Google will retire Gmail’s Basic HTML view in January 2024
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Tell HN: Goodbye HTML Gmail - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37558372 - Sept 2023 (109 comments)
Also sometimes phone calls and very frequently SMS messages would not go through in many parts of South Africa including Cape Town. I still received mail through my IMAP connections and we switched to Whatsapp for work communications, which appears to be stable for most any low bandwidth or intermittent connectivity situation. Through my 1 week in Africa I didn't miss any messages at all on Whatsapp and was able to send messages any time I had signal. Whatsapp voice calls worked pretty well. Slack on my mobile seemed to work but I was not sure if it was synching in real time. Slack voice calls I was told were pretty bad from my side.
We've seen a huge rise in Whatsapp use recently when working in our colleagues in less developed areas.
I initially loathed dealing with "yet another messaging app" when people started using Whatsapp, but it's great to see a tool that's robust enough to work in non-optimal connectivity.
Outside of the US, Whatsapp is pretty much _the_ messaging app
And it’s quite nifty as an “everything” app (kinda what Elon wants to do with Twitter/X).
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[0]: https://line.me/en/
In Europe Telegram is huge. 1 billion Telegram users in the world, with 700 MAU (and there are already some countries where Telegram is the most used messenger).
I refuse to use WhatsApp (and don't have FB). Most of my friends and family are on Telegram. Many have both and use both interchangeably.
If you are in a hurry: https://engage.sinch.com/sites/default/files/styles/x_large_...
> Also sometimes phone calls and very frequently SMS messages would not go through in many parts of South Africa including Cape Town
You say in many parts, really? What other parts?
Maybe get a local SIM if where you're staying doesn't have fibre; is this not a T-Mobile issue?
Opportunity there I guess.
How about local client?
I still use Thunderbird because I have a half a dozen email accounts.
It was probably too late for them, but for me this would have just worked.
No you are not. I prefer to use local clients for everything as well.
They’re an advertisement business.
However I just found out Apple added a way to manage rules in iCloud Mail to iOS 17. It's in Settings > [Your Name] > iCloud > iCloud Mail > iCloud Mail Rules. They did not mention this anywhere, but it's there and it's new!
Unfortunately still unusable for me because it allows only a single condition. No AND or OR conditions. For example still not possible to filter by FROM and Subject and the same time. And you can only filter a very limited amount of fields: FROM, TO, FROM or TO, CC, Subject and List-ID. For example it's not possible to search the body.
iCloud Mail and Calendar are way too simple to be useful for me. Calendar only searches 1 year back, even if everything is synced (I actually need this quite often). No weekly view in portrait mode (I use this all the time in Google Calendar). Calendar and Reminders don't integrate at all (Google Calendar shows tasks from Google Tasks). Not possible to sync calendar subscriptions across devices.
Not being cheeky just wondering whether I should have an extra forwarding setup.
They will only become worse and worse, the trust I had in them is long gone. Just avoid them and let them go out of business
How?
Or just a plain 'Wrong password' except it's the right password, it's just Google thinks it's wrong, but you can't do anything with that address.
You should at least try to imagine how catastrophic losing access to your email would be. How many accounts on other websites are linked to your email? Which of your banks have you set up backup emails beyond your primary? What about car registration and voter registration? For me, those both use email 2FA. For a while I was using a Nest thermostat; my house temperature in a large part was linked to my email.
Why exactly? Doesn’t seem like much fun.
I don’t imagine a lot of catastrophic things that might happen to me. If really really bad things happen they happen. Some I work really hard to prevent. Others might happen and I don’t do anything to prevent them. Most things are somewhere in the middle.
No, you won't deal with that. Because 'your' email address would be no longer yours and there would be nothing you can do at that point, including reading your past emails.
I found the conversation view to be no where near as good as gmail. The ui in general just was far below gmail. So in the end I slithered back on over to gmail.
