible.
Maybe all this protection is good and necessary for the average user, but for me, it has turned my regular development laptop into a web client and I had to back off to an older Mac for development. Apple shoves more and more rules and restrictions down its users' throats, along with shiny baubles I don't care about, and I'm kinda over it.
I really feel this, and it is so disappointing. Since 2012 my primary development machine has been a MacBook Pro, and my 2020 M1 MacBook Pro is maybe my favorite workstation ever (they brought back the good keyboard, the M1 processor is so fast, and the battery life is insane—even at three years old I will get through half a day of work and zoom calls and only be down to 80%).
But at the same time, I see a slow creep of operating system and interface changes. Especially worrying is the push to make macOS look and operate more like iPadOS. I've loved macOS as a development platform because it's Unix-y enough, but with a polished desktop interface where everything just works without fiddling and tweaking.
Perhaps I'm missing something in their vision or perhaps I'm being too myopic, but I don't understand the obsession with adopting mobile/tablet-style interactions and restrictions.
Will I still be able to plan on using this operating system for development in the next 12 years? I've begun revisiting Linux as my desktop operating system on the side, because I fear the answer is no.
Check your ISP contract. Some still provide you with an email account. You could've been paying for this email account all this time w/o realizing it. And even if they don't provide it right now, maybe they can do so for extra fee.
If not, different countries have all kinds of programs to give free emails. Usually quite limited in storage, but still. You could start checking that with the post office -- they'd be the likely candidates to provide such a service.
Not the previous commenter, but I do a similar thing. I have a (promised to be) lifetime email address through my graduating university that I use as the domain registration. It's been good for over 20 yrs now.
I don't know the setup at your graduating university, but I am aware of some universities who are just now starting to rethink "lifetime" alumni email. They are using email service provided by Big Tech and the reason is simple: Big Tech is starting to charge more for these email accounts and once that starts happening (which it is), the universities can't afford to offer many thousands of alumni email accounts anymore. For those universities that have gone with an authentication vendor (including two-factor providers), the costs are increasing for that too.
They are on Microsoft email now and have been for probably ten years if I remember right, so I will have to keep an eye out for that. Thanks for the heads up. When I was there it was their own POP/IMAP/SMTP server.
FYI if you use your country ccTLD instead of .com, the agency in charge will help you recover a domain even if you lose access to your registrar somehow. Just make sure that your whois is always accurate (whois is rarely public for cctld, no reason to put fake info).
Hi! Note that this is not true - all Proton users can use our EasySwitch to set up email forwarding from Gmail to Proton Mail: https://proton.me/easyswitch. When it comes to forwarding from other email providers, here's how you can do it: https://proton.me/support/mail-forwardingpop3. This functionality is also available to all Proton users, free or paying.
I would even say that ProtonMail would be impossible without JS.
The big idea with ProtonMail is end-to-end encryption, so that Proton can't read your email. Among the things such a guarantee makes impossible is a simple HTML view, because it would require the Proton-controlled server to decrypt your email before generating the HTML page.
It also makes traditional protocols like SMTP, POP and IMAP unusable. For that Proton provides a local gateway so that you can use your favorite email client, but Proton servers can't offer such a feature without breaking E2EE.
Dump g-mail. Get yourself a domain name, a third party mail provider and forward your gmails. Google sucks, they’re no longer the tech company there were 20 years ago.
I found the conversation view to be no where near as good as gmail. The ui in general just was far below gmail. So in the end I slithered back on over to gmail.
Also, I remember auto-filters not working very well and not putting my emails in the right folders
The webmail provided by migadu is just one client, there are a dozens out there much better for using emails. Migadu's service is not an interface, it's emails.
I just don't understand it. On the one hand, you can lose access to your mails and have almost no way of getting them back if you use GMail. On the other hand, you have an alternative but still stay with Google because their interface is better? I use an alternative and I don't care about the interface - it's good enough. I can read and write emails, there is human support, that's all I need from my email provider. I'd probably be happier if they had a better interface, but it's really not that important. I'm not judging it, that's your choice, but I just find it strange.
