

Visualizing Yahoo Mail - pykello
http://visualize.yahoo.com/mail/

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rcfox
Gah, automatically playing sounds is _not_ okay. It's not Flash-based either,
since I use the "click to enable" feature in Chrome.

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anigbrowl
I'm fine with it in this context, it's far superior to the way it's usually
deployed. I think that sound control should be client side anyway, but this is
pretty un-disruptive compared to things like news sites etc. that start
streaming immediately.

Admittedly I was amused by the spam sound effect.

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andor
Am I the only one who finds those "trending keywords" creepy? Email isn't
public like Twitter, after all.

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netfire
Creepy? No. A clear violation of expected privacy? Yes.

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Roedou
This is tricky. I was shocked when I saw it, but this is really just a
visualization of the terms they're looking at for spam detection.

I'm surprised they added this feature to the data-viz to be honest. People
don't like being reminded that our emails are parsed, even if just for spam
filtering.

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ultimoo
It's amazing as to how ubiquitous email has gotten in the recent years in
spite of being a relatively older technology. It was only a few years ago that
you needed to afford the luxury of a blackberry to email on the go.

And now we have very affordable phones zapping out emails over reliable
cellular data connections, hundreds of small apps and companies curating and
shooting out content-rich emails that can be viewed in your palm, and browser
based email clients on desktops evolving to have features comparable to
installable thick clients. I wonder what else is in store for the trusty
email.

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laumars
It's not just relatively older, e-mail is one of the oldest technologies on
the net (we're talking 1960s technology here!)

Frankly, I wish it would die already as it's pretty much held together with
ducttape:

* it's all transmitted via ASCII; so any binary attachments have to be base64 encoded that increases their file sizes by ~30%;

* transport encryption still isn't the norm (this is the 21st century, why the hell are we still sending stuff in clear text!?),

* there's no standard error responses meaning it's often guess work whether mail has been received or not

* there's no standard way of rendering HTML mail, so anyone sending mailshots has to revert back to a 1990's web developer mindset (ie assuming that everything doesn't render so resorting to HTML tables and hours of frustration).

* it's not real time / real time daemons are not standardised. (I'm not saying we need something like instant messengers, but it seems silly that we have a small handful of proprietary push systems (eg Exchange) and the rest of us normal users have to instead rely upon re-syncs every 5 minutes (which means a fresh set of handshakes as well). A persistent connection would make much more sense for a 21st century e-mail network.

There's been so many attempts to "fix" e-mail, but most have either missed the
point (eg Google Wave) or just added yet more ducttape to the existing problem
(eg pretty GUIs that change the way we interact with e-mail clients but
without actually touching the core technology itself).

I might actually write my own mail server and client one day because it's
becoming obvious that most people are happy with " _good enough_ "

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jfb
I would add postage to the protocol, as well. Spam consumes so much resources
because it's basically free -- adding required computational complexity to
send a mail (or, even better, an escrow based real money postage system) would
go a long way towards cutting the legs out from under the spammers.

Network effects mean that all this is idle speculation, however.

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laumars
I don't think it would make that much difference to spam as most of it is sent
from hijacked machines anyway and the legitimate stuff is heavily regulated so
must have features like "unsubscribe".

There definitely does need to be a better way of managing it though. But I'm
yet to find a better way to manage spam (every method I do consider would
either be ineffective or open to abuse to blacklist legitimate senders). But I
guess that's the $million question.

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huhtenberg
It looks like they are trying to level-up to Gmail's reputation.

The thing is that at the moment @yahoo.com is the best source of anonymous
disposable email addresses. I'm sure they realize that and I suspect they will
be taking steps to "rectify" this situation by trying to tie an address to an
identity. It'd be interesting to see how that unfolds. Shouldn't be long now.

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laumars
Ironically they used to be. I've not used Yahoo mail in 10 or 15 years, but
back in the late 90s your Yahoo mail ID was the same identity for all of
Yahoo's services.

In fact quite a number of search engines modeled themselves in this (search,
mail, online chat, etc - all using the same single sign on). Then Google came
along and reminded those search engines that many users just want a plain and
responsive search engine. And those portals closed. Lycos shut down their free
hosting, Yahoo closed their chat sites, and so no. And now we have Google
integrating chat, mail, and all manor of other things into their search
engine. It's funny how trends come full circle.

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raverbashing
Funny

Yahoo Mail has been really slow these past weeks. Like in "worse it has ever
been"

So much I'm considering alternatives (and yes, I use gmail, yahoo is for
'second nature' emails, I use a 3 tiered approach, gmail for the serious/can't
miss stuff, yahoo for important but may be subject to annoyances and another
one for a throwaway email for non-important stuff signup)

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brisance
At the time of this posting, it seems the whole of Australia is not getting
any Yahoo! Mail delivered. ;)

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ancarda
Neither is Africa or South America.

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gldnspud
I find it interesting that the only "live data" that it appears to be grabbing
(at least in my case) is an occasional "YouAreHere1.mp3" and
"YouAreHere1.1.mp3". Instead, in the console I get "Port error: Could not
establish connection. Receiving end does not exist."

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fimoreth
I really like how all the trending keywords are words you'd typically see in
spam mail.

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mwc
Worldwide subject line keywords are interesting. So many of them are commerce
related.

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Samuel_Michon
‘Commerce related’? That’s a very nice way of putting it. I’d say it’s all
spam.

From the pile of keywords Yahoo considers ‘good’: free, rates, coupon,
vacation, deals, save, today, lingerie, wants, shipping, alert, extra, daily,
favorite, sale.

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vidarh
Sounds about right for me. Quite a few of those words occur a lot in subjects
I get from legitimate mailing lists relatively regularly, while "non-
commercial" e-mails that I receive from individuals tends to vary a lot more
and would be unlikely to make the list.

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Samuel_Michon
Before I send out an email campaign with MailChimp, it lets me test whether my
emails will be caught by spam filters of the various major ISPs. If I were to
include any of the earlier listed keywords in the subject line, I can be sure
that those emails wouldn't arrive in all of my recipients' mailboxes. That's
why I refrain from using those, even though I only send out commercial emails
that cusatomers have signed up for themselves.

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product50
Wonder how many are spams. No. of emails means little if most of them are
spammy.

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archivator
Press the "Reveal blocked spam" button at the bottom.

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gabipurcaru
in my experience, Yahoo is terrible at catching spam. Maybe half of it is
caught, with some legitimate email marked as spam too.

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vidarh
It's interesting how different peoples experiences of that are. I have an
"ancient" Yahoo Mail address that I don't use much but that receive a massive
amount of Spam, and pretty much nothing gets through.

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webwanderings
Being snarky on purpose but is this visualizing the spam, or phishing emails
Yahoo sends on behalf of people without them knowing about it?

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binxbolling
At the bottom you can toggle visualizing spam on/off. As of writing this, it's
about ~70k legit e-mails per second but ~330k spam e-mails per second.

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zegmas
This might be a stupid question, but why subject line keyword data from UK,
Germany, France, Italy & Spain has been excluded?

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jlogsdon
Just a guess, but privacy laws related to e-mails may be stricter in those
countries.

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brokentone
_Created 2011_

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yoster
Spam email is out of control.