Also, I remember auto-filters not working very well and not putting my emails in the right folders
TIL. I have been using migadu for more than an year and I didn't know they have one.
My favourite feature is the subdomain addressing (something@me.domain.com => me@domain.com).
Can’t say I’m a fan of the webmail, but I’ve only used it when I’m without an imap client.
AdWords debuted in 2000, then AdSense in 2003.
My memory as a user is Google didn't "feel" like an ad-driven company until years later, in the wake of the 2008 DoubleClick acquisition.
They've effectively embraced, extended, and extinguished vanilla email.
It's not very hard to get along with Gmail spam filters unless you're trying to send thousands of mails.
Their moat is being eroded. There search sucks and is designed around their ad business. GPT search is going to basically erode this moat. Its like they are trying to be IBM.
There are obviously other profit centers but this company is really losing its footing
A swollen tech company, once emergent and perhaps built from defining a new market but now reduced to trying to maximize profit without the original spirit, now trying to be too many things at once in a search party style chase to sustain growth (even if only to beat inflation), ends up becoming just another “international business machine”.
IBM is like the Roman Empire of tech history now, the “citizens” eventually betrayed when their previously untouchable pension fund was sacked and squandered by new management after the original President who enshrined it had passed away.
But there are some people who go to buildings every day who need an alternative to stairs. People in wheelchairs, with walkers, with strollers, transporting something heavy on wheels, and other scenarios I can't even think of right now, all rely on ramps to access areas that others access through stairs, and may find stairs to be more accessible. They are often a relatively small percentage of the population, but they exist, and as a society, we have decided that they deserve access to our buildings.
Similarly, there are visitors to my websites who require an alternative accommodation to JavaScript, such as people with slower devices which don't perform well with JS enabled, people who are concerned about security and privacy, people who are using a text-mode browser, people who are using something like wget to archive the site for later reading, and so on. There are, just like with the ramps, scenarios I can't even think of right now, but that are accommodated by allowing no-JS access.
And I'm going to continue choosing to accommodate them, bending over backwards to do everything I can to ensure that each and every visitor is treated like they are visiting a five-star hotel, not a prison.
Of course, this philosophy is not for everyone, obviously not for the Gmail team, and perhaps not for you either, but it works for me and my conscience.
Deprecating any tags in the post HTML5 world requires WHATWG approval and noscript is more of a fallback mechanism than a "security" feature or means to convey an opinion. There's no good reason to get rid of it.
The WHATWG, the group that exists because browser developers decided to ditch the existing standard and do their own thing?
What is it going to do? Complain about Google ditching the standard and doing its own thing?
That is exactly the good reason to get rid of it, for Google. Why would they want to allow a fallback to script-less web?
Javascript can fail to load for a lot more reasons than just the user disabling it. Noscript is the only way to let the user know that's occurred or to ensure some functionality doesn't break. In fact Google Analytics uses a noscript tag containing an iframe as a fallback to keep the data flowing even when stuff like a content security policy or bad network request causes the javascript to fail.
Also Google: If we detect you’re scraping us or any of our “partners” (read: the public web) we’ll shut you down. We have ways of ensuring we’re the only bot capable of indexing the web. Heard of web fingerprinting?
You use an HTML client now?
Setup an AS and buy a /24 (roughly $10k), buy a server and router for BGP, colo them in a datacenter (roughly $1k/mo + $500 initial cost for used servers and setup).
From there, it should be a simple matter to install your preferred email setup, such as postfix + dovecot or such (probably 2 hours if you've done this before, and maybe 2 days if you haven't).
You know some people will take you seriously however ridiculously stupid that paragraph is, right?
Realised KDE was terrible and none of it was worth the hassle.
I should have just bought a Mac a decade earlier.
I switched to Macs nearly 20 years ago from Windows and have been mostly very satisfied. But a recent upgrade from Mohave to Monterey has changed my opinion. It deleted all directories at the root level that the system didn't know about, including my backup (which I had to recover from Backblaze B2), deleted emacs, protected all the system directories to the point where, if you build things in weird system directories, forget it - it's impossible.
