Gmail, We Need to Talk
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
And apparently something about HTML emails too.
Imagine this: you are Google. Raking in billions. PhD level scientists are hired to mop floors, and serve coffee to everyone. You hire top level designers, pay them $250k/year and tell them to improve Gmail.
And they do...Gmail gets better. You make more billions, hire more designers, pay them more and ... tell them to work on Gmail.
You now have 10 designers, "designing" GMail. Come end of year performance review all those highly paid, world class professionals will want to say "I did <x>, <y>, <z> and I deserve a raise". Nobody will want to say "Yeah, GMail is actually great so I left it alone and didin't muck with it, can I have my raise?". So, they go to town and re-design it every 6 months. Review comes and well they all can claim they have successfully re-designed, flattened, styles etc, added custom iframe, windows, etc.
This happens with software teams, that is why so much software is re-written, people don't get rewarded for maintaining as much as for creating. So they have to create, and when things get crowded, that means tearing down and then re-create.
Does this incessant desire for change/to be seen to be doing something have a name?
It came up in a political commentary I was reading (about how politicians have to be seen to do something, even if the status quo is better), and I've noticed it in the "curve of website disillusionment" for clients ("Our website is 3 years old ergo a new shiny one will be much better. No, we didn't do any research but it's obvious 'cause it's old")
- MS Office peaked around 2000 - Gmail 3 years ago? - GMaps 3 years ago? - I would argue Windows peaked somewhere between 2000 and XP
The same applies to managers. When an organization works well, they have the need to change things around just because.
A lot of it makes sense from the point of view of end of year reviews. They have to say they did "something" to justify pay raises and bonuses. The sad part is that a lot of times that busy works makes everything worse.
Sure, for power users, some things take two or three clicks which required one previously and I understand that's frustrating, but Office's old interface was a complete mess which got by on inertia - and there are still keyboard shortcuts and the customisable hotbar.
Google, could you please make Google Maps Pro, with consistent interface and advanced functions available all the time? I'll be a paying customer.
The ribbons manage to unify the drawbacks of both the button bar and the menu bar that you mentioned:
- it is composed of "rows of incomprehensible buttons" with no logical order (Where is the most-frequently-sought insert-column button in Excel? Hint: not in the "insert" ribbon tab, that would be too easy. Where is the function to create collapsible rows/columns? In the "Data" tab...)
- it has additional features hidden so well that nobody can find them without googling - Excel's most powerful features like creating named cell styles are now only reachable by clicking through several layers of unintuitive unlabeled mini-buttons tacked on as an afterthought. Yes, I have the muscle memory for remembering half a dozen triple-chord keyboard shortcuts like Alt-D-F-F, but nobody who didn't use Office 2002 will be able to use the new version at anything approaching full speed - that is exactly the opposite of UI discoverability.
But is that even a reasonable share of the market any more? I'm hardly a spring chicken and I was exposed to Office in elementary school. I would imagine that the proportion of people who've never used an office suite (and can't use Google to search for answers for how to do things) is fairly small at this point.
In my experience, adding the Ribbon was a huge step backwards in terms of usability, not because the Ribbon is inherently bad, but because it was a very big, very abrupt change from the File | Edit | View ... menu system that preceded it. I was working on an IT helpdesk at the time the Ribbon rolled out (with Office 2007), and the backlash from users who couldn't apply the same set of steps that had always worked for them to do things like adjust paragraph spacing was immense.
I feel like Microsoft was blinded by its focus groups. Perhaps the focus groups included people who weren't familiar with Office, or with computers at all, and that skewed the results enough to make it seem like the Ribbon was a good idea. But in practice, the cost of adopting the UI is not just the cost of learning the new UI, but also the cost of forgetting the UI that preceded it. The Ribbon might be great if you're starting from scratch with a new UI, but the existing Office 2000 UI was so entrenched, the cost of forgetting was huge.
New users should be given tutorials, online help or other kinds of training that successfully bring them up to speed. Those kinds of materials are then cleanly separated, and they get out of the way forever once the user is acquainted with the system.
Uh, Windows 2000 was good on supported hardware but had really poor support for typical consumer PCs. XP was a security nightmare, although XP SP2 did improve things. Hardly a "peak". Newer versions of Windows, with malware protection enabled by default, do a much better job of protecting customers.
