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Comment by profeta | Hacker News Reader

most desktop clients (mutt included) almost died when everyone moved to gmail and such. imap/pop access was too expensive (when compared to having a so-so UI for free) or not available.

now that gmail and yahoomail give imap for free, they will surely comeback. see N1 for example.

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Gmail has provided free IMAP since they launched, and Yahoo has had it for years too. Personally, my main draw to Gmail is that I just don't have to deal with ISPs blocking SMTP, which can get really annoying really quickly on laptops.

>ISPs blocking SMTP is this actually still a thing? I know on our campus network they block SMTP on the wired network, but not on the wireless (for some boneheaded reason or another).

All sane residential ISPs block port 25 (SMTP) to prevent spam.

All sane mail providers offer SUBMISSION (same protocol as SMTP) on port 587, which is intentionally not blocked by ISPs.

I've been on ISPs that block SMTP ans SUBMISSION along with their main alternative ports because they had too much spam sent from their IPs in the past getting them added to spamhaus.

Of course, they only needed to block port 25, but alas they blocked them all.

Residental ISPs where? I've yet to see one here in EU O.o

RCS & RDS in Romania [1]. Telekom in Germany [2].

[1]: http://www.rcs-rds.ro/asistenta/protejeaza-ti-calculatorul?t... (in Romanian)

[2]: https://www.telekom.de/hilfe/festnetz-internet-tv/sicherheit... (in German)

Most residential ISPs in the US, at least. Certainly all of the big ones do (Comcast, Time Warner, AT&T, Verizon, etc); the FTC has actually specifically recommended that all US ISPs block outbound port 25 as a spam mitigation measure.

Pretty sure gmail supported POP from day one, and it has supported IMAP since 2007 [1]. The problem is that gmail's mail organizational system is sort of incompatible with POP/IMAP and completely incompatible with a number of clients. That started to change around 2010 when gmail had been so popular for so long that the standards and clients started to accomodate gmail's way of doing things.

Desktop MUAs won't suddenly become popular now. A generation of users has been brought up on webmail, and the idea of using a separate program for email on the desktop isn't familiar to them.

[1] http://www.wired.com/2007/10/google_adds_imap_support_to_gma...

I think the main thing is that people see no difference between gmail and other web messaging (eg Facebook) anymore. It's a text box on a website.

I completely agree. Just during the last 24 hours I've heard someone repeatedly using expressions like "I've sent you a Gmail" or "Yes, you can send a message from Outlook to Gmail". As if Gmail was just another messaging service, along the lines of Whatsapp, WeChat or Line.

The person in question is someone who became "computer literate" relatively recently (at least compared to me, I'm 37 and always been tinkering since I was a kid) and has become accustomed to most on-line services while using smartphones and tablets, not a personal computer.

That person is not alone. To be honest, I think most people under 20 and most people living in developing countries went down a similar path (mobile first) and have a similar understanding of messaging platform.

But aren't users also used to using mobile mail apps, not websites? At least for iOS users, I could imagine them being comfortable with Mail.app.

You'd think, but the shift from desktop apps to web apps happened concurrently with the rise of mobile apps. It doesn't seem that users think of mobile and desktop apps the same way.

$weed = "yes please"

Sadly this is not really true for the industry and Germany. Most people around me still use Outlook.

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