Maybe all this protection is good and necessary for the average user, but for me, it has turned my regular development laptop into a web client and I had to back off to an older Mac for development. Apple shoves more and more rules and restrictions down its users' throats, along with shiny baubles I don't care about, and I'm kinda over it.
But at the same time, I see a slow creep of operating system and interface changes. Especially worrying is the push to make macOS look and operate more like iPadOS. I've loved macOS as a development platform because it's Unix-y enough, but with a polished desktop interface where everything just works without fiddling and tweaking.
Perhaps I'm missing something in their vision or perhaps I'm being too myopic, but I don't understand the obsession with adopting mobile/tablet-style interactions and restrictions.
Will I still be able to plan on using this operating system for development in the next 12 years? I've begun revisiting Linux as my desktop operating system on the side, because I fear the answer is no.
Can confirm: I have never sysadminned for myself recreationally. After I bungled an Arch upgrade (by failing to read the notes) I bought a Mac and haven't looked back. Yeah, it ships with a weird awk, and the GNU tools it comes with are pretty dated, but it's close enough for basically everything I want it to do.
> it's close enough for basically everything I want it to do.
People has been making argument for years about the best distro and which distro makes them look like a god. Now, anything which helps me do my job as fast as I can is the best and I think Debian/Ubuntu is the best distro to work with. Large user base, familiar interface and pretty up-to-date software is the selling point of Debian/Ubuntu.
brew install coreutils
PATH="/usr/local/opt/coreutils/libexec/gnubin:$PATH"
# macOS
cp -R
# Linux
cp -rBesides the ads, Gmail also has that annoying "YourRealAddress+alias" which makes aliases useless, whereas iCloud aliases have saved me from a lot of spam, and it's infinitely better now with their new "Hide My Email" feature that lets you create a different address each time.
If not, different countries have all kinds of programs to give free emails. Usually quite limited in storage, but still. You could start checking that with the post office -- they'd be the likely candidates to provide such a service.
But now mobile data is normal. Your phone/tablet's email is a almost certainly a dedicated app - an actual email client.
Time to drop webmail, and gmail.
But for those who have a personal mobile device and poor mobile data, an actual email client would likely be a good choice.
An actual email client uses much less data than webmail. For example the gmail webpage loads around 10MB just to show the web page, before any actual email content.
Also an email client functions with an intermittent network, only actual sending/receiving requires a data connection. Existing emails are accessed using the local mailbox, and outgoing emails are queued until the network becomes available. A webmail system provides no functionality in the absence of network data.
The discussion here is centered on bandwidth and accessibility, and both of those problems are solved by using the mail client that (almost definitely) shipped with your device.
Google knows the numbers for that, we don't. But it's striking how few "I use this UI in situation X" comments this story and its duplicates have. Most of the comments are by people who at best imagine it would be something they'd use, but actually don't. (And at worst the comments are by people who don't know what the basic HTML UI was, but are here to complain about other aspects of gmail.)
Windows, macOS, and many Linux distributions ship with mail clients that you can set up to use with Gmail.
I wonder how many people on earth are accessing webmail from a device that does not have a mail client installed.
The big idea with ProtonMail is end-to-end encryption, so that Proton can't read your email. Among the things such a guarantee makes impossible is a simple HTML view, because it would require the Proton-controlled server to decrypt your email before generating the HTML page.
It also makes traditional protocols like SMTP, POP and IMAP unusable. For that Proton provides a local gateway so that you can use your favorite email client, but Proton servers can't offer such a feature without breaking E2EE.
Please correct me if I’m wrong, sorry I wasn’t clear you provide a great service and I am thankful.
I don’t get it.
The new version of GMail has a lot of anti-features, s.a. bad text editor, uses too much screen for things I don't care about, it interacts very poorly with screen readers and any kind of automation / plugins that imitate user input (eg. I use Surfingkeys and simply selecting an email, as in "clicking" the checkbox is a game of whack-a-mole).