You can pull in emails from your old gmail via imap into your new account. Within roughly 5 years from 2010 to 2015 I switched over from an iCloud account and gmail to a custom domain and server. In that time, almost all logins were transferred. 5 years is a long time, though.
Funny, this last one just happened to me and I blamed myself. I made an account for my son, wrote down the username/password then didn't touch it for nearly a year. I got to log in and it keeps saying wrong password.
As someone who was in tbat situation: Gmail allows you to configure some account to have almost a full access to other Gmail account; do that for any important account you provision.
It's a question of size. I use Fastmail, and even if they do that (and I hope they don't), it's a relatively small company, so the impact is also smaller.
Both are asked by your various governments to spy on you. I am not privy to the most current technical details - if you go through old NSA presentations that Snowden revealed I am sure you'll get the general idea of how it works.
Every year I read another article detailing the futility of trying to get along with gmails filters. Most often these writeups end with the author giving up and using Gmail.
It’s hard to think of things that I care about less than the minutia of my email. Google’s an advertising business? So what? My Gmail has worked flawlessly for 19 years. If somehow Gmail fucks me over in the future, I’ll deal with that when the time comes. Until then, I’m not giving my email a second thought.
> If somehow Gmail fucks me over in the future, I’ll deal with that when the time comes.
You should at least try to imagine how catastrophic losing access to your email would be. How many accounts on other websites are linked to your email? Which of your banks have you set up backup emails beyond your primary? What about car registration and voter registration? For me, those both use email 2FA. For a while I was using a Nest thermostat; my house temperature in a large part was linked to my email.
> You should at least try to imagine how catastrophic losing access to your email would be
Why exactly? Doesn’t seem like much fun.
I don’t imagine a lot of catastrophic things that might happen to me. If really really bad things happen they happen. Some I work really hard to prevent. Others might happen and I don’t do anything to prevent them. Most things are somewhere in the middle.
No, you won't deal with that. Because 'your' email address would be no longer yours and there would be nothing you can do at that point, including reading your past emails.
I have had a personal domain forever and never used it. I’m happy with iCloud and decided to ditch Gmail. It took less than five minutes to set up iCloud and my registrar to use my personal domain for email. Easy and no extra cost or service was required.
Unfortunately the iCloud webinterface is completely disabled when Advanced Data Protection is enabled, including iCloud Mail/Contacts/Calendar, even though these services are not covered by end to end encryption. This means basic features like filters are missing too.
You can reenable the web interface in iCloud settings under system preferences on a Mac (not sure if it’s on iOS). The web interface will require just in time verification with an iCloud device to confirm log ins though. Works pretty well.
It would still break end-to-end encryption if I allow it.
However I just found out Apple added a way to manage rules in iCloud Mail to iOS 17. It's in Settings > [Your Name] > iCloud > iCloud Mail > iCloud Mail Rules. They did not mention this anywhere, but it's there and it's new!
Unfortunately still unusable for me because it allows only a single condition. No AND or OR conditions. For example still not possible to filter by FROM and Subject and the same time. And you can only filter a very limited amount of fields: FROM, TO, FROM or TO, CC, Subject and List-ID. For example it's not possible to search the body.
iCloud Mail and Calendar are way too simple to be useful for me. Calendar only searches 1 year back, even if everything is synced (I actually need this quite often). No weekly view in portrait mode (I use this all the time in Google Calendar). Calendar and Reminders don't integrate at all (Google Calendar shows tasks from Google Tasks). Not possible to sync calendar subscriptions across devices.
Much lighter and more responsive and uses a lot less RAM. I can't reasonably keep the normal viewer open in an 4GB RAM computer together with other tabs and programs. And I suspect a 2GB computer would just explode on the normal viewer even if that was the only tab open.
