Yahoo Mail is not catching up anymore
backwardcompatible.net
backwardcompatible.net
Today I got the new tabbed inboxes - 'Primary', 'Social' and 'Promotions'. Lots of important email is now out of view from the primary inbox and buried with unimportant crap. This is so far from what I want I can't even recognize who GMail is trying to target with this. There is apparently no way to turn it off, either.
2. Click the arrow next to the Inbox label. Select your preferred inbox type. http://cl.ly/image/1Z2M0c1z3T1B
Also, as mentioned below, you can revert to the un-tabbed inbox by going to the Inbox section of the settings and disabling all tabs other than Primary, or by selecting one of the split inboxes (Unread first, Priority, etc).
Disclaimer: I'm a Gmail engineer.
It seems like the new feature is essentially just a way to do automatic (learned?) labeling -- yet it won't let you build your own tabs using already-defined custom labels. :-/
Do you mean "Policy is against giving users any meaningful ability to train their filters, but if Neptune is in the Third House, Gmail might learn from its mistake"?
The mistake is making me worry about this shit in the first place.
> Also, as mentioned below, you can revert to the un-tabbed inbox by going to the Inbox section of the settings and disabling all tabs other than Primary, or by selecting one of the split inboxes (Unread first, Priority, etc).
Thank you.
I do not leave crap lying around and then add another management dimension to my Inbox to deal with it.
Plus, it has the added benefit that emails which land in anything but the main inbox don't notify your phone, removing a distraction.
May I contact you with a Google question? I've encountered a technical problem which I would like to report, but I am having trouble finding an appropriate communication channel. The technical problem itself is interfering with my ability to use the typical channels.
If you are willing to help point me in the redirect direction, then please contact me via the info in my profile. (I was hoping to contact you privately, but your profile is blank.)
I won't harass you, and I don't expect support from you personally - I'm just hoping you might be able to point me in the right direction, in terms of how to report the tech problem.
Thank you!
Thanks.
Like all the others have pointed out, you can (thankfully!) turn it off.
With recent innovations I have less and less reason to use dedicated desktop apps. I honestly love every aspect of gmail.
The worst ATM is that desktop clients don't support the multiple inboxes that gmail introduced, so most clients think i have a ton of unread messages. So i wish google would come out with some desktop clients with multiple account support.
Edit: I usually see my email appear in my android app before I even see it in the desktop.
Click the gear icon on the right, then click 'Configure Inbox'
Untick every checkbox but Primary, then click Save. It's now saner.
Having all the "promotional" emails I get sent moved to a separate tab where I only have to look at them when I want to has completely tamed my inbox. My primary tab now only has messages that I care about.
I only wish it was implemented in a way that all clients could utilize it. I personally don't use the Gmail iOS client because I have several work inboxes that I want unified with my personal email.
- "Hey I'm most in a sea of spam!"
- "That's what rules and folders are about. It astonishes me how few people like to spend days constructing manual filters to weed out spam from their inbox"
Someone adds Bayesian filtering to MUAs/MDAs, classifying mail as (SPAM|NOT SPAM). The world rejoices as the intricate filter building interface got reduced to two buttons, and the complexity of combating spam went from O(n) to O(1), and email became manageable again.
Fast forward to present time
- "Hey, now that the problem of spam is solved, email is useful again. So useful in fact that I'm now lost in a sea of emails!"
- "That's what filters and labels are about. It astonishes me how few people like to spend days constructing manual filters to classify email"
Someone adds Bayesian filtering to MUAs/MDAs, classifying mail as (X|NOT X), for interesting values of X. The world rejoices as the intricate filter building interface got reduced to two buttons, and the complexity of classifying email went from O(n) to O(1), and email became manageable again.
Personally, I like getting these sorts of emails in my face so that I can click "unsubscribe" instantly and never worry about them flooding my inbox again.
The second most important thing is the email I am replying to, but the compose window pops up over the top of that obscuring a chunk of it.
I've noticed others doing this as well. They e-mail me without a subject and its context is from a recent chat.
I don't particularly like the UI changes, myself. But then, I'm not... well, to cut it short, I'm increasingly aware that I am not / am no longer Google's target demographic.
