"We’re writing to let you know that the Gmail Basic HTML view for desktop web and mobile web will be disabled starting early January 2024. The Gmail Basic HTML views are previous versions of Gmail that were replaced by their modern successors 10+ years ago and do not include full Gmail feature functionality."
It was pretty fun/interesting to see creative solutions like that to deal with very limited bandwidth in practice.
We'd pull email down over Inmarsat, but the geometry was such that the ship literally had to come to a different course and speed to keep a lock on the bird.
Physics matter sometimes.
No idea how feasible it is to integrate that with mutt in a client-only integration or if you need a backend for this, though.
> for my personal mail
That's actually the whole idea behind having your own domain. If you are john@gmail.com and switch to john@fastmail.com, you have to tell all your contacts that you changed your e-mail address, which is not practical.
If you are john@doe.com, you can use it with GMail, and later move to Fastmail, and nobody has to know about it.
I haven't set it up to be a forwarding destination from Gmail, but should.
We add that discussion in our company, so yes I get why companies when to push app usage. But please make it dismissable. You have to accept that you will have a small portion of people that for a lot of reason will never use your app, don't try to force it on them. Otherwise you're just polarizing your user.
It's also now forbidden to distribute a turnkey app that lets the end user paste their personal key after build time (app must only use a single key, so the developer gets billed). Interesting that whatever reader djbusby is talking about doesn't fall afoul! Is it something that's specifically compatible with Reddit's API off the shelf, or did you create that layer yourself?
If you genuinely think that they killed their API and aren't using hyperbole, then you were misled.
They killed 3rd party apps by charging the developers of those apps on a per-request basis at a price that would have been unsustainable for them. However, these charges are only if you're logged in. You can still use 3rd party apps anonymously.
If you want to be logged in so you can post/vote/comment, there's a work-around. If you create your own client ID and put it into an existing app, then you can still use third party apps (on Android at least) [0]. I'm still using BaconReader this way.
[0] https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wHvqQwCYdJrQg4BKlGIVDLks...
It's gone now.
Thankfully they allow some margins and after that they just delay messages to the next day: https://www.migadu.com/pricing/#what-after-reaching-limits
So micro seems like a pretty good deal that I'm now considering myself!
Do they have a web client, or it's a bring your own client?
How "family friendly" is the actual usage experience (as opposed to nerd friendly; I'd need to convert my wife as well as myself:)
Thx muchly!
I'd say the web client doesn't get any simpler. I'm sure my parents could easily figure it out (they're not tech savvy).
Just a reminder that if you had your own domain, then you could seamlessly switch between e.g. gmail and protonmail without having to change your email address. That is really convenient and gives you the freedom to change email provider whenever you want.
Sadly, it's getting increasingly hard to work entirely in text mode for email nowadays; people don't have any issues reading my text mail but almost 0% of all my incoming email is plaintext compatible; for mutt I have to run most of my emails through w3m before reading them, which isn't a huge deal but I kind of wish people would just send plaintext unless they have a specific reason not to.
My dumb fault.
You, the CTO, and I all prefer plaintext emails, but we're very much the minority.
It doesn't affect me, but there are objective reasons for letting people choose their own fonts. My dad has dyslexia and generally has an easier time reading Comic Sans than other fonts. For (I think) obvious reasons his company isn't going to start sending all their HTML-formatted emails in Comic Sans, which means he artificially has to spend more time reading emails than he might otherwise, unless he wants to copypaste the message bodies into MSWord and convert it.
What we lose is simply not worth it for the point 1% of people who use mutt.
Sending as both: what happens to clients that can't be configured as such?
There are fonts that are a bit more accessible to people with dyslexia like Comic Sans which companies aren't going to just randomly start sending emails in.
Can we take a step back and think about what we "win" with "inline pictures, colours, links and tables"?
> for the point 1% of people who use mutt.
It's not only using mutt. There are actually quite a few things that you lose by using HTML e-mails. You just don't know them, and so you consider that the way you use e-mail is the best.
Not saying that you are wrong, and maybe 99% of users actually don't want to use e-mail like those 1% you mention. But before you say so, it would be great if you considered those use-cases that you don't know. Because maybe those 1% using mutt have a valid point :-).