I wouldn't care if I could use GMail from Emacs, but Google makes it increasingly more difficult to do that (and for some -- impossible) because they want their users to use the Web version over which they have more control.
The new version of GMail has a lot of anti-features, s.a. bad text editor, uses too much screen for things I don't care about, it interacts very poorly with screen readers and any kind of automation / plugins that imitate user input (eg. I use Surfingkeys and simply selecting an email, as in "clicking" the checkbox is a game of whack-a-mole).
I mean, it's just all around worse from functionality perspective. Why would I want that?
Because I'm tired of watching infrastructure I've relied on for a decade+ go up in flames. I'm tired of constantly migrating services because investors need their 25 basis points. Between the Google Workspaces debacle and the recent selling off of their domain registrar, it makes me wonder how much longer any Google service will exist.
I was in Cape Town, South Africa last week working from my mobile hotspot during one of the rolling power blackouts and Gmail and Slack on the web browser were both so slow they were effectively dead. I was hunting around (with poor connectivity) and for the life of me could not find the link to the HTML version of gmail from my laptop. I supposedly had "5G" from my T-Mobile International Data Pass.
Also sometimes phone calls and very frequently SMS messages would not go through in many parts of South Africa including Cape Town. I still received mail through my IMAP connections and we switched to Whatsapp for work communications, which appears to be stable for most any low bandwidth or intermittent connectivity situation. Through my 1 week in Africa I didn't miss any messages at all on Whatsapp and was able to send messages any time I had signal. Whatsapp voice calls worked pretty well. Slack on my mobile seemed to work but I was not sure if it was synching in real time. Slack voice calls I was told were pretty bad from my side.
We've seen a huge rise in Whatsapp use recently when working in our colleagues in less developed areas.
I initially loathed dealing with "yet another messaging app" when people started using Whatsapp, but it's great to see a tool that's robust enough to work in non-optimal connectivity.
Right. So let's not use the imperfect local clients that still work well. Let's just keep complaining about how Google is a big meanie for not making mail.google.com work offline (somehow) instead.
mostly young people I believe, my nephew classroom are all chatting on instagram while the only friends i know who has instagram group chats are some kind of heavy instagram users like influencers..
> Outside of the US, Whatsapp is pretty much _the_ messaging app
In Europe Telegram is huge. 1 billion Telegram users in the world, with 700 MAU (and there are already some countries where Telegram is the most used messenger).
I refuse to use WhatsApp (and don't have FB). Most of my friends and family are on Telegram. Many have both and use both interchangeably.
This might be a reasonable view for very specific market fragments. Like if your market is only rich city-dwellers in California or something. But for the general case, it's absolutely false. People struggle with connectivity and bandwidth all day, all over the world.
I accept your point that good mobile data is not universal.
But for those who have a personal mobile device and poor mobile data, an actual email client would likely be a good choice.
An actual email client uses much less data than webmail. For example the gmail webpage loads around 10MB just to show the web page, before any actual email content.
Also an email client functions with an intermittent network, only actual sending/receiving requires a data connection. Existing emails are accessed using the local mailbox, and outgoing emails are queued until the network becomes available. A webmail system provides no functionality in the absence of network data.
whatever. anyone who really cares about this would use their own client and POP which is even more bandwidth efficient than going to an HTML-only site as you're downloading the bare minimum necessary.
You may experience issues with imap/pop/smtp in some parts of the world on some specific providers (i.e Dubai,UAE). That's how I rediscovered the web email client.
Android nowadays only ships with Gmail app. It can do generic IMAP but it's never been clear to me if the process is entirely on-device. I'd rather not keep Google in the loop.
That said there are some generic mail clients for Android. Not many are good, but they're out there. K-9 has recently received some love again.
There are several scenarios I can think of where it people would not be able to use IMAP or POP to get their mail, and you touched one of them: people without their own device.
