
Email is your electronic memory - brongondwana
https://blog.fastmail.com/2018/02/14/email-is-your-electronic-memory/
======
dmbaggett
I've ranted here before about the complexity of email and the difficulty of
even existing as a startup in the email space (see my bio). The single team
that has navigated the insanity of the email space well as a small company is
Fastmail. They are brilliant, ethical, and pragmatic. I sincerely hope the
folks at Google who are behind this AMP-for-email idea will take the time to
chat with the Fastmail team about it before pulling the trigger.

Having lived through the last DOJ/Google 10-month battle royale (the sale of
ITA Software, now called Google Flights), I think this is an absolutely
terrible idea for Google from an antitrust standpoint. The upside for them,
while obvious, pales in comparison to the downside they face by leveraging
their email and search dominance to create a new walled garden. I'm amazed
this got past legal.

~~~
mo3gut
> brilliant, ethical, and pragmatic

In case it's news to others, as it was to me, Fastmail routinely acquires SSL
certificates for its customers' domains without their knowledge or consent.

[https://www.fastmail.com/help/files/secure-
website.html](https://www.fastmail.com/help/files/secure-website.html)

~~~
brongondwana
Not routinely, it was done once as part of the plan to support SSL for all
websites, and when we hit some limits with letsencrypt, we shelved the plan
for a bit. There are currently 4 unsolved issues, which the team are looking
in to.

We still need to find a way to provide automatic SSL for customer domains
though - because we allow our customers to create arbitrary websites inside
either their domains or their personal subdomain on our domains
(username.fastmail.com).

The alternative of NOT doing something with SSL certificates is having
insecure websites for customers by default, which will be more and more
punished (and rightfully so) by browser interfaces. Setting up SSL for the
domains which are hosted with us is the right thing to do.

------
bad_user
From the TechCrunch article [1]:

> _What is the vast majority of “live” content on the web, stuff that needs to
> call home and update itself? Not articles like this one, or videos or songs
> — those are just resources you request. Not chats or emails. Cloud-based
> productivity tools like shared documents, sure, granted. But the rest — and
> we’re talking like 99.9 percent here — is ads._

Truer words have never been spoken. Shame on you Google.

[1] [https://techcrunch.com/2018/02/13/amp-for-email-is-a-
terribl...](https://techcrunch.com/2018/02/13/amp-for-email-is-a-terrible-
idea/)

~~~
ainiriand
Brilliant article, to be fair. One small piece of internet history.

------
ocdtrekkie
Bron, I am so happy to see a blog from you guys about this... I was actually
planning to ask.

In the light of Google being a monopoly-scale actor, I understand that you may
need to support AMP. But if I might offer a note of implementation suggestion,
if you add AMP: Make sure AMP, like remote images, is off by default. Perhaps
allow the user to whitelist certain services or addresses to show AMP content
without the extra click. That way, if AMP provides me a benefit in the way I
use emails from a particular provider, I can turn that on... but my email
client is never assuming I want to load their dynamic content.

I can see interesting use cases, as someone who pipes all my notifications at
my email. I'd love to Favorite and Retweet right from my Twitter
notifications, for example, without leaving FastMail. But I definitely don't
ever want dynamic content loading from the latest marketing email from a store
I've bought stuff from.

~~~
chrismorgan
AMPHTML Email is designed to sit beside the text/plain and text/html parts as
just another alternative, with type text/x-amp-html. So in _theory_ , any
senders of AMPHTML Email should also include a regular HTML part that is
semantically equivalent, and any client that doesn’t support text/x-amp-html
should simply get the less fancy version.

In practice, if something gets popular enough then the alternative that is
_supposed_ to work properly side-by-side gets neglected. (Some email senders
cop out on text/plain these days, leaving it out, or worse, empty, as in
Dropbox Paper’s document update notifications.)

But I don’t _think_ AMPHTML Email is likely to be sufficiently broadly
supported that this becomes a problem. (It’s only likely to happen at all if
all the major providers and major email clients support it.) If at any point
we do end up supporting AMPHTML Email, any remote content will be handled like
remote images.

~~~
sly010
The more time spent on optimizing for one email client, the less time spent on
optimizing for an other.

Hands up if you (like me) have skipped coding the text/plain part of an email
template and sent out multipart emails with no or empty text/plain.

Developers are lazy, but business minded people will push amphtml because they
think it's an edge. If it becomes a thing, people will create webpages instead
of emails and skip proper testing. (Again, myself probably included).

~~~
craigds
We've done the opposite. After ten years in operation we've only just begun to
add html parts to our emails. Its just easier to render plain text, and no one
has the time to be spending hours templating and testing emails, we've got
better things to do.

~~~
chrismorgan
And the really amusing aspect of that is that text-focused emails (be they
text/plain or deliberately simple and barely styled text/html) tend to get
better engagement than fancy branded emails—the data I’ve seen from a variety
of sources is quite conclusive about that.

I wish more people published data about it.