I mean, it's just all around worse from functionality perspective. Why would I want that?
Because I'm tired of watching infrastructure I've relied on for a decade+ go up in flames. I'm tired of constantly migrating services because investors need their 25 basis points. Between the Google Workspaces debacle and the recent selling off of their domain registrar, it makes me wonder how much longer any Google service will exist.
I'm tired of Enshittification.
Maybe if a large majority of people do not own a device and have to use a borrowed computer, this could be a problem.
But (as far as I know) most Android phones ship with a mail client, and so does Windows.
There is also the matter of having to set it up, which is not accessible to many people who can't (or don't want to) handle the cognitive load required.
That said there are some generic mail clients for Android. Not many are good, but they're out there. K-9 has recently received some love again.
Modern Javascript functionality on an average site adds as much value as sparks chasing the mouse pointer in the nineties, and appear to be developed by people with, again on average, even less aptitude for software.
The difference between having a bare-bones HTML page, versus a bloated one, could make a significant price difference.
With that said, I’m sure that’s just an extreme edge case - but still a legit one. If you’re stuck out in nowhere with low and/or prohibitively expensive internet, you want a fast and small alternative.
Testing over a heavily throttled connection that drops packets should be a mandatory part of usability testing for anything intended to be used over the Internet.
The NPR One app used to chew through a few hundred mb of data in "caching" every time you started it. No way to restrict this function to wifi only. And no, you can't select bit rates.
Also Zoom has little ability to minimize the audio or video data usage (but I've learned you can reduce how much of others video is sent to you by reducing the window size). Just wish I could set myself to 480p to be present but not destroy my data while working at the cabin.
Likely true. Zoom doesn't chew up much bandwidth. I always find it funny when people think they need to upgrade their home internet bandwidth because a family "works & studies from home". Unless you're up/downloading huge media files, several instances of Zoom and virtual desktops will consume less than a 4k Netflix stream.
Would this be achieved by plugging in a crappy camera and only giving that to Zoom?
People used to say the same about accessibility until the ADA lawsuits started coming in forcing businesses to take it seriously.
There needs to be a business incentive to spend developer time on low bandwidth. Progressive web apps that cache stuff are about all you're gonna get for now.
Which is a shame, since FF dev Tools have a quite comfy tool for testing the we page in low bandwidth environments:
* https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/devtools-user/networ...
(I haven't done web de for a good ten years now, yet, even I somehow know about these)
> Testing over a heavily throttled connection that drops packets should be a mandatory part of usability testing for anything intended to be used over the Internet.
Having a very old GMail account, I still hold on to it, because I can still use IMAP in Gnus. But, should I lose that, or should Google finally curb my tiny freedoms... I'll have to look for alternatives too.
A well designed Single Page App should be downloading a small-as-possible initial bundle with the page HTML and CSS, and then only downloading the data necessary for any given page. In theory that results in less bandwidth used if you're looking at a reasonably large number of pages compared to downloading a server rendered HTML page for each page because you only download the HTML once in the SPA version compared to every page you load with the SSR version. This is literally the reason why SPAs became popular in the first place.
In badly built apps this isn't the case - the data is bloated, the bundle isn't optimized, etc. I imagine in the case of Gmail this is the case though - you probably only need to read a couple of dozen moderately large emails before the JS version starts to win out. This is something you'd need to test rather than making an assumption though.
That said, a native app will win over both because it's already on your device so the bandwidth used is only the email data.
I don't know. Internet on a cruise ship in the middle of the Ocean is a bit like complaining you don't have good wine on your camels when backpacking through the Sahara.
In any case, it absolutely is an edge case for now so there should be a minimum of preparations before the trip (setting IMAP instead of webmail for instance, if you need heavy bandwidth site content then set a proxy that only keeps the actual content and access that instead of the original source, etc.).