Computer users, which is to say people who use computation devices for arbitrary tasks, and invent new uses on the fly, are not the majority demographic anymore. We are a 'specialty group.'
The fact this hasn't happened probably says a lot about the situation, both technically and politically.
I wonder sometimes if it is the whole 'agile architecture' thing where one person can decide "Oh we're going to change protocol buffers for this service, I'll just push that out ..." and the collateral damage is far and wide. I used to think people who complained about the poor IMAP implementation were just unwilling to go with the flow, and then had the flow take me down to where most flows go after they have come out of the faucet :-).
The next step in the evolution is 'personal' clouds I think. An Internet appliance that you own that you use for mail and media and what not. Back to the future-past but with a more resilient design. Perhaps that idea will bear fruit, it isn't like its getting better in the "internet clouds."
Seriously, the Groups interface is an abomination. "Post" at the top? Really? I had to look for about 30 seconds to find the button when switching from the clear old Google Groups interface to the new mess.
"Ma, look! We're native mobile! Ma! MA! Look! Mobile! Ma!"
How long after that before google disables IMAP access to gmail?
hm. maybe I should start offering (paid) IMAP mail service again.
These mail clients used standards like pop3 or IMAP to communicate with the mail server. with IMAP, you can check email from multiple devices/computers just as easily as you can with gmail (though, for some reason, most users were confused by IMAP; pop3 was popular long after IMAP was universally available. using pop3 from multiple computers is a huge pain.)
(Of course, this was back before everyone and their dog had their own domain name, so switching email providers was still a huge pain in the ass.)
My suggestion is that everyone pick an IMAP client to handle their email, then switch between providers as-needed.
What evidence is there that google will ever stop supporting IMAP? What makes you think another provider is not going to stop supporting IMAP, or stop existing at all? What's so hard about switching providers if google does drop IMAP, particularly if you're using your own domain?
Well, you get to choose your mail client independently of your mail provider.
>What evidence is there that google will ever stop supporting IMAP
I have no solid evidence, of course, but the fact that they've disabled xmmp support on gtalk, to me points at a google attempting to become more of an apple or facebook-style 'walled garden'
(and all along, well, google makes money off showing you ads; if you check mail via IMAP, you aren't reading those ads)
>What's so hard about switching providers if google does drop IMAP, particularly if you're using your own domain?
If you are using IMAP to check your mail, and have your own domain, this isn't hard at all.
My view is that being a mass market IMAP provider wouldn't make all that much sense unless google did turn off IMAP, or unless google otherwise started screwing things up (things, I mean, besides the UI)
However... it's easier to do something if you've been doing it for a while, you know? I haven't seriously sysadmin'd a mailserver for anything but my own company in... almost a decade now. It would take me some time to get up to speed. So yes, if I want to be in a position to swoop in if google disables IMAP, I should probably start now.
Yes, there is, if you are willing to live a Spartan e-mail lifestyle, like I do.
Simply go to:
https://mail.google.com/mail/h/
I never really liked their new-fangled interface they came up with a few years ago, and they said they wouldn't deprecate the old one, so I kept using it.
2. Yahoo Mail does not enforce SSL unless you choose obscure menu options: http://help.yahoo.com/kb/index?page=content&y=PROD_MAIL_ML&l...
But you are right, it should be on by default.
I was pleasantly surprised. Things seem to make a lot of sense and I like their metro/flat design on the web, easy on the eye.
If you are bored of the new UI changes to Gmail, I'd suggest you check out Outlook.com as an alternative.
- Search. Good, fast search over 7 GB of email.
- Speed.
- Undo send.
- Multiple aliases on the same email account.
It's definitely possible to beat Gmail in the first two, these days, but importing all that email into another service takes a while, so there had better be a good case that I'll get equal or superior functionality. A demo would be nice.
Until then, I'll stick with the old compose, and probably find or write a user script to make the new one work like the old one once it goes away.
(Incidentally, Mail.app comes quite close to meeting the first two, but its search is a bit wonky, and there's no undo send.)
i'd either add a dialog (with default selected button being Cancel) or replace the Send button with a Preview button, which would show the message the same way you read a message, and there you would have the Send button.
