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Comment by darklion | Hacker News Reader

The application itself looks absolutely amazing, and the authors should be commended for it.

That said, the FAQ mentions that the for-profit model is designed to avoid ads in the client and to "take a strong stance on privacy", which is a little bit disingenuous given that the client exclusively relies on an email service provided by the world's largest advertiser and email data miner.

Yes, Mimestream itself isn't using my data, but there's a bit of induced cognitive dissonance in taking a strong privacy stance for a Google-specific product.

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> In order to build a sustainable business that can continue to innovate and improve our products, Mimestream will eventually transition to being a paid app.

Come on, they're explicitly saying that they're charging for the service. It's pretty clear that when they're talking about privacy the caveat is that they won't suck your data into another sink (them) _other than google itself_, being the provider of gmail and all.

I'm all for privacy and informing the user but they're hardly playing word games here.

> I'm all for privacy and informing the user but they're hardly playing word games here.

I'm not saying they're playing word games. I'm saying the strong ethical stance on privacy is diluted by the underlying service they built their product on.

If I built a new automobile refueling station that dispensed diesel and gasoline, but used the fact that the pumps themselves ran on solar energy to claim "I strongly believe in 100% renewable energy", well yes, in one way you're living up to your ideals, but in another larger way, you're really not.

Google also provides the account contents to the US military intelligence community on demand without a warrant via the PRISM program, so it is impossible to use this program as it exists right now and have private email.

Here’s hoping you can use it with an actually private email service in the future.

Yeah, the intention isn't to claim that Mimestream somehow makes using Gmail more secure, but rather that it doesn't suck your data onto an additional server, like a lot of email clients tend to do these days.

I would like to add support for IMAP and JMAP in the future, which should broaden the scope of services you can use this with!

I think you have your priorities inverted.

I would much rather have my emails sucked into some developer’s private server than sit on the server of a large multinational that provides them to the federal police and national military without warning, notice, just cause, due process, or meaningful judicial oversight.

Doing gmail-first is the error, and is an endorsement of a society without privacy or the rule of law.

You have produced an espionage-only email client.

We can’t just go about our lives, pretending gmail is okay because it’s popular. Using gmail and building in its ecosystem is an explicit endorsement of gmail which is part of an illegal military spying program.

They aren’t different things, as much as I imagine we’d all like them to be. To endorse gmail is to endorse illegal military spying, and is to endorse a society without privacy.

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