There is also the matter of having to set it up, which is not accessible to many people who can't (or don't want to) handle the cognitive load required.
I am confused by the reaction to this. It seems like the only people adversely affected by this would be people who rely on borrowing others’ devices and therefore cannot use a native mail client.
The discussion here is centered on bandwidth and accessibility, and both of those problems are solved by using the mail client that (almost definitely) shipped with your device.
The set of people adversely affected is even smaller than that: it's people who would actually use the basic HTML in the future, which can be closely approximated by the people who use it now.
Google knows the numbers for that, we don't. But it's striking how few "I use this UI in situation X" comments this story and its duplicates have. Most of the comments are by people who at best imagine it would be something they'd use, but actually don't. (And at worst the comments are by people who don't know what the basic HTML UI was, but are here to complain about other aspects of gmail.)
One use case is the web view allows you to check emails of a workspace that requires a Google Device policy to be installed to use the native apps. Of course, the simple solution is to be given a workplace phone or don't check emails when away from a computer.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 285 ms ] threadhttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37558372
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37630243
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37558372
The difference between having a bare-bones HTML page, versus a bloated one, could make a significant price difference.
With that said, I’m sure that’s just an extreme edge case - but still a legit one. If you’re stuck out in nowhere with low and/or prohibitively expensive internet, you want a fast and small alternative.
Having a very old GMail account, I still hold on to it, because I can still use IMAP in Gnus. But, should I lose that, or should Google finally curb my tiny freedoms... I'll have to look for alternatives too.
Testing over a heavily throttled connection that drops packets should be a mandatory part of usability testing for anything intended to be used over the Internet.
The NPR One app used to chew through a few hundred mb of data in "caching" every time you started it. No way to restrict this function to wifi only. And no, you can't select bit rates.
Also Zoom has little ability to minimize the audio or video data usage (but I've learned you can reduce how much of others video is sent to you by reducing the window size). Just wish I could set myself to 480p to be present but not destroy my data while working at the cabin.
Likely true. Zoom doesn't chew up much bandwidth. I always find it funny when people think they need to upgrade their home internet bandwidth because a family "works & studies from home". Unless you're up/downloading huge media files, several instances of Zoom and virtual desktops will consume less than a 4k Netflix stream.
Would this be achieved by plugging in a crappy camera and only giving that to Zoom?
People used to say the same about accessibility until the ADA lawsuits started coming in forcing businesses to take it seriously.
There needs to be a business incentive to spend developer time on low bandwidth. Progressive web apps that cache stuff are about all you're gonna get for now.
Which is a shame, since FF dev Tools have a quite comfy tool for testing the we page in low bandwidth environments:
* https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/devtools-user/networ...
(I haven't done web de for a good ten years now, yet, even I somehow know about these)
This point stands, no matter what you think of his cruise?
Also, who can decide, what is really necessary? And I don't have hard data at hand, but I cannot imagine a cruise to be more expensive in its impact, compared to flying somewhere for vacation.
Do you know? Do you? Or is it a presumption?
(Googling now to find out if this even exists, doesn't remove the presumptive nature of things.)
The vast majority of cruises are pretty shitty for the environment and treatment of people. Also tax avoidant. People just really don’t want to hear that so they can keep doing them and not think about the down sides.
> killjoywashere 46 minutes ago | undown | root | parent | next [–]
> I'm on an ship doing oceanographic survey work in the arctic.
and
> TrackerFF 2 hours ago | prev | next [–]
> Recently I was on a cruise ship, and out in the waters only my carriers “maritime” plan was available
My point had to do with the extreme accusatory nature of the post, without data to back it up.
My post was absolutely the reverse of presumptive, for I asked is someone was being so, not asserting that they were.
But that’s beside the point anyway, as it was just raised as an ad hominem argument against the guy who wanted websites to work on poor connections, and rightly so.
train your imagination, i'd say
A ship on the other hand is very fuel efficient. But it maybe runs longer, if it is a cruise. Still, 2 flights forn1 week vacation are likely way worse, than 1 week cruise.