Letting people recover from uncommon mistakes is better than ham-fisted and annoying mechanisms that attempt to prevent the mistake.
It probably works for the impatient that is hitting ctrl+enter (or whatever shortcut) too soon by muscle memory. but then it should be called delayed send to not give a false mental model to the user.
the current model is preventing the real mistakes for probably 1/10 of the cases it's needed. and enticing less care and probably bumping the rate in the end.
If a dialog or preview comes up for every message you send, you just develop a new habit for sending mail (press the send button, then press the send button again on the dialog / preview). If anything, it just creates more of a hassle for the user.
The undo button is for that 'Oh crap!' moment, when your auto-pilot lead you astray.
I tried Gmail a few years ago and it simply did not hold a candle to the speed and convenience of Yahoo's offering. They've done a few things I am not thrilled about on the last major update but they seem to be tweaking it behind the scenes.
Beyond that, I've been very much against relying on Google for anything that is critical to my business. Why? They can shut down your entire account and every single Google service you use in a microsecond. When they do you will not know why and you will have no sensible path to addressing or even discovering the problem. That, to me, is the deal breaker. Why cares about the minutiae of their UI, setup, lists, tabs, spam filtering, etc. Your email account can evaporate overnight and you will not be able to do a thing about it. I, frankly, don't cannot comprehend why any business person would even consider using them.
I'm not sure if they changed it, but I don't like the idea of sending an ad along with my email. Put an ad in my user interface all you like, but not in my content.
Gmail was so ahead of everyone else it wasn't even fun. It was even ahead of desktop-clients, which at the time was no small feat. Those were the days of full-page-reload (X)HTML4 pages and the best webmail on the market made people prefer text-mode clients like "pine" instead.
Web surpassing the desktop in user experience during those days were literally unheard of.
Those days are long gone. These days I'm looking for whatever looks like a viable replacement. I really want to get out.
Example: http://i.imgur.com/n1qeN3i.gif
I was stung by the loss of free apps for domains, because I use Appengine and need several distinct email addresses per app. None of them need Drive or anything but email forwarding, so $50 per year per address means a considerable expense. Yahoo's $120 per ten addresses seems far more reasonable.
Anyone knows good ones?
> "Mr Snowden said that the other partners in the "Five Eyes" intelligence alliance of the US, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand 'sometimes go even further than the [National Security Agency] people themselves.'"
edit: got link wrong
I actually looked for a mail service (besides google) inside the USA, because I figured spying on non-citizen services would be even more prevalent. But it came down to rackspace email (which was "just ok" but lacked any kind of two factor auth/alternative logins) and fastmail (which I found nicer).
However, their "alternative login" thing is pretty useful. I have separate (completely random) passwords for the IMAP sync for my phone and work machine, so I can revoke those at any time without touching the master password. In some sense, that setup is similar to the one Google has for two-factor auth and service-specific passwords.
'full access' regular logins can do _everything_ but modify other alternative logins. If you happen to have domain admin rights added to your login (eg. not the main domain admin account), regular logins can even do that!
I would probably pay double for an "imap/smtp only login" feature. ;)
On the plus sides it is cheap for good amounts of storage, reliable so far, support is helpful and it is Europe (Hungary) based rather than US based.
The main negative is the lack of documentation and I can't seem to access their forums which may have closed but may have had the answers I needed and avoided an email to support. I also don't know much about the company in terms of ownership and control.
I'm glad others are noticing as well -- competition is good =)
I made the switch (moved 55k+ messages with http://protips.maxmasnick.com/export-gmail-to-fastmail-or-an...) and haven't looked back.
FastMail offers a similar infinite scroll feature. I was able to select and move several thousand messages through the web interface when I was first configuring it.
FastMail's highlights for me are:
- Really good, customizable "personalities" (alternate email addresses with their own SMPT servers, auto-BCC settings, etc.)
- Sieve support -- SO much more powerful than rules in Gmail, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sieve_(mail_filtering_language)
- Customer support that actually responds and is super helpful in my experience
- Ability to use your own domain name(s) without all the overhead of signing up for Google Apps.