The big win for me is that somewhere between Windows 7 and 10 (not sure when), Microsoft added a feature so that the OS wouldn't bluescreen if the display driver crashed -- it would fall back to its "basic", Microsoft-written driver, and try to restart the actual driver. This is just one example but imho Windows actually became more reliable over the years.
Pretty sure that happened in Vista, actually.
Version 2008 looked good, was really nice to use, easily customizable
From 2010 on it turned into a gray, depressing mess with less features (toolbar buttons almost indistinguishable from each other, no macros, toolbars can't be customized by just dragging things) .
It's like that person that your tough interview process is designed to weed out - looks good, but when you hire them and put them to work you discover that they can't code, just crib stuff from Stack Overflow and discussion boards.
With "Timeline," you dig in and find things that just don't work right like arrival and departure times (if you're going to show me at a location until 1:30PM why when I go in and drag the slider are there further data points bouncing around that location until 3PM?) and filtering of bad location recording (apparently I make several 1-minute trips a night 1 mile over to a corporate office park nearby with a cell tower).
The previous version was bad (or at least irksome and clearly designed and tested only by people on 4K monitors or with very odd mouse habits for the in-day timeline), but this one is worse because it SEEMS good until you actually look at the data.
How is it hard?
EDIT: Sorry if this came out as aggressive. I'm just dumbfounded, that's all.
I know how to get directions in the new interface. I just don't like doing it. Is it more clicks? More elements taking up space I don't care about? Hijacking the native right-click menu? Aggressive resizing/panning when I didn't ask for it, to accommodate what it thinks the new context should be? I don't really know.
These are the obvious ones. There are more subtle UX fumbles too. If I click my house while I'm in my house and click directions, I probably don't want directions to my house. I probably want directions from my house.
Edit: Oh! That ridiculous thing it does when my phone vibrates. Someone decided they could detect frustration by using my accelerometer. Now any time I get a text message and am using maps, maps gets insecure and asks me to submit feedback.
I've started to use bing more recently.
I know that tapping will drop a pin, and I don't want to drop a pin, (because there's already a pin from my search and that's in the right place) so I don't want to tap. But tapping is actually what I need to do to get rid of the interface and just leave me with the map. But only after I've done whatever it is I need to do to make the GPS dot active. I'm on a bus. The GPS dot shows me where I am. The pin shows me where my destination is. Maps also shows every bus stop (I complain, but this is one of the things that makes me feel like I'm on StarTrek) but you only get the bus stops if you zoom right in. So, I spend some time zooming in and out. The map images keep loading and unloading. I kind of wish Maps would realise that I need the bus stops. I know there probably isn't a setting for that (because FUCK YOU USER WE KNOW WHAT YOU WANT) so I just keep pinch zooming and unzooming, and hoping I don't miss-pinch and un-drop the pin.
Maps is great if you use it often enough to learn it. I use it just often enough to not remember it next time I go to use it.
(All maps are amazing. I remember using Autoroute from 5 1/4" floppies and a Hercules graphics adapter and that was amazing, so GMaps on that slab of glass does feel like magic. I moan too much.)
This is clearly an intentional anti-pattern, and it's been there for over two years. I have to actually type, for example: "Fry's electronics, city, state" (remember, this is on a TOUCH KEYBOARD) to get where I want to go.
It shouldn't really be in debate that the UX of maps has gone way downhill. There's simply no comparison to the older version and I've never met anyone who wasn't disappointed by the changes.
I'm assuming you do have GPS location turned on, and that you're allowing location access on that page and waiting for a GPS lock before searching, correct? (And if not, how do you expect it to know where you are?)
IP addresses are usually enough to get to the right city.
I also liked the one period of time I used to type in my US zip code for Movie Showtimes and somehow be routed to theatres and showtimes in a town outside Naples, Italy. This was on a desktop, not a phone.
Not the biggest deal in the world but it seems every useful thing Google comes up with seems to degrade in quality over time and increase in complexity.
Maybe another reason for the change is that, back in the Marissa Mayer days, hiring standards used to be much more brutal. Google was still reaping the rewards of bucking the trends of web portals jammed with ads, but eventually lost its confidence in nerd-driven products and instead began to imitate Apple, Facebook, and inexplicably, Microsoft...
My personal one is that they just can't stop tweaking. It's not like there aren't some fundamental improvements with a lot of their services but everything needs to get touched and then it ends up like that car Homer tries to design in that episode of The Simpsons.