(And I will likely go by train towards my vacation, but this is not always possible)
They also run on absolutely terrible fuel, very low quality and with lots of impurities. Pollution is not only greenhouse gases. I am not saying planes are much better, but both are really quite bad.
So? Why should Google care? Out of the goodness of their hearts?
Switch to an email provider that caters to your data limited environment.
Interestingly, one of the major sucks for these LEO systems does not appear to be bandwidth. It's the route. We throttled the ship down to 2 Mbps for a while (100 pax) and Google properties are actually quite snappy while everything else is dead slow to the point of timing out. Turns out Google arranged to have Starlink ground stations installed in their data centers. That takes off a lot of hops. Amazon was one of the few other things that would load.
I hate to sound like a shill for big tech, but I get the sense Google and Amazon actually give a shit about speed. When you measure your bandwidth bill in billions, you can afford to?
With the rate you are paying, you could get there quickly too.
That pricing and speed is quite different to their website - obviously service isn’t optimised for the arctic, but how does that pricing work?
I don't know. Internet on a cruise ship in the middle of the Ocean is a bit like complaining you don't have good wine on your camels when backpacking through the Sahara.
In any case, it absolutely is an edge case for now so there should be a minimum of preparations before the trip (setting IMAP instead of webmail for instance, if you need heavy bandwidth site content then set a proxy that only keeps the actual content and access that instead of the original source, etc.).
Same with the beach house or the cottage lost in the woods not zoom-compatible. Well...
It's weird to me how when this subject surfaces on HN a lot of people defend they are entitled to the same capabilities when they are in white spots than when they are at home.
A well designed Single Page App should be downloading a small-as-possible initial bundle with the page HTML and CSS, and then only downloading the data necessary for any given page. In theory that results in less bandwidth used if you're looking at a reasonably large number of pages compared to downloading a server rendered HTML page for each page because you only download the HTML once in the SPA version compared to every page you load with the SSR version. This is literally the reason why SPAs became popular in the first place.
In badly built apps this isn't the case - the data is bloated, the bundle isn't optimized, etc. I imagine in the case of Gmail this is the case though - you probably only need to read a couple of dozen moderately large emails before the JS version starts to win out. This is something you'd need to test rather than making an assumption though.
That said, a native app will win over both because it's already on your device so the bandwidth used is only the email data.
The best solution would be jmap but it seems dead, most implementations are dead and not compatible with the last version.
https://www.infomaniak.com/en/hosting/service-mail
Do you use them as your domain registrar as well? They say to have a custom domain to transfer the domain to them, seems a bit extreme but I wouldn't mind consolidating my services.
I use Evolution with custom flags and virtual folders + imapfilter to automatically add custom flags. It works great.
This is a dark pattern, stuff which justifies to fine those companies at their scale and to force them to keep interop with small tech via regulation.
Personally, I did quit gmail at that time and I am now self-hosted.
Google kills whole successful products, what made you think that they would support alternative UIs used by dozens of us?
Arguing that they should maintain multiple views is just ignorant of the world we live in. You will be disappointed further.
Whether or not a trillion-dollar company with 170 000 employees can afford to maintain two views for a product with 2 billion MAU or make it not suck, now that is really irrelevant.
that remains to be seen
It’s how Google’s business works, maybe, but that wasn’t the argument.
Imagine an organization which wants to buy Google's package for organization. Perhaps some government body. And that body has a regulation that requires certain accessibility features from services provided by contractors. So, even if very few, or even if nobody in that government body needs good accessibility, the IT will not buy a service from Google because one day someone will come and sue them for buying stuff they shouldn't have.
So, it doesn't matter what fraction of users actually needs the "basic HTML" view. The new one sucks from usability perspective, and especially from accessibility perspective. If they cancel the better version they have... well, I'd be all for suing the government agency that decided to use GMail.
