I think I'll pass on putting my email through their systems. Although I have to admit this looks way better than GMail. I hope this inspires Google to do something about their interface design.
Gmail was perfect.
SAAS means you're vulnerable to vendor change with every pageload.
Though there are getting to be tools which allow you to reverse-engineer sites and design them how you want, but this is subject to a lot of churn keeping up with the SAAS vendor.
Still lovin' my mutt.
Another example, it would be really cool to be able to edit email as Markdown/Textile/reStructuredText and have it converted to a text+html (multipart/alternative) email, but currently there is no way to do that with Mutt without using some sort of sendmail wrapper that does this.
[1] I realize that Gmail's threading isn't 'true' threading, but I'm talking about pulling in the entire thread even if it's not part of the current email folder.
More generally, though, I last used mutt in the late 90s so I have no clue but.. it doesn't allow for a vim-style of extension by third party addons?
I'm not as satisfied with mutt-kz as I was with sup, but it's probably even better if you have invested a lot of time configuring mutt just so.
Comments about perfect technology keep popping up on hn. I would think that claiming any technology is "perfect" is a little self-defeating coming from a tech startup news site? The very core of what we all stand for here is advancing mankind (or making the world a better place) through whatever means we are capable (most often technology). Viewing existing technologies as "perfect" closes the mind to the possibilities of better solutions.
I wonder how many times throughout history someone has claimed some piece of technology is perfect, and the same person 10 years later chuckles at the thought of having actually used the now-antiquated and clearly-inferior technology.
Today's gmail interface is hard to use and is slow. Very arguably a far cry from the perfection it seemed to be in 2004.
>> I'm going to hope and pray that google stops screwing with their interface design.
I don't agree with, and this is part of what I was addressing as well. I hope they do continue screwing with their interface design, but obviously I rather hope and pray that they improve it rather than make it slower and more cluttered. It doesn't make sense for me to happily use Google products and simultaneously fear that if they touch them they will make them worse. They are the owners of the product, so either I trust that they have some competency or I look elsewhere.
One complaint I've heard, a lot .. almost everyone thinks new gmail UI is butt ugly.
But it's also very functional. My parents were long time yahoo-mail users, who switched a few months ago. They love never having to delete mail in order to tidy, terrific spam detection etc. My dad uses filters and archiving, but my mom has a huge inbox and only ever searches. This dichotomy between searching and labeling is an on-going debate in the family :)
Putting you in control. Email is private and confidential, and most folks we've talked to want to keep it that way. So we keep your personal email personal. We don't scan your email content or attachments and sell this information to advertisers or any other company, and we don't show ads in personal conversations. We let you decide whether to connect your account to social networks, and which ones you want to use - and you're in control of who you friend or follow. And, if you're a power user who wants to really fine tune your inbox, we let you create your own categories, folders, and rules to tailor Outlook.com to your preferences.
They're saying they don't scan your email to sell information to advertisers, that doesn't mean they don't scan it for violations of their T&C's.
Mind you, even this statement is pretty FUD-like since Gmail also doesn't "scan your email [...] and sell this information to advertisers".
When Google+ first came out quite a lot of people lost their "Google lives" (including their gmail accounts they had been using for years) when Google banned them for being under 13 or using a pseudonym.
I think the issue got resolved because he was lucky enough to be a nerd which a blog that got picked up by HN/Techmeme etc. and then someone from Google personally fixed the problem.
Most users would have been hosed. It also doesn't help that Google has no "real" customer support other than forums. As a user it would be extremely uncomfortable to lose your Google life and have no phone number to call.
At least you can call Microsoft. Whether they can do anything about it is a different story but it at least will escalate easier, or at least I would imagine
As for the pseudonym thing, that never occurred. People lost their google+ accounts, but the rest was just forum posts saying things like, "I remember reading about someone..." without providing the actual citation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children%27s_Online_Privacy_Pr...
> While children under 13 can legally give out personal information with their parents' permission, many websites altogether disallow underage children from using their services due to the amount of paperwork involved.
If you'd like, I can rephrase, but the meaning is the same:
Google doesn't offer anything like hotmail's family account (where the child's account is managed by a proven parent's account), so if they find out that you're under 13, they will be in violation of the law if they do not close your account, and they aren't allowed to warn you that they will do so (or let you go back and change your birthdate).
Google could simply choose not to collect personal information on accounts of children. This would be, literally, one line of code to implement. They've chosen instead to ban children from Google services, which is in no way required by law.
As for the literally one line of code, I don't believe that's correct. IANAL nor an implementor of a COPPA-compliant product, but my understanding is that even storing a copy of an email that contains personal information will be in violation of the law without parental consent and certainly without the ability for a parent to view it and delete it. Storing any received and sent email may be enough to count as collecting personal information.