I know that you're supposed to constantly iterate and try and improve performance, design, etc in software but is there anything in the general literature / case studies of 'improving' too much and degrading the core product(s)?
Not to mention that it's always funny to search for an issue on Google, find the links to the forum, see all the people that chime in with a similar issue, the few souls that try to help, then, as you scroll, the further desperate comments of "They don't care about us." Shouts in the wind.
If the website then how would it know your location if you don't allow it?
http://i.imgur.com/SaHMCF2.png
Yes, there's a round "Directions" icon. This time. Frequently, searches for a given address don't bring up that icon or any other UI affordance that indicates how I might get directions to the destination.
However, Maps does reliably fill half the screen with photos, random chunks of white space, and other irrelevant visual junk as seen in the above screenshot.
I had absolutely no idea that Maps had a right-click menu, so thanks for that tip (seriously). Right-clicking on an AJAX-based Web page is obviously not a standard or expected UI concept... but given what Google has done with Maps over the last year or so, literally anything helps.
This is sadly a really common UX failure in a lot of different apps.
One thing that many people still don't seem to realize is that it's more important to be consistent than being smart. I like to call these "hide and seek" UI elements - they display conditionally in an effort to be smart (e.g., no directions are available to this place, so we hide the directions button). But in practice it just confuses users.
One thing I keep encouraging, to varying levels of success, is that UIs should always be consistent. If you are unable to provide a feature, disable that element with a helpful tip (e.g., graying out the Directions button and say "Directions not available from this address" or some such).
Loading GMaps takes forever now and brings my entire browser to a freezing stop (Chrome OSX) until it's done doing whatever it's doing. This is a modern desktop (i7, 16GB RAM, discrete graphics). Even after it's done "loading" if you try to interact with the map right away it does so at a crawl - inputs take multiple seconds to register and panning/zooming runs at about 2 frames a second.
It takes about 10-15 seconds after load for the site to be fully functional and performant. That's insane.
Ditto the Satellite view. Yeah, having 3D buildings is pretty cool and all, but the performance is atrocious on even fast, modern machines. If that's the tradeoff I'll take the 2D satellite imagery back please.
Overall interacting with GMaps is itself a chore, and it almost entirely comes down to bad performance. This is especially frustrating on mobile if you put the performance of GMaps on iOS next to competitors like Apple Maps - the rendering performance is insanely low even on the most up to date hardware like an iPhone 6s.
Beyond performance problems, one thing Google didn't fix until recently was that it was literally impossible to see information on an address/place and nearby transit at the same time. They changed Transit from a persistent overlay that can be toggled to a special view mode itself, which would disable itself the moment you clicked on any point of interest on the map. It makes me wonder if anyone on the Maps team lives in a major city.
I so much hate the "new" google maps ... anybody has a alternative ? Somehow, I like the tiles of google maps best :-/
It's hard to imagine that Google would make a UI that slow given their extensive optimizations.
They aren't testing their cool WebGL version widely enough, so it fails badly for many users. (Edit: or wait, is it just a 2D <canvas>? Either way, it should be fast in Safari and it's not.)
I can kind of see their reasoning, since public transport is often time dependent, but often I don't care about specifics, I just want to get an idea what links exist, and how long I'm going to spend in transport visiting a bunch of places.
I'm with you on the "it forgets the transportation mode" complaint, by the way; even Google Now seems incapable of using it, despite being able to parrot back the setting in the config panel.
One thing that is absolutely brain-dead is that (in Chrome) I can't type in maps.google.com and tab-search for my address. I can do this with Amazon.com or Netflix, but not an actual Google property? Weird.
Another thing that is just bafflingly absent is that GMaps doesn't know where my home and work are. Not just as locations, but as concepts. (Snide part of my brain wonders if the Maps team just lives at work.)
Another thing is that to make GMaps work with my Mac, I have to have a Chrome Extension to stop the map from freaking out. And then simple things like double-clicking to zoom in seems to have a non-predictable behavior where sometimes it zooms in and sometimes it tries to put a marker on the map.
Not everything in Gmaps is horrible. There are many nice features. But they've allowed the critical path through the software to become obscured and eroded.
Also I'm not sure but it would seem you have some kind of plugin that might be interfering as GMaps is very smooth on Mac Chrome and Safari.
And you might be single-clicking on the maps which brings up a gray marker to show you more detail of the nearest address to where you clicked. It's easier to just use the scroll wheel to zoom in/out.
