
Yahoo Mail’s Plan to Fix Email: Make Computers Read It - cpeterso
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/08/yahoo-mails-plan-to-fix-email-make-computers-read-it/595183/
======
dazbradbury
Yahoo should probably focus on getting the basics of email deliverability
right first. They could have the best client side features by a distance, and
I wouldn't go near them and would continue to tell others to avoid using them.

The number of times their servers reject emails at random, causing yahoo email
users frustration, is astonishing for an email service provider. Contacting
their postmaster to spell out the issue results in a dispute over email
headers (which they insist can be obtained from their email client even though
the emails are being rejected server side) - and their numerous problems go
unsolved. We tell users to switch away from yahoo if they want to receive
emails with a reasonable probability.

We've never had issues sending millions of emails to Gmail, outlook, or pretty
much any large ESP other than yahoo.

~~~
sergiosgc
Worse than rejecting emails, Yahoo _silently_ rejects emails. No error on SMTP
delivery, no DSN sent back, sometimes it just drops the email into /dev/null.

Never use Yahoo mail. There are much better alternatives out there, even if
you want a free service.

------
redthrow
> Yahoo Mail is an underdog too: It represents 6.3 percent of email clients,
> versus Apple’s 43.6 percent, Google’s 30.3 percent, and Microsoft’s 11.4
> percent

When I read this I thought this Apple's 40%+ email share can't possibly be
true and I read the linked article and realized if an iPhone user is reading
their yahoo.com or hotmail.com email on the Mail app on their phone, it counts
as an "iPhone email", so this number is meaningless, although it's probably
true that Yahoo email has a smaller share than Hotmail or Gmail.

~~~
keyserzose
It’s referring to email _clients_.

~~~
iforgotpassword
I wasn't even aware they have a client, I thought it's just the web view.

~~~
mbel
The web view is the email client they provide. The statistic shows how people
access their email account, not where it's hosted.

------
thrwy3982
yahoo mail really hurt me when they threw all my childhood correspondence away
without warning. it would probably fit in 600 KB.

like this:

[https://www.cnet.com/forums/discussions/yahoo-email-
deleted-...](https://www.cnet.com/forums/discussions/yahoo-email-deleted-all-
my-emails/)

or maybe a different issue where they deleted mails older than 1 year or older
than 10 years or something, I forget. (you can google it. people were
comparing it to going into your attic or back of your closet and throwing away
old letters you'd saved.) anyway it really made me very sad. I don't use them
and am unlikely to ever trust them. they really let me down.

~~~
lrem
Even being 100% sure Google won't lose my email in an accident and 99% sure
they'll never duck my account, I still IMAP all my messages out of it. For
that 1%, no less.

~~~
jvagner
I have created a to-do list for the start of each calendar quarter. It
includes things like:

* Replace toothbrush heads (electric)

* Spring clean two rooms in the house

* Download backups of all email accounts

* Download backups of all cloud web sites

* Sync external hard drives to cloud archival storage

* Download QIF and QBO of all bank accounts

It's quarterly. Worst case scenario, I lose last three months. And by doing it
quarterly, I usually add to the to do list, and it's a catch-up.

Cleaning two rooms of my house take the longest time. Everything else can be
done in about 1-2 hours.

------
peterwwillis
> They started taking screenshots of boarding passes or coupons so they could
> find them more easily. This is a dumb way to use computers,

What? This is a wonderful way to use computers. Screenshots are offline
storage of specific, useful information in a universal format whose content
can be browsed and recognized at a glance.

People don't want better organization, they want to get their boarding pass
out easily. You can do that a million ways, but the one way that makes no
sense is "pull up the virtual letter I received at time of purchase and see if
it contains an embedded image or an attachment I forgot to download". What
would make more sense is to have an extension to something like vCard called
"tickets" and allow special ticket-holding apps to keep them. Your email
client could download them and pass them to the app automatically, ensuring
you always have your tickets offline and organized in a dedicated ticket
program.

We don't have to live in a world where one application tries to do everything,
and we can use standards to make universal things (like tickets) actually
universal.

~~~
deca6cda37d0
With Apple Wallet and Google Pay apps it's easy to add tickets/boarding
passes/cards etc

Companies should make it easy to add it to those apps. For me boarding passes
are really easy to add to Apple Wallet for example.

~~~
kwhitefoot
Where I live (Scandinavia) most boarding passes are just QR codes and a
screenshot of that does just fine for the few cases where the app used to book
the ticket doesn't handle it for you.

------
sincerely
Am I crazy for kind of hating this. Half of the article feels like a PR piece
for functionality that gmail already has, and the prospect of emails changing
after theyve been sent is kind of unsettling.

------
empath75
Probably worth noting that aol and yahoo don’t even use their own mail
internally, they use gmail. Or at least did as of a couple of years ago.

~~~
mxuribe
Really? I hadn't ever known this. If true, this saddens me greatly...This
means that even more of the global email traffic than previously thought is
under/traverses google's infrastructure umbrella. </sigh>

~~~
throwaway13000
Not really. The communications team (about 400-500 people) who develop email
product do use it. Unfortunately, for larger Verizon media, verizon has
dictated that they use gmail. Explanation is that "Yahoo Mail" is consumer
focused not enterprise focused which requires calendar support, conferencing
etc.

~~~
oaththrowaway
Why doesn't corporate get them to make those feature then? Complete joke that
we don't even use our own stuff in house.

Not that I want to use Y! Mail but it's the principle of the thing.

~~~
pfranz
I do think dogfooding in general is a good thing but I feel like it can hold
you back if you're dogmatic--especially with a large company. Sure, people
snicker when people found out MS uses Linux for some services. Same with Apple
using Linux for their services when they still had xserve and osx server. I
think both companies were better served by not being forced to use their own
products.