Can you name any email provider that will knowingly allow children under 13 to use the service without having a parent controlling the account? When you do use the family accounts in hotmail or yahoo, you have to actually provide proof that you're an adult, and some level of proof of connection with the account (joining the accounts actually looks rather difficult, through hotmail, at least. Usually a parent account sets up child accounts). Setting up that system literally takes more than one line of code.
("accepting and verifying a credit card number in connection with a transaction" is one of the COPPA approved methods of verifying adulthood)
An expensive typo for sure.
They do? I was able to send myself several test messages containing this link.
1. http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120326/04530718244/micros...
I was losing my head for a few minutes.
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows-live/code-of-cond...
And there's the whole Skype brouhaha.
Microsoft have an edge over Google in that they aren't perceived to be as morally bankrupt, when it comes to privacy and protecting their users (because they earn their money elsewhere), but with the Skype criticism, that may be subject to change. It's a nice flank of attack to use against Google, though, and the video ad in the submission hits all the right notes.
This is a terribly odd statement. Microsoft has shown, time and time again, that they can shaft their customers because many of them have, or at least had, few alternatives. Google might make a lot of its money on advertising, but it wouldn't make a penny if it didn't have the trust and respect of its customers.
Google is just as susceptible to trust issues as Microsoft or anyone else. Every time Google is caught violating privacy it's always an "accident", like with the wifi network data collection being done by their street view cars. If a company is constantly apologizing for "accidents" that align with their business interests I'd have a hard time trusting them, even if I continue to use them.
What use is there for fragments of WiFi payload data logged from a moving vehicle that also happens to be hopping WiFi frequencies? If there was any intent to exploit it, wouldn't you try to log more comprehensively? That is, by grabbing full HTTP transactions, or whatever.
Of course, this isn't meant to minimize the very clear fact that someone there fucked up. That case appears to be one where the accident label is justified.
How did that debacle "align with Google's business interests"?
Two other points:
1. After an engineer alerted his supervisor of the "accident" it continued anyway so even if it was a sincere accident, nobody gave a enough of shit to rectify it.
2. Google still has the data two years after they were supposed to have deleted it, which they blame on communication issues as to how to delete it. Is Google saying the don't having the engineering know how to properly dispose of data if needed.
http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Data-Storage/Google-Failed-to-Delet...
The data collected while a streetview car drove by can inform their advertising efforts? You really have to bear a serious anti-Google grudge to entertain such a ridiculous, technologically laughable premise.
I don't have a grudge against google, I like my android phone over an iPhone and use google Reader and Chrome because they are the best at what they do, and use google analytics because it's good enough for the price. I just don't have any illusions as to what they expect in return for their free products.
Further, why would Google need to log random bits of WiFi payload data to extract a relatively small amount of email when they operate Gmail?! If the decision to purposefully violate people's privacy had actually been made, wouldn't it be easier to look at Gmail than to use Street View?
There would be more data, better data, and you'd have it more quickly than if you sent a bunch of cars to drive all over the world, collect a bunch of extraneous crap, then wait for them to come back, and screen it for something useful.
Frankly, that's absurd.
I'm not sure I have that level of trust for Microsoft, though my trust in Microsoft is much higher than, say, facebook (which I actively distrust, and try very hard to prevent from having access to anything I would consider private, especially email).
Your email is likely to be an important part of your life's documentation, containing an awful lot of very personal information. An unscrupulous provider could use it in all sorts of horrible ways - off the top of my head, how about a lucrative employment screening service that lists of how often you've mentioned getting wasted the night before, or throwing a sickie, or dissed a colleague... let alone the value of strategy, customer communications and other immensely valuable commercial conversations.
This is why many here refuse to use email services they don't control. I myself use Gmail, because I trust Google. Not because they say "Don't be evil", but because I think they understand how their entire business depends on trust. Compare this to Facebook, for whom privacy seems to be an afterthought. Their business is being badly hurt because they continue to trample over their user's trust.
And what about Microsoft? For me, the rorts Microsoft have carried out in the past twenty years (cynically stacking standards organisations with their minions to bulldoze their document format through was the last straw for me) counts them out. I'll never use another MS operating system or online service, end of story. No matter how much better than the competition.
So for me, particularly for online services, trust trumps functionality - absolutely.
But no, I was talking about search. Google doesn't do email well in general. Their one significant advance was popularizing threaded display of conversations, and that hasn't been a gmail-exclusive feature for years.
In any case, the topic wasn't about which is fair or not, but rather about what the public image of Google vs. Microsoft is and I strongly disagree with your sentiment that Google generally appear more corrupt than Microsoft does. At least if we're talking the tech-savvy part of this worlds population.
Hahahaha what
Lol, kids these days, not around during the 80s, 90s, and early 2000s.
1. They haven't been around as long and so haven't had to decide how far they'll go when the next big thing comes along.
2. I think they "get" trust, and realise their entire business depends on it. Facebook... not so much. Their continued retraction of new services show that trust isn't even an afterthought.
It feels like a weekend hackathon project not a commercial enterprise.