And you can just put the address in the search bar and the first result on the results page should be the address detail plus links for directions.
Google Music kicks on my fan after a while. The only other thing I run that does that is Kerbal Space Program. One simulates space flight with nice (ok, decent) 3d graphics, the other plays f*cking music.
Works for me, and that's definitely one I've never explicitly set. According to my settings, the tab search just redirects to https://maps.google.com/maps?q=%s
It's gotten leaps and bounds more useful than it was 4-5 years ago. Transit directions are much easier to use. One of the only things I can complain about is that on mobile, if I've conducted a transit direction search then the results I get are for the given time. If I miss a bus or don't leave until a bit later and want to re-run the search again at the current time (some buses may have stopped running if I get delayed leavng party for example), I have to actually input the time on my phone; there's no way to re-run the search with the current time.
It's mind-blowing to me that they wouldn't make it easier to have a transit search use the current time, and instead continue to use a route from anywhere from 15 minutes-3 hours ago. Why would I even be performing the search again if I wanted the same routes.
All adblockers turned off, no errors in JS console, no other extensions installed, regular maps works fine.
I want that feature, but that shouldn't entitle Google to have that data on their servers.
I have a very long time since I used it. (I still use Google earth too).
...and the fact that I had to write this comment proves your point.
It doesn't look "modern", but if you ask me it's more usable.
Since Google has hidden the other properties behind the grid icon I've completely forgotten they were there.
Wow, I agree with you that it's visually worsened. I'm shocked at how much harder it is to visually parse information in there. It's not harder to use overall per se (from what I remember) but the number of visual indicators defining what's clickable or a message in a thread or a sliding panels hiding tags or pop-up reply panels that are just harder to work out is very surprising. I actually stumbled on an interesting piece today discussing this exact point, I forget where I saw it[0].
I admit to using desktop/clients for virtually all email stuff so going back into the web panel was a surprise to say the least.
Office 365 for email is dramatically better than GMail. Google Drive is much better, but I'm sure they will find a way to design that up too.
Hard to complain when they're free, but... I do my best.
God yes. What the hell man??
The Schema initiative - I didn't know it was called that until now - is in the other direction, and I like it. Emails that have valuable information for me, such as airline flights, are presented not in the way those that send it want it to be shown, but in a way that my mail client thinks is best. Frankly, I want sameness in my emails.
To pick an instance at random: Confirmation emails for purchases made, especially if they have tickets as an attachments. If this email looks broken, customer thinks it's phishing or something, and might end up trashing it, just because styling is not supported consistently.
And I take issue with your argument of "marketing emails are bad." You may not like them, and that's fine, but there is a large part of the internet ecosystem that do like marketing emails- such as my mother who likes learning about deals/sales/coupons at her favourite outlets.
Hello there! Thanks for purchasing X for $Y. Your tax invoice is attached. Here's where you can track your delivery:
Thanks!
Even if it's not as effective for click-through/customer re-engagement/etc. you should let the customer decide on what kind of emails they want. Data will prove if nice images and ads are less effective than simple HTML. Gmail shouldn't be forcing that decision, it should be empowering the greatest number of people to do the most amount of things.
For consumers, gmail should provide the optimal email experience- if they don't like it, they have the choice to use a different product.
But for developers, gmail should provide as many tools and as much functionality to meet developers need. That way developers build, Google profits.
Responsive design? Have you ever tried implementing an HTML email that will work across different clients? I'd be thrilled if 2005-era floats worked. As it stands, <table>s inside <table>s is state of the art.
A newsletter will multiple items will need headings (for people to scan through if they're short on time), a paragraph for people who need more details. Images, if the articles require them, also help.
Corporate email - not just advertisements, but also invoices, notifications, as such, almost always require some sort of branding. Customers expect them - a plain text email might be regarded as phishing or fake. And why force people to open up an attachment when HTML exists and can mark up those elements perfectly well?
Email also need to carry information of less importance - unsubscribe links, confidentiality notices, signatures, most of which are required by law or lawyers, but which can be made smaller or greyed out so they can be ignored when reading.
You can't do any of the above with plain text. What you need is markup, which guess what, HTML is.
Because you can't expect the email server/client to index the invoice for it's search database.
Probably other reasons
Regarding your example, I have no problem if such emails are not stylized.
