Yahoo Mail’s Plan to Fix Email: Make Computers Read It
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
The number of times their servers reject emails at random, causing yahoo email users frustration, is astonishing for an email service provider. Contacting their postmaster to spell out the issue results in a dispute over email headers (which they insist can be obtained from their email client even though the emails are being rejected server side) - and their numerous problems go unsolved. We tell users to switch away from yahoo if they want to receive emails with a reasonable probability.
We've never had issues sending millions of emails to Gmail, outlook, or pretty much any large ESP other than yahoo.
Never use Yahoo mail. There are much better alternatives out there, even if you want a free service.
When I read this I thought this Apple's 40%+ email share can't possibly be true and I read the linked article and realized if an iPhone user is reading their yahoo.com or hotmail.com email on the Mail app on their phone, it counts as an "iPhone email", so this number is meaningless, although it's probably true that Yahoo email has a smaller share than Hotmail or Gmail.
like this:
https://www.cnet.com/forums/discussions/yahoo-email-deleted-...
or maybe a different issue where they deleted mails older than 1 year or older than 10 years or something, I forget. (you can google it. people were comparing it to going into your attic or back of your closet and throwing away old letters you'd saved.) anyway it really made me very sad. I don't use them and am unlikely to ever trust them. they really let me down.
* Replace toothbrush heads (electric)
* Spring clean two rooms in the house
* Download backups of all email accounts
* Download backups of all cloud web sites
* Sync external hard drives to cloud archival storage
* Download QIF and QBO of all bank accounts
It's quarterly. Worst case scenario, I lose last three months. And by doing it quarterly, I usually add to the to do list, and it's a catch-up.
Cleaning two rooms of my house take the longest time. Everything else can be done in about 1-2 hours.
What? This is a wonderful way to use computers. Screenshots are offline storage of specific, useful information in a universal format whose content can be browsed and recognized at a glance.
People don't want better organization, they want to get their boarding pass out easily. You can do that a million ways, but the one way that makes no sense is "pull up the virtual letter I received at time of purchase and see if it contains an embedded image or an attachment I forgot to download". What would make more sense is to have an extension to something like vCard called "tickets" and allow special ticket-holding apps to keep them. Your email client could download them and pass them to the app automatically, ensuring you always have your tickets offline and organized in a dedicated ticket program.
We don't have to live in a world where one application tries to do everything, and we can use standards to make universal things (like tickets) actually universal.
Companies should make it easy to add it to those apps. For me boarding passes are really easy to add to Apple Wallet for example.
Not that I want to use Y! Mail but it's the principle of the thing.
I know someone who works at a Microsoft subsidiary. She'll bring up using MS Lync, Teams, Skype, Excel or something and I'll be thinking "oh, most companies just use X." The few times I've used those Microsoft products I found them confusing and error prone...this also means I should spend more resources learning this. All of that would take away from my day job.
I can easily see not wanting to spend time investing in half baked calendars and conferencing taking resources away from consumer focused features.
It seems the tides have turned a bit. Now that SMTP email is everywhere, users could reverse the situation. I could say that I will only accept emails which can be parsed by a computer. I (or my provider) could then publish a schema for the types of emails that I'm willing to receive (and how they should be formatted for me). The rest would go into some other folder (ie: spam), that I could look through if I cared enough.
[1] https://tidbits.com/1991/09/16/ce-ships-quickmail/
[2] https://www.engadget.com/2008/07/28/outspring-puts-the-final...
The problem is people not learning to properly use a tool that they spend a big part of their time with, and instead fearing that if they touch one wrong thing, one wrong button, their computer or smartphone will explode.
It was rough going for the first week or so but by the second week I had a large number of folders and filtering rules set up. I had at least 80% of the emails being marked as read and tucked away as soon as they were received, since they were mostly log files I only needed to look at if something went wrong.
The problem is people not learning to properly use a tool that they spend a big part of their time with, and instead fearing that if they touch one wrong thing, one wrong button, their computer or smartphone will explode.
I have no idea how to cure people of this problem. I have been trying to teach my dad how to use his computer and phone nearly all my life. He's learning things, sure, but there's never any moment where I feel like I've handed him the keys to the Corvette, so to speak. Each time I show him how to do something, it's like I'm driving him to a different appointment.
(It'd have been a lot easier if I was more tolerating of errors, but the entire reason I was updating it was to eliminate errors that had started getting annoying. And I'm guessing errors are one reason why some people don't use filters.)
OTOH, I'm told you can't apply Sieve filters retroactively? That sounds completely awful.
If Google makes this difficult, that's on them.
I don't buy that email is broken, not anymore than other communication means at least. The clients may be too hard to use or too limited in functionality. The sad truth is that beyond a few walled of webmail solutions, like Gmail or Yahoo, development of email clients have stalled. Add to that companies that spend zero effort in education staff in using Outlook (because let's face it, we're talking about Outlook for the most part, when talking work emails).
Why does everyone keep being fixated at the idea that email is broken?
The only broken thing in email is Google and it's obscenely obscure and paranoid spam filtering.
The underlying protocols are well over 40 years old (RFCs 822, 821, 733, 630, 561, possibly others), and are showing their age. (https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc733)
In theory, email is universal and distributed, in practice it's very highly concentrated amongst a few major providers (Google's Gmail, Microsoft Outlook, Yahoo, as of 2016 http://blog.shuttlecloud.com/the-most-popular-email-provider...). Google alone has a majority of US email addresses. Some see this as a problem. (https://mako.cc/copyrighteous/google-has-most-of-my-email-be...)
In practice, self-hosting email is problematic and presents risks to the administrator, their correspondents, and third parties through possibilities of spam and other abuse.
At the same time, the utility and practicality of email is rapidly declining. I've used email for well over three decades, and defended the basic protocols until recent years. I can do so no longer, and actively avoid email in general for numerous reasons, something that does not please me in the least.
Unfortunately, getting protocols and standards un-stuck is exceedingly difficult, not just in tech and comms, but generally, and for deep and systemic reasons. Greenfield domains with a small but collaborative community seem best disposed to developing standards -- that's not what we have presently in the online / digital world.
old != broken
> In practice, self-hosting email is problematic and presents risks
Not more, than self hosting WordPress.... And it's really not that problematic to self host it. I'm very tired of always hearing how hard it is when all one needs to do is adding a few dns records for spf, dkim, dmarc and reverse dns, and it works.
> At the same time, the utility and practicality of email is rapidly declining.
Not as infrastructure, no. In personal communication, yes.
You are correct on some points, especially the power concentration. On other points we're over complicating email. We need to accept that it'll never be as "private" as some enthusiasts would like it to be, but it's a more than adequate for reliably exchanging information.
I've hosted email for 40m+ users. It's nontrivial.
But I use it everyday and it is one of the few things in the computerised side of my life that actually does work properly.
Mind you I almost never use web mail even though my main account is Hotmail and I have both Gmail and Yahoo accounts. I use Thunderbird on several machines, built in email client on my Lenovo tablet and the Gmail app on my Moto g5+. They all work.
So what is it that everyone wants to fix?