Deprecating any tags in the post HTML5 world requires WHATWG approval and noscript is more of a fallback mechanism than a "security" feature or means to convey an opinion. There's no good reason to get rid of it.
That is exactly the good reason to get rid of it, for Google. Why would they want to allow a fallback to script-less web?
Also Google: If we detect you’re scraping us or any of our “partners” (read: the public web) we’ll shut you down. We have ways of ensuring we’re the only bot capable of indexing the web. Heard of web fingerprinting?
Javascript can fail to load for a lot more reasons than just the user disabling it. Noscript is the only way to let the user know that's occurred or to ensure some functionality doesn't break. In fact Google Analytics uses a noscript tag containing an iframe as a fallback to keep the data flowing even when stuff like a content security policy or bad network request causes the javascript to fail.
The WHATWG, the group that exists because browser developers decided to ditch the existing standard and do their own thing?
What is it going to do? Complain about Google ditching the standard and doing its own thing?
But there are some people who go to buildings every day who need an alternative to stairs. People in wheelchairs, with walkers, with strollers, transporting something heavy on wheels, and other scenarios I can't even think of right now, all rely on ramps to access areas that others access through stairs, and may find stairs to be more accessible. They are often a relatively small percentage of the population, but they exist, and as a society, we have decided that they deserve access to our buildings.
Similarly, there are visitors to my websites who require an alternative accommodation to JavaScript, such as people with slower devices which don't perform well with JS enabled, people who are concerned about security and privacy, people who are using a text-mode browser, people who are using something like wget to archive the site for later reading, and so on. There are, just like with the ramps, scenarios I can't even think of right now, but that are accommodated by allowing no-JS access.
And I'm going to continue choosing to accommodate them, bending over backwards to do everything I can to ensure that each and every visitor is treated like they are visiting a five-star hotel, not a prison.
Of course, this philosophy is not for everyone, obviously not for the Gmail team, and perhaps not for you either, but it works for me and my conscience.
Besides the ads, Gmail also has that annoying "YourRealAddress+alias" which makes aliases useless, whereas iCloud aliases have saved me from a lot of spam, and it's infinitely better now with their new "Hide My Email" feature that lets you create a different address each time.
Setup an AS and buy a /24 (roughly $10k), buy a server and router for BGP, colo them in a datacenter (roughly $1k/mo + $500 initial cost for used servers and setup).
From there, it should be a simple matter to install your preferred email setup, such as postfix + dovecot or such (probably 2 hours if you've done this before, and maybe 2 days if you haven't).
Realised KDE was terrible and none of it was worth the hassle.
I should have just bought a Mac a decade earlier.
Can confirm: I have never sysadminned for myself recreationally. After I bungled an Arch upgrade (by failing to read the notes) I bought a Mac and haven't looked back. Yeah, it ships with a weird awk, and the GNU tools it comes with are pretty dated, but it's close enough for basically everything I want it to do.
> it's close enough for basically everything I want it to do.
People has been making argument for years about the best distro and which distro makes them look like a god. Now, anything which helps me do my job as fast as I can is the best and I think Debian/Ubuntu is the best distro to work with. Large user base, familiar interface and pretty up-to-date software is the selling point of Debian/Ubuntu.
I switched to Macs nearly 20 years ago from Windows and have been mostly very satisfied. But a recent upgrade from Mohave to Monterey has changed my opinion. It deleted all directories at the root level that the system didn't know about, including my backup (which I had to recover from Backblaze B2), deleted emacs, protected all the system directories to the point where, if you build things in weird system directories, forget it - it's impossible.
Maybe all this protection is good and necessary for the average user, but for me, it has turned my regular development laptop into a web client and I had to back off to an older Mac for development. Apple shoves more and more rules and restrictions down its users' throats, along with shiny baubles I don't care about, and I'm kinda over it.