I'll grant that there's a lot of yucky and annoying html in some marketing emails. But there is still a use-case for html-styled emails, and just having plain text with "click here to see images of the food you're getting next week" is pretty darn 1994.
Moz has a great article which covers it pretty well. Basically you have to send 100 emails per day for some length of time.
Since you can't just add them to your email and expect them to work, I think that is why it hasn't caught on. I'd really love if it did though.
1: https://developers.google.com/gmail/markup/registering-with-...
Oh god, yes! I, sometimes, get really offended when people are asking my email for sending the warranty on something I bought in real life. And then, extremely upset when they start sending their colorful marketing prospectus through this address. This inbox (or any other one) is carrying very valuable informations for me to remain organized and accurate; Therefore, it must stay sorted and categorized. I do not have time, nor attention to evaluate your christmas sales on stuffed donkeys.
Enough with the ads, and the blinking shit.
Of course it wouldn't be that Google is the world's largest advertising company and they are in direct competition with those advertisements that they break.
I only use plain text emails. I don't even use email tracking so that hidden pixel doesn't trigger any annoying warning on the email client that ruins the experience.
Sending unsolicited email to consumers is, indeed, spam. B2B is different.
EDIT: CANSPAM (US) is a bit ambiguous on this point. (Helpful blog post: http://customer.io/blog/Send-email-without-unsubscribe-link-...) CASL, its Canadian equivalent (I'm Canadian) is very clear on this point, though--unsolicited B2B to a publicly posted email address is a-ok, as long as it's not automated.
"Just to be clear, you’re not allowed to use Customer.io to send cold emails.."
Guess why :)
Edit: They are a business and have a "contact us" email on their website. Should I really not email them just because im not a customer, but a possible partner?
Another way of phrasing your mother's advice: "What if everybody did X?"
On the other hand, spamming or otherwise misusing email to deliver your unsolicited "message" at everyone else's expense is a classic instance of the Tragedy of the Commons. There is no incentive for any individual actor to do the right thing. Kant's categorical imperative is one of several reasonable ways to think about it.
I think the same for the email. If,everybody who can make a legitimate business proposal email them, no problem. And I apply the same ethics when I had my own company with a public email on my website (now im an employee and emails dont get to me)
Only if it is sent in bulk.
Unsolicited commercial email is spam, regardless of whether it is B2B, and regardless of whether it is sent to "public addresses".
Depends in which country you are in but in most EU countries, that is still spam and hence subject to legal action.
Edit: why the downvote? Care to explain your point?
When I say plain text, I mean plain-text. I mean not even markdown. Just plain text. The client can choose to make links clickable if they like.
Any formatted document should come as an attachment (I'd prefer PDF). I guess it should be an attachment I expect or I probably wouldn't open it. In any case, I don't like emails with tracking. It feels forced. If you really care, send delivery and read receipt requests but I doubt we do.
Markdown should stay where it belongs. It should convert into HTML in the server, not on my client.
They took that option away from me in 2011. No, I don't care about a picture. All I wanted was fixed width font, and plain text. Yes, I could apply style sheets to read plain text, and they would eventually break them for me. I'm not bothering with an uphill battle to get it back. I'm just moving on.
Oh, and about rich text? If I happen to be cutting and pasting something that was bold over here, I usually don't want it bold in my email! In fact I've wanted that approximately 0 times in my life. And it is a very good approximation.
If I happen to be cutting and pasting something that was
bold over here, I usually don't want it bold in my email!
Plain text cuts all the cruft and I can reasonably expect emails I receive to largely look similar so I get good at extracting relevant information.
Every client I have, desktop and mobile, displays and sends in plain text only and I'm pleasantly surprised how infrequently this breaks anything completely and how often it exposes tracking links etc.
If we must track users, perhaps we can just give them a link they can visit?
What do you think about using attachments for documents where formatting is essential?
Something I found interesting in the Wikipedia MIME article is:
> Text in character sets other than ASCII
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIME
If I so much as write க in Tamil, I rely on MIME. (Sorry if this is obvious to readers. I am not an email expert.) For others like me, the Wikipedia article on email spells it out:
> Originally an ASCII text-only communications medium, Internet email was extended by Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) to carry text in other character sets and multi-media content attachments. International email, with internationalized email addresses using UTF-8, has been standardized, but not yet widely adopted.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email
Sorry for going off on a tangent. I appreciate your reply as I learned something new today. (:
If plain text email was the end-all, then instant messenger and SMS would have killed email a long time ago.
