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Comment by whizzkid | Hacker News Reader

Sorry to be the one that has negative feelings about it.

Email is one of those rare concepts that is really hard to change or enhance. I can easily see Google abandoning this feature in 5 years.

People need email service just because of the email function, nothing more than that.

It's concept clearly has some limitations (attachment sizes, layout inconsistencies and so on) but it also doesn't have any deal-breaker problems.

Introducing external services integration to email sounds like taking a huge risk. How people manage their invoices, to-do lists and other stuff is changing faster than ever. These add-ons will require active development all the time to keep themselves up-to-date.

As a developer, I wouldn't risk investing in this feature.

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An API that might go away in 5 years is much much better than hacking the DOM. I wouldn't base a business around either, but I can think of some fun and useful add-ons I could build

I've been panned on here before for saying this, but I really feel everyone should leave email alone. As a spec its already so immensely complicated and embedded that any features you add will only be picked up by a tiny percentage of providers.

Imagine if that advice had been taken pre-gmail though. Not everyone loves it, but for most people, gmail's conversation view is far superior to the default way emails were organized before. And it does this while still interacting seamlessly with other email clients.

I don't see gmail as perfect, but that's kind of the point; it's possible we could gain from this kind of experimentation.

Afterthought - archiving and snoozing emails are also concepts that weren't around initially, but can be extremely valuable depending on your workflow. I'm sure there are other similar improvements and additions to be found.

Archiving emails was a true game changer.

I often email documents to myself for future reference, even though I'm also uploading them to jira, or a wiki, or a shared drive or whatever.

The one place I know I can always search all the way back is Gmail.

Archiving has always been possible via folders and IMAP. What makes it valuable was the gigabytes of storage space and decent webmail client.

I've come to dislike it more and more. Gmail hides too many details. Thinks like precise timestamps. Things like not surfacing subject changes well enough. Things like a spam filter with immense amounts of false positives. I keep having to fight with gmail in ways I never have to with other mail solutions, to the point were I'm getting very close to abandoning it entirely.

I agree with you on the spam filtering. It would be VERY nice if you could customize the threshold, or even better, have a couple of thresholds, so you end up with a 'definitely spam' and a 'probably spam' box.

I've kind of created that by using spamassassin to filter out really hardcore spam before it gets to gmail, but obviously that's not an option if you're using an @gmail address.

That said, I think we take for granted just how good gmail's spam filtering is. Their ability to 'see' so much email passing through the system gives them a massive advantage there, which they've used to pretty good effect. They catch a ton of stuff for me that SA misses, and very few false positives (but just enough that I can't ignore the folder, unfortunately).

Unfortunately the false positives vary greatly with your mail patterns. For me the amount large enough that even though it also stops a shitload of spam I'm starting to think it's too much of a problem. Just checked right now, and though I've checked my spam folder earlier this month (and emptied the folder), it now has 40 messages of which 9 are false positives. What's more, several of them are from senders I regularly get e-mail from and that I have never marked as spam.

Ha, lucky you. Before I started pre-filtering with SA, I got about 3000 spam emails per month. I can cut out about 2/3 of those with SA without losing any of the false positives, so now I only have to wade through 1000 or so to find the one or two falses. :/

That brutal, but if my false positive rate was that low I'd probably be willing to just tolerate it. What drives me most crazy, is just how hard it is to get Gmail to accept that a given type of e-mail is not spam...

> Not everyone loves it, but for most people, gmail's conversation view is far superior to the default way emails were organized before.

Before gmail, I used gnus (http://www.gnus.org/) to read my email, and frankly the two methods seem pretty on-par (in fact, for over a decade I used gnus to read gmail). The only reason I do use gmail (actually, Inbox) today is because I want to read & send email from my phone, and it's convenient to use the same interface both places.

Honestly, I'm a bit tempted to switch to K9 on the phone & gnus on my computer again. Gnus is orders of magnitudes faster than Inbox or the Gmail web UI.

I had the same reaction as you at the headline, but clicking the article and seeing intuit and salesforce made me rethink slightly. It would indeed be handy to be able to toss a receipt email into quickbooks or a new name on cc into a salesforce contact from webmail. I'm sure there are some other decent uses of the concept.

Absolutely. I am not saying that these add-ons can not be useful. In fact there are a lot of ideas one can come up with.

I just think external email integrations are hard to keep healthy and active.

It sounds like you're against it because there's a huge market for it...

Nah he's right. They have a history of axing stuff with 0 care about personal or corporate users.

Search 'Google graveyard' , etc.

There may be a huge market, but your dev time will earn income for not many months/years.

I'd rather see my products live longer than that, and me focusing on growth, than constantly trying to restart development just because Google worries much more about their bottom line, than their users.

But, to each his own.

If you're looking for an alternative open source email platform, check out Nylas Mail. It's built in React+ES6 with a rich plugin system.

https://github.com/nylas/nylas-mail

(I work at Nylas.)

> As a developer, I wouldn't risk investing in this feature.

Are you developing or working on anything related to email?

Pretty often at work actually, yes.

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