Same with the beach house or the cottage lost in the woods not zoom-compatible. Well...
It's weird to me how when this subject surfaces on HN a lot of people defend they are entitled to the same capabilities when they are in white spots than when they are at home.
Interestingly, one of the major sucks for these LEO systems does not appear to be bandwidth. It's the route. We throttled the ship down to 2 Mbps for a while (100 pax) and Google properties are actually quite snappy while everything else is dead slow to the point of timing out. Turns out Google arranged to have Starlink ground stations installed in their data centers. That takes off a lot of hops. Amazon was one of the few other things that would load.
I hate to sound like a shill for big tech, but I get the sense Google and Amazon actually give a shit about speed. When you measure your bandwidth bill in billions, you can afford to?
With the rate you are paying, you could get there quickly too.
That pricing and speed is quite different to their website - obviously service isn’t optimised for the arctic, but how does that pricing work?
This point stands, no matter what you think of his cruise?
Also, who can decide, what is really necessary? And I don't have hard data at hand, but I cannot imagine a cruise to be more expensive in its impact, compared to flying somewhere for vacation.
Do you know? Do you? Or is it a presumption?
(Googling now to find out if this even exists, doesn't remove the presumptive nature of things.)
The vast majority of cruises are pretty shitty for the environment and treatment of people. Also tax avoidant. People just really don’t want to hear that so they can keep doing them and not think about the down sides.
My point had to do with the extreme accusatory nature of the post, without data to back it up.
My post was absolutely the reverse of presumptive, for I asked is someone was being so, not asserting that they were.
> killjoywashere 46 minutes ago | undown | root | parent | next [–]
> I'm on an ship doing oceanographic survey work in the arctic.
and
> TrackerFF 2 hours ago | prev | next [–]
> Recently I was on a cruise ship, and out in the waters only my carriers “maritime” plan was available
But that’s beside the point anyway, as it was just raised as an ad hominem argument against the guy who wanted websites to work on poor connections, and rightly so.
train your imagination, i'd say
A ship on the other hand is very fuel efficient. But it maybe runs longer, if it is a cruise. Still, 2 flights forn1 week vacation are likely way worse, than 1 week cruise.
(And I will likely go by train towards my vacation, but this is not always possible)
They also run on absolutely terrible fuel, very low quality and with lots of impurities. Pollution is not only greenhouse gases. I am not saying planes are much better, but both are really quite bad.
So? Why should Google care? Out of the goodness of their hearts?
Switch to an email provider that caters to your data limited environment.
The best solution would be jmap but it seems dead, most implementations are dead and not compatible with the last version.
Do you use them as your domain registrar as well? They say to have a custom domain to transfer the domain to them, seems a bit extreme but I wouldn't mind consolidating my services.
I use Evolution with custom flags and virtual folders + imapfilter to automatically add custom flags. It works great.
This is a dark pattern, stuff which justifies to fine those companies at their scale and to force them to keep interop with small tech via regulation.
Personally, I did quit gmail at that time and I am now self-hosted.
Google kills whole successful products, what made you think that they would support alternative UIs used by dozens of us?
It’s how Google’s business works, maybe, but that wasn’t the argument.
Arguing that they should maintain multiple views is just ignorant of the world we live in. You will be disappointed further.
Whether or not a trillion-dollar company with 170 000 employees can afford to maintain two views for a product with 2 billion MAU or make it not suck, now that is really irrelevant.
that remains to be seen
Imagine an organization which wants to buy Google's package for organization. Perhaps some government body. And that body has a regulation that requires certain accessibility features from services provided by contractors. So, even if very few, or even if nobody in that government body needs good accessibility, the IT will not buy a service from Google because one day someone will come and sue them for buying stuff they shouldn't have.
So, it doesn't matter what fraction of users actually needs the "basic HTML" view. The new one sucks from usability perspective, and especially from accessibility perspective. If they cancel the better version they have... well, I'd be all for suing the government agency that decided to use GMail.