+----------------------------------+---------+------------------------+
| Col1 | Col2 | Col3 |
+----------------------------------+---------+------------------------+
| Value 1 | Value 2 | 123 |
| Separate | cols | with a tab or 4 spaces |
| This is a row with only one cell | | |
+----------------------------------+---------+------------------------+It also doesn't necessarily work well for non-European languages.
It also looks ugly.
However, as I put on my True Scotsman hat and kilt, any true email client will present monospaced fonts, therefor those which fail to do so aren't real email tools.
Actually not that often. If the formatting is critical to the email, don't write it in an email. Send me a PDF.
https://groups.google.com/a/googleproductforums.com/d/msg/gm...
Thank you Google for protecting my privacy and making spam harder.
THANK FUCK. Seriously, just send me plain text.
* breaking established addressing conventions. Gmail (last time I used it) made it difficult to distinguish between To: and Cc:, both in received emails and when sending.
* messed-up quoting, and other broken conventions.
* the one that's been discussed to death here recently: it's on the way to impossible to send email and expect it not to be silently dropped if you're not on gmail.
* the email authenticity measures linked to the last point also screw up mailing lists and forwards. Most of the DMARC notifications I get from gmail now include a bunch of FAILs for people that forward from another domain to gmail. Soon, they'll simply stop receiving most mail.
Email is walking dead, and gmail is largely to blame.
Pisses me off no end.
I think most people (correctly) interpret HTML-ness in email as a signal that the email is undesirable.
That sounds like "HTML email with minimal cruft" rather than "plain text" to me.
Indeed, the only good thing I can say about Gmail is that they didn't try to use the Microsoft Word engine to render HTML like Outlook did. The way HTML email is set up and the table filled soup like code that's needed to use them well is about half the reason most developers fall back to things like Mailchimp templates rather than trying to make anything half decent.
It's also why it's a real shame that the old email standards project kind of got abandoned, because absolutely zero progress has been made on this front for years upon years (outside of Apple's smartphone email apps).
And yes, while plain text email does 'work', good luck convincing a company (or your boss) to go with something basic rather than the equivalent of a glossy print brochure.
1. Have your own domain for emails. This is important. Gmail (or any service provider) can block you/remove your account for no reason and with no recourse. Your email is very important if you are doing serious work and have financial sites and data linked to that email address.
2. The very reason that I used Gmail was speed and storage. The very reason that I left Gmail was speed. Storage is no longer relevant now. Speed become a problem in 2012-2014. It seems better now, but there seems to be "rush hours".
3. The Gmail web app is no longer good. I like a very simple interface because I write very long email. Why make the "compose" show up as a pop-up? I write emails and not chat messages.
4. The SPAM filter is good until it catches a couple business emails. This is when I decided that no SPAM filter is better.
5. If you don't pay for the product, you are the product. I left Gmail after using it for 8 years. I was fine for 12 years but as the business grow I thought about that line. Suddenly, I had strange thoughts about Google using all my data.
I'm starting to think that this statement is becoming really generalized. Anonymized data has the power to help society.
I.e. anonymized cancer patient data to help doctors see larger societal trends without jeopardizing client privacy.
I trust larry page and the Google team, and presume Google is handling my data responsibly.
But 1)corporations are obliged to care about profit, and 2) anonymized data can be de-anonymized with (to me) astonishing ease. In Data and Goliath Bruce Schneier cites a dozen cases of de-anonymized data, from health records to Netflix history to personal identification.[0] It is possible that I'm just more paranoid than the average GMail user, but this scared the bones out of me.
[0] An example on his website: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/05/reidentifying...
http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/15/google-needs-to-do-a-lot-mo...
> Have your own domain for emails
Gmail allows you to own your domain. You just subscribe for Google Apps, at $5 / user / month, which is reasonable.
> If you don't pay for the product, you are the product
Well, with Google Apps you very much pay for the product. But I don't agree with such thoughts not even for the free Gmail. Yeah, it's a cute line, but has nothing to do with reality, the reality being that products being sold have to be produced, the essence of capitalism being to lower the costs and increase the scale, turning sold products into commodities and users, by being people, are anything but commodities, being in fact entities that in comparison with hardware or whatever, can always get pissed off or switch to a competitor. Such lines also assume a very simplistic view of the producer / consumer relationship. Cash changing hands is nice, but in our world an ecosystem is much more complex than that, much like how in nature there's a very complex and life creating relationship between predators, cattle and grass, each link in that food-chain being essential for the survival of everything else. And the genius of Google has been to recognize that the welfare of users is paramount to their success, though unfortunately they seem to forget that ever since Google+ and Vic Gundotra.
