Email doesn’t disappear
blog.fastmail.com
blog.fastmail.com
"Nobody, from the lowliest spammer to the grand exulted CEO of a massive company, can remove or change the content of an email message they have sent to you."
Unless the message has embedded images linked from the web. Those images are part of the 'content of an email' as far as most people are concerned, but aren't part of the message envelope. So they can be destroyed or replaced by the sender whenever they want.
Do any mail clients aim to deal with this by keeping a permanent copy? (Including the 1x1 tracking pixel content?)
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/12/gmail...
Tangentially related LWN article:
Ok, one of the major points was that the email had yet to be opened/downloaded but still that email disappeared from an inbox.
> Nobody, from the lowliest spammer to the grand exulted CEO of a massive company, can remove or change the content of an email message they have sent to you.
No. Unless it is on your own server. And this is an argument against FastMail, and they know it for sure. So why lying so brutally?
> FastMail is a provider you can trust
Rule of thumb: never trust anyone who says you can trust him/her.
If the Fastmail CEO sent me an email through Fastmail, with very little technical knowledge, I could set up a regular desktop client to download all those emails locally - headers and all. Even the iPhone default Mail app setup helps you do it.
The same is not true of Facebook - those messages belong to Facebook.
You might want to consider POP3.
I think the argument is that you have a way to export and retain emails while there is nothing you can do with messages on FB other than screenshot.
I don't think their point was that you can get text vs images.
So FastMail's argument is just logically inconsistent. More, an agency problem is here.
its technically possible to edit the mail body on the server side and serve the modified message under the same mail ID.
I'd wager most clients would invalidate their local copy and trust the new mail from the server, but have to admit that I've never tested such a scenario.
Also: A backup of the mailbox would be unaffected by any server-side change.
Not the SSL certificate for your domain, which Fastmail will acquire with or without your prior knowledge or consent, and to which you have no access or control.
They can't request a certificate unless you already pointed your domain to their servers. So if you're already doing that for HTTP, requesting an ssl cert so they can enable HTTPS on it is a perfectly valid request... especially when browsers are starting to mark all HTTP sites as insecure.
If I've received an email and keep it in the webmail, I cannot change that. A downloaded mail can be edited, unless it's signed with PGP. I can change content, headers, dates. An email in Gmail webmail cannot be changed by me. And while Google can do that, and maybe an excellent hacker can do that, the chance that you're the victim of that as an average Joe is very small.
What is your threat model? Obviously, it does not include google (and by extension, the state actors that can compel it to do things). But what does it include?
When you're in court having having a dispute with a customer or your boss, you can't dispute Gmail timestamps etc. That's all I'm saying.
Most solutions focus on preventing individual e-mails to be read or modified by a 3rd party. Does anyone apply similar techniques to a whole mailbox / account?
Really? I mean who writes such a thing literally. It has to be indirect!
I wouldn't say it's worth linking on HN (except maybe to spark a conversation), but here we are.
Admittedly, actually using the phrase "____ is a ____ you can trust" is pretty tacky at this point.
I use FastMail for my work email and it's ok, but I wish these guys would introduce a few new features from time to time. Why in 2018 do I not have the ability to "Snooze" an email and come back to it at a later date? or add notes to an email that don't get sent to the person I'm conversing with? or consolidate emails from multiple conversations into a single conversation? Yeah FastMail your service is a better alternative to Gmail because I don't have to worry about being locked out of my email one day for no apparent reason, but why aren't you innovating? Email with Fastmail is just as tedious and boring as it was 10 years ago.
tl;dr - less politicised blog posts, more making your service not suck, please.
Once you've used a service like Intercom, FrontApp or even Google's "Inbox" you realise emailing can be far more productive. It's a shame that companies like FastMail gave up on trying to improve the experience.
On top of that, it sounds like you really want something other than email.
And there's no good standards compliant way to implement that, so it'd mess up third party clients. This is why Gmail is such a broken experience if you aren't using Gmail's own proprietary Google-blessed apps.
* Create a folder 'On Hold'
* Move emails there
* Check in a couple days.
If you want alternatives, check AirMail. I find it's a good client on iOS and OS X that implements what you want
With Google Inbox (inbox.google.com) I can Snooze an email for [x] number of days and it'll be gone from my inbox and I don't have to think about it until it comes back. I use Inbox for personal email but I'd rather not be.
Airmail doesn't have a web client, and that's where most of my emailing takes place, so unfortunately it's not an option.
We use FrontApp on top of FastMail for customer service, it provides a bunch of useful features on top of email, such as the one I just mentioned. I could use it for my personal email but that would mean paying two monthly subscriptions. Plus it doesn't have spam filtering built in.
And... You've just lost standards compliance so you can't use any standards compliant clients. This is a terrible hack of a workaround and you know it :)