I know someone who works at a Microsoft subsidiary. She'll bring up using MS
Lync, Teams, Skype, Excel or something and I'll be thinking "oh, most
companies just use X." The few times I've used those Microsoft products I
found them confusing and error prone...this also means I should spend more
resources learning this. All of that would take away from my day job.

I can easily see not wanting to spend time investing in half baked calendars
and conferencing taking resources away from consumer focused features.

------
latchkey
In the early 90's I used something called QuickMail [1]. It was pretty
awesome, especially for its time. You had the ability to do things that SMTP
couldn't do, like unsend, see if message was viewed, send 'smart emails' etc.
The issue was that it only worked well if other users were on QuickMail.
Beyond the other dramas of acquisitions [2], it never really caught on to
replace plain old SMTP.

It seems the tides have turned a bit. Now that SMTP email is everywhere, users
could reverse the situation. I could say that I will only accept emails which
can be parsed by a computer. I (or my provider) could then publish a schema
for the types of emails that I'm willing to receive (and how they should be
formatted for me). The rest would go into some other folder (ie: spam), that I
could look through if I cared enough.

[1] [https://tidbits.com/1991/09/16/ce-ships-
quickmail/](https://tidbits.com/1991/09/16/ce-ships-quickmail/)

[2] [https://www.engadget.com/2008/07/28/outspring-puts-the-
final...](https://www.engadget.com/2008/07/28/outspring-puts-the-final-nail-
in-quickmails-coffin/?guccounter=1)

------
pferde
Email overload already has a fix - filtering rules and email folders have been
a thing for decades, and most popular email clients have offered convenient
ways to quickly create the rules for nearly as long.

The problem is people not learning to properly use a tool that they spend a
big part of their time with, and instead fearing that if they touch one wrong
thing, one wrong button, their computer or smartphone will explode.

~~~
mehrdadn
IMO writing good filters can be pretty hard. I literally spent what must've
been an entire hour on updating just 1 Gmail filter today. All going through
my mailbox cross-checking to make sure it would mark exactly what was needed,
no more, no less.

(It'd have been a lot easier if I was more tolerating of errors, but the
entire reason I was updating it was to eliminate errors that had started
getting annoying. And I'm guessing errors are one reason why some people don't
use filters.)

~~~
pferde
Most people can get by with nothing more complex than "put all messages from
this sender to folder X", or a few similar options. Heck, even MS Outlook
makes this easy.

If Google makes this difficult, that's on them.

~~~
mehrdadn
"Filter messages like this" is literally in their drop-down for precisely
this...

------
pmlnr
> Fix Email

Why does everyone keep being fixated at the idea that email is broken?

The only broken thing in email is Google and it's obscenely obscure and
paranoid spam filtering.

~~~
dredmorbius
Email has numerous issues, from default security (in flight and at rest),
formats, workflows, privacy, retention, directories, routing, spam, and more.

The underlying protocols are well over 40 years old (RFCs 822, 821, 733, 630,
561, possibly others), and are showing their age.
([https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc733](https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc733))

In theory, email is universal and distributed, in practice it's very highly
concentrated amongst a few major providers (Google's Gmail, Microsoft Outlook,
Yahoo, as of 2016 [http://blog.shuttlecloud.com/the-most-popular-email-
provider...](http://blog.shuttlecloud.com/the-most-popular-email-providers-in-
the-u-s-a/)). Google alone has a majority of US email addresses. Some see this
as a problem. ([https://mako.cc/copyrighteous/google-has-most-of-my-email-
be...](https://mako.cc/copyrighteous/google-has-most-of-my-email-because-it-
has-all-of-yours))

In practice, self-hosting email is problematic and presents risks to the
administrator, their correspondents, and third parties through possibilities
of spam and other abuse.

At the same time, the utility and practicality of email is rapidly declining.
I've used email for well over three decades, and defended the basic protocols
until recent years. I can do so no longer, and actively avoid email in general
for numerous reasons, something that does not please me in the least.

Unfortunately, getting protocols and standards un-stuck is exceedingly
difficult, not just in tech and comms, but generally, and for deep and
systemic reasons. Greenfield domains with a small but collaborative community
seem best disposed to developing standards -- that's not what we have
presently in the online / digital world.

~~~
pmlnr
> The underlying protocols are well over 40 years old

old != broken

> In practice, self-hosting email is problematic and presents risks

Not more, than self hosting WordPress.... And it's really not that problematic
to self host it. I'm very tired of always hearing how hard it is when all one
needs to do is adding a few dns records for spf, dkim, dmarc and reverse dns,
and it works.

> At the same time, the utility and practicality of email is rapidly
> declining.

Not as infrastructure, no. In personal communication, yes.

You are correct on some points, especially the power concentration. On other
points we're over complicating email. We need to accept that it'll never be as
"private" as some enthusiasts would like it to be, but it's a more than
adequate for reliably exchanging information.

~~~
dredmorbius
No, old does not _necessisarily_ mean broken. But the assumptions, scale, and
environment (particularly trustworthiness and safety) under which email was
developed no longer match present reality.

I've hosted email for 40m+ users. It's nontrivial.

------
kwhitefoot
People keep declaring that email is broken and needs fixing.

But I use it everyday and it is one of the few things in the computerised side
of my life that actually does work properly.

Mind you I almost never use web mail even though my main account is Hotmail
and I have both Gmail and Yahoo accounts. I use Thunderbird on several
machines, built in email client on my Lenovo tablet and the Gmail app on my
Moto g5+. They all work.

So what is it that everyone wants to fix?