More realistic would be to say that a zero price tag is in fact subsidized with something else, as there's always an implicit cost. The cost of the free Gmail is lock-in. And just like in nature where monocultures are unhealthy for everybody, free Gmail is hurting competition and worse, they are dropping the ball on standards. So Android is my favorite mobile OS, but can you believe that Android doesn't have a modern, well designed and standard email client? I mean, you're good as long as you're a Gmail user. Exchange also works. But for plain IMAP? Say goodbye to push email and to basic functionality, like archiving by swiping. They should also be ashamed that Android doesn't support CalDAV or CardDAV out of the box, though granted you can buy some add-ons.
Android has bad IMAP support -- is this a limitation of Android, or of IMAP? (are there push notifications for iOS?) IMAP has been a thorn in my side for ever, but I assumed that was the fault of an old outdated protocol?
What I _do_ like, is that when I get an email with things like flight details that my client can add it to the calendar.
if I have any complaint with gmail it's that they're too successful, running your own mail server that's standards compliant and runs all the DMARC/SPF/DKIM + PTR is fine, but until you have a reputation with gmail 70% of people aren't seeing email from you (and I'm not talking marketing emails).
which is self-fulfilling, because my emails go into the spam bin, which means when the spam bins get churned into the anti-spam learning engine it has, it sees that "(S)He's been marked spam before".
So it somehow centralises email, which is at it's core decentralised. :\
"Journalism"
Addressing the content of the article:
- "Gmail Makes Developers Shun Email", I can't think of any developer I know that shuns email, and they all pretty much use gmail.
- "How Gmail Breaks Email", to be frank... not even in the slightest. Sure, it sounds pretty annoying having to jump through all those hoops for a fancypants email.
- "Google should take the lead in bringing the web mail stakeholders from Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL together toward the support of a common set of CSS and HTML."
Who makes a demand like that of a company? Hey, Company X, gather every industry leader please and force them to all standardize to one spec. Am I the only one that would prefer companies to not be in the driver seat for these kinds of decisions? Isn't this what led to the IE6 debacle?
I really don't get these articles. Today I've read HN front page articles about horrible gmail is (my favorite email service for the past 10 years) and "Amazon kind of sucks". I must be out of touch.
Hopefully no one exposes him to the ocean of old Outlook clients with crufty Word-based HTML renderers out there; he might die of a heart attack. Mentioning Pine/Alpine would be cruel as well.
I'm very aware of Outlook's backward HTML support, but at least its a single client. With Gmail, each of their clients has weird quirks that make it frustrating to code for.
As developers sometimes creating HTML emails are necessary, such as creating system generated reports for business users. Right now, the process is fraught with issues - including figuring out Outlook, so fixing this does not just benefit email marketers alone.
I think you've misinterpreted the phrase "Gmail Makes Developers Shun Email". TechCrunch writes:
Gmail and its plethora of rendering quirks is a big reason why developers avoid working on email.
This suggests that developers shun email clients as a development platform (i.e., working on email), not that developers don't use email themselves.
[1] http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/12/gmail-...
But you're right: https://blog.filippo.io/how-the-new-gmail-image-proxy-works-...
Sorry Justin, but sending web-pages by email is exactly why email sucks. No messaging apps allow HTML+CSS markup to be sent, and there's a reason for this - it's not readable. Instead send a URI/Link and the recipient can view the HTML using a tool that's designed for that - the browser! Web-pages aren't messaging. That's what the WWW is for, not email. Apple is totally at fault for introducing HTML support in emails, they didn't see the spam coming. Email is a messaging protocol, not a news reader or web browser. NOBODY (except for advertisers) wants SHOPPING CARTS in their emails. What non-sense.
All of that just so that you can pretend an inherently text medium is actually a way to deliver web pages directly to users. This is a lot of work for questionable benefit to GMail's actual users as opposed to Email Marketers.
The other webmails rewrite ids and classes and prepend unique identifiers to prevent them from clashing with their own namespace (AOL is the only one that puts it in an iframe).