The smartphone penetration rate in sub-Saharan counties has doubled between 2013 and 2017. Countries like Ghana and Senegal had about 30% usage in 2017, and South Africa was over 50%.
And 2017 was 6 years ago, so we’re probably at the point where the majority of people in some of the least developed countries on earth are using smartphones that can run a lightweight mobile site with some JavaScript like gmail.
At least half of Africa has LTE connectivity, while over 75% has 3G.
https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2018/10/09/majorities-in-...
https://www.gsma.com/mobilefordevelopment/blog/mobile-connec...
The same will follow for all other countries. LTE is more cost effective and better for cellular carriers and users.
This idea from the hardcore tech Luddite community that the web has died the moment we have to run a line of JavaScript is completely ridiculous. My computer from 1999 could run JavaScript in the browser. It’s time to get over it.
Plus, email has an alternative with mail clients, which are a better experience for users with poor data connectivity, anyway.
We will be pushed to 4G sooner or later, but lower requirements helps at any major events with lots of traffic on cell towers, or a slow, spotty, over-subscribed wifi connection at an airport or hotel. It helps when your main device breaks, but you don't want one app with high memory requirements to kill everything else on your (old) backup.
Slow and spotty connections are a nostalgic memory for most people, and even if they’re not, Google provides low bandwidth alternatives via their app and third party mail clients.
It’s fine that this service doesn’t cost much money to run but if nobody’s using it there’s no point.
I am proud to call myself a luddite, because contrary to popular knowledge luddites (and neo-luddites) are not technophobic but technocritics: they question whether a technological progress is also a social progress, a human progress, an environmental progress. There is little reason to believe that 4G and 5G are such.
If your computer from 1999 can run current websites, why change websites ?
If your computer from 1990 can download emails with POP, why change to HTML?
I don't know how gmail works, my comment is more general. I want more HN-like and less Medium-like
I'm from South America and I've been to touristic places with real bad internet. People living there definitely feel these kind of choices.
Even if you still had this problem you would have an email client or Gmail app as an alternative, both options that can function offline and in spotty connections.
I would guess this service is being deprecated because nobody is using it.
That is bad for the sustainability of life in my universe :-).
These are the usecases Google is declaring are not worth accessing their services anymore.
I’m sorry your internet was slow on your sailboat :’( maybe a glass of your favorite vintage would help?
The point isn't "oh use another protocol". Gmail is billed as a full-on product, and especially, they push their web interface. This is them abandoning users. Sure, some folks will fall back to IMAP or POP. But at the end of the day, the company is taking a stance, much as you're taking a stance and I'm taking a stance and all opinionated actions are stances being taken that reflect our characters and values.
We talk a lot about energy nowadays. I think there is a point in systematically questioning the new technology if it requires orders of magnitudes more resources. Do you need to send a 4K video with a moving "hello" text, or is it totally enough to send 5 letters? The video is a lot heavier, for no actual need.
I would hazard a guess that the number of real and important situations where a critical and irreplaceable legacy system requires access to *Gmail* is close to zero. These systems are unlikely to have access to the internet, and if you’re connecting an *unsupported browser* to a legacy webmail solution, you’re doing things very, very wrong.
What are you thinking of self-hosting? The email server? There are plenty of alternatives to GMail. An email webclient? Just use a non-web client, there are plenty of those too :-).
For a webmail client probably https://squirrelmail.org. It's over 2 decades old, still maintained, and kept to its original simplicity.
And on mobile if you want to edit settings like filters, impossible to do without the html version
Ultimately, I ported my domain to Fastmail, where it’s possible to edit filters in the mobile app. Fastmail also makes it really easy to choose the username from which to reply. You don’t have to create a dumbass alias address.
I use it so often, it loads so fast for multiple email accounts, instant refresh, it was so good
[0] Just checked, and I get 8.22Mb of heavily compressed JS to load Gmail!
It was the only feature I was using the basic html for.
I’d highly recommend posteo for anyone reading this, wanting a privacy focused html-only email service.
This’ll be a good push to finally move everything to Fastmail.