- Jabber support (not in-browser, but they do have a server that works with Adium/iChat/Pidgin)
- Very fast, modern web interface. Definitely faster than Gmail for me. Good keyboard shortcuts too (very similar to Gmail's but with a few differences).
- An archive folder that works well with the archive functionality in Mail.app and other clients.
The only thing that isn't great is search. It works ok for everything but searching within messages (i.e. from/to/subject searches are fine). I believe FastMail does have support for a lot more search operators than Gmail and can search headers as well. But I'm not an expert on the power user search features for either.
This is because I actually use the search in Mail.app on my Mac, which is actually better than Gmail's search capabilities for every search I've tried (same good results, but way faster). Obviously works great with FastMail too, and I figure it's good to have a local copy of email.
I also miss a few things from the (old) gmail interface, but I definitely like FastMail's interface better on the whole than the new compose in Gmail. Things I miss in FastMail are the mainly the ability to pop composing a message into a new window with one click and sync with the address book on my phone. Neither are deal breakers.
I actually use MailMate (http://freron.com) for the majority of my email access now. It's still a little rough around the edges but being able to compose emails in Markdown and see the entire hierarchy of a thread (not flattened into one level) is worth a bit of UX pain.
I like their service & want more people to leave gmail, so I signed up to make a suppor request (which I had to verify in true listserv fashion) and wrote a ticket trying to explain how lots of people who signed up would be expecting a web 2.0 style try & buy trial, not a real subscription service that would send them bills! And those people would be turned off by their aggro emails, but didn't seem to get through to the guy on the other end.
So I think fastmail is still pretty oldschool internally (which is a good thing on the security & privacy aspects!) and would be well-served making more modern demos and explanations so they can directly suck people into a non-NSA gmail competitor that has a sweet UI with keyboard shortcuts, good searching etc.
Ideally, I'd like a Pinboard for e-mail.
This is a minor nit, but most of the really interesting stuff you can do with Sieve requires the 'variables' extension, which Fastmail doesn't support for some reason. Other than that, it's really nice.
I switched to Fastmail a few weeks ago and am as pleased with it as you. Just one question though - I can't find a way to recreate the "All Mail" folder from Gmail, where you would delete mail in Mail.app and it would end up in "All Mail". It ends up in Trash instead. Same with my iPhone - if I delete a message there, it goes to Trash, not "All Mail" like it used to with Gmail. Were you able to get this to work?
That should make this folder appear: http://tmp.m-n.us/m/20130718_k83emkvnc4.png. I believe it is automatically associated with INBOX.Archive on FastMail.
That puts them out of the running for me.
[1]: https://www.fastmail.fm/help/overview_company_info.html
[2]: http://www.nyi.net/
I use Sieve to push a summary of certain messages to my phone (with https://pushover.net, another great service). This is not possible with Gmail rules (you can forward an entire message, but not selectively send just the subject and sender). See https://www.fastmail.fm/docs/sieve/fm-sieve-notify.html
Sieve also supports regular expressions: https://www.fastmail.fm/docs/sieve/draft-murchison-sieve-reg...
There are some example Sieve scripts that might give you a better idea of what Sieve can do:
http://ballz.ababa.net/jerry/sieve.txt
http://fastmail.wikia.com/wiki/MichaelKloseSieveScript
Note that you don't have to do all that crazy spam stuff -- the build in spam filtering seems to work fine for me. The only manual rule I added was to spam anything with common Russian characters because Russian spam was somehow slipping through the filter.
That thing looks like a godsend for mail-migration to whatever non-Google service I end up using.
Using something like this, you quickly realize gmail has become incredibly bloated. And to think gmail in its time was the "fast" solution to a bloated hotmail.
Times do change.
For the email foo@foo.com, I want to be able to give someone foo+bar@foo.com and when they email me it automatically goes into a generated bar folder without any additional clicks or configuration from me.
However, it has a really nifty feature that makes this idea work much better, in my opinion. You can configure FastMail to use "virtual domains" that will reroute b@a.example.com to a+b@example.com. (To use this, you need a MX record for *.example.com, but that's fine.)
So, for example, I may sign up for a SpammyService with the email spammy@myemail.mydomain.com. Then all emails from SpammyService will be redirected to myemail+spammy@mydomain.com, which will then be filed in the appropriate folder.