But at the same time, I see a slow creep of operating system and interface changes. Especially worrying is the push to make macOS look and operate more like iPadOS. I've loved macOS as a development platform because it's Unix-y enough, but with a polished desktop interface where everything just works without fiddling and tweaking.
Perhaps I'm missing something in their vision or perhaps I'm being too myopic, but I don't understand the obsession with adopting mobile/tablet-style interactions and restrictions.
Will I still be able to plan on using this operating system for development in the next 12 years? I've begun revisiting Linux as my desktop operating system on the side, because I fear the answer is no.
You know some people will take you seriously however ridiculously stupid that paragraph is, right?
If not, different countries have all kinds of programs to give free emails. Usually quite limited in storage, but still. You could start checking that with the post office -- they'd be the likely candidates to provide such a service.
You use an HTML client now?
Please correct me if I’m wrong, sorry I wasn’t clear you provide a great service and I am thankful.
The big idea with ProtonMail is end-to-end encryption, so that Proton can't read your email. Among the things such a guarantee makes impossible is a simple HTML view, because it would require the Proton-controlled server to decrypt your email before generating the HTML page.
It also makes traditional protocols like SMTP, POP and IMAP unusable. For that Proton provides a local gateway so that you can use your favorite email client, but Proton servers can't offer such a feature without breaking E2EE.
They’re an advertisement business.
I found the conversation view to be no where near as good as gmail. The ui in general just was far below gmail. So in the end I slithered back on over to gmail.
Also, I remember auto-filters not working very well and not putting my emails in the right folders
TIL. I have been using migadu for more than an year and I didn't know they have one.
My favourite feature is the subdomain addressing (something@me.domain.com => me@domain.com).
Can’t say I’m a fan of the webmail, but I’ve only used it when I’m without an imap client.
Not being cheeky just wondering whether I should have an extra forwarding setup.
Or just a plain 'Wrong password' except it's the right password, it's just Google thinks it's wrong, but you can't do anything with that address.
They will only become worse and worse, the trust I had in them is long gone. Just avoid them and let them go out of business
How?
They've effectively embraced, extended, and extinguished vanilla email.
It's not very hard to get along with Gmail spam filters unless you're trying to send thousands of mails.
You should at least try to imagine how catastrophic losing access to your email would be. How many accounts on other websites are linked to your email? Which of your banks have you set up backup emails beyond your primary? What about car registration and voter registration? For me, those both use email 2FA. For a while I was using a Nest thermostat; my house temperature in a large part was linked to my email.
Why exactly? Doesn’t seem like much fun.
I don’t imagine a lot of catastrophic things that might happen to me. If really really bad things happen they happen. Some I work really hard to prevent. Others might happen and I don’t do anything to prevent them. Most things are somewhere in the middle.
No, you won't deal with that. Because 'your' email address would be no longer yours and there would be nothing you can do at that point, including reading your past emails.
However I just found out Apple added a way to manage rules in iCloud Mail to iOS 17. It's in Settings > [Your Name] > iCloud > iCloud Mail > iCloud Mail Rules. They did not mention this anywhere, but it's there and it's new!
Unfortunately still unusable for me because it allows only a single condition. No AND or OR conditions. For example still not possible to filter by FROM and Subject and the same time. And you can only filter a very limited amount of fields: FROM, TO, FROM or TO, CC, Subject and List-ID. For example it's not possible to search the body.
iCloud Mail and Calendar are way too simple to be useful for me. Calendar only searches 1 year back, even if everything is synced (I actually need this quite often). No weekly view in portrait mode (I use this all the time in Google Calendar). Calendar and Reminders don't integrate at all (Google Calendar shows tasks from Google Tasks). Not possible to sync calendar subscriptions across devices.
AdWords debuted in 2000, then AdSense in 2003.
My memory as a user is Google didn't "feel" like an ad-driven company until years later, in the wake of the 2008 DoubleClick acquisition.
I don’t get it.