Interestingly Gmail webmail actually supports the style tag but strips out id and class selectors in them leaving element selectors - so they're actually doing some heavy duty parsing already.
As for it being an inherently text medium. I would say it depends on the recipient. Emails do not need to be web pages, but simple CSS styling can go a long way to ease readability in emails - especially in a long curated newsletter like Product Hunt.
There is no valid reason anymore for not iframe'ing your HTML emails any more. Browsers are consistent enough in rendering that you can achieve trivial cross-platform pixel perfection (font rendering aside).
Point blank, it's easy to see that this is by design and not by quirk or fault. If anything Google are looking to maintain usability by keeping as close to RFC spec as possible.
One of the biggest problems facing email today is SPAM, and general deliverability. Once you veer far off spec it gets a lot more difficult to manage these two issues.
For example, look how nice Greylisting worked in theory, until you realize that most IT or hosting companies don't have a clue how to configure an MTA within RFC specs and do silly things like retrying delivery every 5 mins.
When your dealing with complex systems, it's better to keep each part of that system well oiled and within a predictable spec. And then Microsoft adds HTML support to Outlook so that marketing execs can throw 15 sales related images and some wording about saving trees...
Often, solution providers should have given an alternative when asked to do things that break from standards. As we often say in this field, "Just because you can, doesn't mean that you should."
Kc/
that's what needs to happen for greylisting to work.
it's spambots that don't have the retry ability.
An MTA should never resend after only 5 minutes. It should wait at least 25 minutes before even the first retry.
I've seen many set up to retry every 60 seconds, giving up after 5 tries. One IT tech even told me it was so his boss doesn't have to wait 3 days to get a non-delivery report! Lol.
If the sender wants me to see a website, just send me the damn link?
Oh- what's that? Do your competitors find it hard to advertise on your platform? That's so sad. I really value the service that email marketers provide.
Thanks again Google,
Your search is still ok - but it is your email account that is good enough to keep me as a customer. An Bing is awful. Except for the arial photos - they are better than the shitty ones on google maps.
Short emails may be fine with plain text, but once you need to present any sort of structure, HTML becomes necessary and there's no reason why email needs to be this difficult.
We just build the template in Mailchimp and export it out as HTML nowadays. Never had an issue with that workflow.
There are countless other standards this article overlooks which have been implemented very well in recent years in Gmail, so why does it lambast the lack of Schema?
Since then: Slow death by "product manager", or whatever the hell they call it.
(In league, I suspect in my personal opinion, with some cabal of out-of-control graphic "designers". Though this is hardly the only problem.)
And that's a problem? Please don't put CSS in your email.
Really? Because I find it so much more readable if all of my emails are the same font.
We moved to gmail to escape from spam not to get more spam.
I like that it forces the use of templates that are rigorously tested and will seldom change.
Because when I mark the email as spam... it will very likely bin all other emails produced by the same template.
I only slightly jest, but the best emails are the ones with the least possible styling. These are also the most deliverable emails, the ones most likely to make it through to an inbox.
It's not just the gmail client, of course; nearly all rich mail renderers are astonishingly baroque and broken (take a look at which engines Outlook uses to render html mail - sometimes it's the msword renderer).
Of course, we could all just agree to send plain text emails with a link to the web page-ified rich version of the email, but that's not satisfying. I work in the borderlands of rich email - I'm not sending advertising stuff, I'm just sending notifications to users, but those notifications look a lot better when they've got some good markup.
The Android mail client doesn't, the iOS mailclient doesn't, Outlook actually feature-retarded between 2010 and 2013, most webmailers break on anything that's not tables with inline styles, Lotus Notes Webmail is actually fairly good but unfortunately depending on the platform the full Notes client uses either its horrid internal engine or something provided by the OS that may actually be IE7 (shit, you design a beautiful newsletter for Mac Notes, and it falls apart on Windows; also weird weird suboptions hidden deep inside Notes make it balk on anything but color/background-color/height/width)...
The only mail client that can render full-featured HTML5 newsletters is Thunderbird.
You say you don't have family plans yet, but it sounds like you will. Do you really expect me to be okay with having my GMail account setup on my children's phones?
Sometimes actions would be nice, but there specification does not define how to use them in good ol' plain-text emails.
I'd love to know who and why my parent comment was downvoted.. I hate that, you can't say anything on here without downvotes.