This lets me (1) get around services that disallow plus signs in emails and (2) not let an automated system know that I'm auto-filing their emails (and potentially deleting them, etc.)
- I have the "Undo Send" Labs features enabled, so I can undo a lot more than your unintentional sends. I can undo my intentional but ill-considered sends, too.
- I can go to Google and search, "When is my next flight" and see (based on my GMail mail confirmation message from the airline) when it is. That's awesome. Better, that integrates with Google Now on my phone. I don't even have to SEARCH, and I see when my flight is, what terminal, what gate, whether it's delayed.
I hate to ask, but what browser are you using to access GMail?
My problem is this:
http://backwardcompatible.net/images/gmail.png
* top posting is useless when you have long e-mail with 6-10 points to address in it. * being able to see 7 lines at a time is my real problem * the other real problem is when I have a 100-line email with 10 points to address in it and 10th point ends on line 34, I want to be able to easily cut the remaining 66 lines that come before the signature. I know that people using GMail won't see them anyway, but there are other people not using Google Mail and they will have to look through 66 lines to see if I replied to something else as well.
There is no way to simply select those 66 lines and cut them. If I press shift+end, it selects to the end of the line. If I press shift+PageDown it scrolls the GMail page in the browser down, and I also lose sight of the cursor. Selecting it with mouse is also not straightforward, because of some weird scrolling. The text entry box is simply too small. They shouldn't have tried to fix something that was working perfectly.
I understand Google engineers are not using Firefox and they are not replying to people who use products other than GMail and they have large screens. That is precisely why they lost sight of UX issues their users have. They believe everyone uses Google products only, and maybe they just don't care about those that don't, I really don't know.
- I don't want to have Undo Send. I don't want to wait when I send an e-mail. I don't have time for that.
- So, when you are searching for next flight, you should open GMail. I thought it should be used for e-mail, not search. ;)
- Firefox. Are you implying that I should only use Chrome and GMail is not usable from other browsers?
We did chose laptops based on their resolutions. Otherwise, you'd still be using an 80x24 character display monitor.
Like this bad boy:
You can enable it through the Gmail settings > Labs > "Quote Selected Text", highlight the lines you want to respond to in your email and press the 'r' key to open a reply with only the highlighted part quoted.
Or is your problem that you've never clicked on the drop-down at the top left of your reply, and clicked, "Pop out reply"?
You probably just didn't know about that last one, which is understandable - it's a bit hidden. But I think it solves easily half of your complaint.
As to the editing quoted text, another HN'er responded adequately to that point.
Google engineers do use Firefox, and they do pay attention to people without large screens. Your assertions otherwise are baseless.
You don't wait for "Undo Send." The server politely waits a few seconds for you - you're free to do whatever you want.
I was just curious if you were using some ancient Internet Explorer.
As for my browser, it isn't 2 lines of bookmarks. It's one line of bookmarks and Web Developer Toolbar is the second line. As for the menu bar, and this is the way Linux version of Firefox works, although I would probably turn it on even if it was hidden because I use History, Tools and Bookmarks menus all the time (like 20+ times a day)
I don't want to auto-hide the taskbar, I like to see which applications are running all the time. Not all people use the computer the same way, and I surely wouldn't change my usage pattern of desktop environment just to please one web application.
"Pop out reply" and Shift+Ctrl+End help, and GMail is now usable. So thanks again. :)
BTW, I did try to pop out the message and then reply but, when it pops, it opens a 800x540 window which still has text box with 7 lines of text. Even if I maximize that window, the reply box is still 7 lines and I got half of screen filled with blank white space. I missed that there is a second way to pop it out. One could argue that even HN's default textarea is a better textbox than GMail's.
If there is room for many email apps (Sparrow, Apple Mail, Mutt, Outlook, Thunderbird), there should be a market for many web-based email backends and there should be room for an open-source Gmail analogue that be people can extend and improve.
Someone ought to make a web-mutt.
These days, (to me anyway) the fact that Gmail is an e-mail service is a little incidental.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/07/yahoo-fight-for-users-...
Is yahoo mail the new black?