The new version of GMail has a lot of anti-features, s.a. bad text editor, uses too much screen for things I don't care about, it interacts very poorly with screen readers and any kind of automation / plugins that imitate user input (eg. I use Surfingkeys and simply selecting an email, as in "clicking" the checkbox is a game of whack-a-mole).
I mean, it's just all around worse from functionality perspective. Why would I want that?
Because I'm tired of watching infrastructure I've relied on for a decade+ go up in flames. I'm tired of constantly migrating services because investors need their 25 basis points. Between the Google Workspaces debacle and the recent selling off of their domain registrar, it makes me wonder how much longer any Google service will exist.
I'm tired of Enshittification.
Also sometimes phone calls and very frequently SMS messages would not go through in many parts of South Africa including Cape Town. I still received mail through my IMAP connections and we switched to Whatsapp for work communications, which appears to be stable for most any low bandwidth or intermittent connectivity situation. Through my 1 week in Africa I didn't miss any messages at all on Whatsapp and was able to send messages any time I had signal. Whatsapp voice calls worked pretty well. Slack on my mobile seemed to work but I was not sure if it was synching in real time. Slack voice calls I was told were pretty bad from my side.
We've seen a huge rise in Whatsapp use recently when working in our colleagues in less developed areas.
I initially loathed dealing with "yet another messaging app" when people started using Whatsapp, but it's great to see a tool that's robust enough to work in non-optimal connectivity.
Opportunity there I guess.
How about local client?
I still use Thunderbird because I have a half a dozen email accounts.
It was probably too late for them, but for me this would have just worked.
No you are not. I prefer to use local clients for everything as well.
> Also sometimes phone calls and very frequently SMS messages would not go through in many parts of South Africa including Cape Town
You say in many parts, really? What other parts?
Maybe get a local SIM if where you're staying doesn't have fibre; is this not a T-Mobile issue?
Outside of the US, Whatsapp is pretty much _the_ messaging app
If you are in a hurry: https://engage.sinch.com/sites/default/files/styles/x_large_...
In Europe Telegram is huge. 1 billion Telegram users in the world, with 700 MAU (and there are already some countries where Telegram is the most used messenger).
I refuse to use WhatsApp (and don't have FB). Most of my friends and family are on Telegram. Many have both and use both interchangeably.
And it’s quite nifty as an “everything” app (kinda what Elon wants to do with Twitter/X).
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[0]: https://line.me/en/
But now mobile data is normal. Your phone/tablet's email is a almost certainly a dedicated app - an actual email client.
Time to drop webmail, and gmail.
But for those who have a personal mobile device and poor mobile data, an actual email client would likely be a good choice.
An actual email client uses much less data than webmail. For example the gmail webpage loads around 10MB just to show the web page, before any actual email content.
Also an email client functions with an intermittent network, only actual sending/receiving requires a data connection. Existing emails are accessed using the local mailbox, and outgoing emails are queued until the network becomes available. A webmail system provides no functionality in the absence of network data.
Maybe if a large majority of people do not own a device and have to use a borrowed computer, this could be a problem.
But (as far as I know) most Android phones ship with a mail client, and so does Windows.
That said there are some generic mail clients for Android. Not many are good, but they're out there. K-9 has recently received some love again.
There is also the matter of having to set it up, which is not accessible to many people who can't (or don't want to) handle the cognitive load required.
The discussion here is centered on bandwidth and accessibility, and both of those problems are solved by using the mail client that (almost definitely) shipped with your device.
Windows, macOS, and many Linux distributions ship with mail clients that you can set up to use with Gmail.
I wonder how many people on earth are accessing webmail from a device that does not have a mail client installed.
Google knows the numbers for that, we don't. But it's striking how few "I use this UI in situation X" comments this story and its duplicates have. Most of the comments are by people who at best imagine it would be something they'd use, but actually don't. (And at worst the comments are by people who don't know what the basic HTML UI was, but are here to complain about other aspects of gmail.)