~~~
Flimm
I like everything about plain text emails except for hard wrapping, which
looks awful on screens that are too small or too wide.

~~~
chrismorgan
To a large extent, hard wrapping is a combination of choices made by the
sender (to hard wrap the text, because it doesn’t trust clients to soft-wrap
properly) and receiver (to soft-wrap or not).

There was a standard to handle it nicely, format=flowed; sadly, it didn’t make
it: [https://blog.fastmail.com/2016/12/17/format-
flowed/](https://blog.fastmail.com/2016/12/17/format-flowed/)

But even without that, the quoted-printable content-transfer-encoding means
that the hard wrapping isn’t actually necessary—you can have lines as long as
you like. Some email clients _do_ thereby send text/plain with arbitrarily
long lines, which will cause overflow in some clients (typically where plain
text is shown in a monospace font), and be wrapped in others (most, these
days, I think; these are typically where plain text is shown in a proportional
font).

Then too, some email clients ignore the 78 character limit (it is, after all,
only a SHOULD [1]) and write longer lines in the MIME message. (Not sure what
they do after 998, which the spec says they MUST not exceed [1].)

But the inability to specify the desired semantics of proportional-with-
wrapping versus monospace is probably the part of text/plain email that makes
me saddest.

[1]:
[https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5322#section-2.1.1](https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5322#section-2.1.1)

------
dgudkov
Email represents three important abstractions of the real life:

First, it's a task queue. And you're the _worker_ that processes the tasks.
Anything that helps an email service to be that abstraction is very good for
users -- prioritizing, postponing, auto-processing, branching, delegating,
etc.

Second, it's a log. As the article rightfully says -- an immutable one. Again,
anything that helps email be a good log is very good for the user -- search,
filtering, archiving, etc.

Third, it's a file storage. This is the most overlooked part, unfortunately.
Search, sharing, organizing into collections -- all that would be of great
help to users.

Yet, Google pushes that silly AMP :\

~~~
brongondwana
Bah - file storage. Yep, it certainly is. And to a large degree, because it's
a log. Once you email something as an attachment (even to yourself) it's like
a version control commit. That copy is locked in, and won't change. You can
find it and refer back to it later. It has a timestamp on it, and it's
probably stored in the cloud somewhere with backups and such.

Hence "memory" \- because that's how people use it :)

~~~
dgudkov
>And to a large degree, because it's a log.

I agree. Although, it's more than just a log. For instance, it would be great
to have the ability to see a collection of all files sent by a particular
sender, with file versions (with dates and links to according emails) stacked
under one file name.

Another suggestion -- view a collection of files in all emails with particular
label.

Finally, in some cases it can be helpful to have a local read-only copy of
files in a particular collection. It's like one-way read-only Dropbox. This
would make automated processing of email attachments so much simpler. (BTW, a
product idea, anyone?!).

~~~
brongondwana
So one of the smartass login messages in our internal slack is "JMAP will fix
it".

Interestingly enough, JMAP will make this kind of thing much easier - and we
have thought about it in the design! Our Cyrus server already internally keeps
a blobId which is a digest of the binary content of each MIME part. Which
means you can easily tell that two attachments are identical without reading
the contents or guessing based on size and name.

And it's easy to search for messages with file attachments and fetch just the
file attachement details via JMAP, making this kind of interface relatively
easy to write.

The usual caveats about "we haven't got a particular timeframe in mind" apply
- but once JMAP is standard, anyone can write a client to that standard!

~~~
pdfernhout
Hi Bron. JMAP is a great design for what it is (a much better IMAP). Thanks
for creating it. I can see JMAP becoming a great standard for email-oriented
client/server communications.

That said, I'd still encourage you to think bigger to make a more general
system. Of course, the risk of thinking bigger is you may end up with either
nothing or a monstrosity no one wants to use. And also you'd likely have to
adapt your business model eventually if the bigger picture changes through
your actions. So, it's fair to think smaller too.

From a related post I made to the Thunderbird Planning list in April 2017 on
what I see as the bigger picture: [https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/tb-
planning/2017-April/00...](https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/tb-
planning/2017-April/005533.html) "My perspective is from wanting to create
tools to support a "social semantic desktop" of which email is a subset of the
items. Other types of items include news messages, RSS feed messages, chat
messages, notification messages, IoT messages, blog posts, pingbacks, saved
web pages, commands constructing complex shared documents, VR world update
messages, code snippets, notes, and more. Email is a special case of a much
larger world of messages. So, for me, a good assumption is that people will
eventually have billions of message items comprising terabytes of data in
their local (shared-with-email) store. Eventually each user would be part of a
global federation of users that together have billions of times that number of
messages as a federated semantic web. I understand that such a vision of
messaging on that scale is not yet the goal of most people in this discussion
right now. But I'd still urge people to think a little beyond redoing
Thunderbird as-it-is and try to imagine a personal messaging system that
processes, archives, indexes, and recalls vast numbers of items every day in
interaction with a user and automated systems as part of a larger federation
of similar systems using shared semantic standards."

I've been beating my head against that wall for years with very limited
progress (as have others) -- so I can't say it isn't a high risk endeavor with
a low probability of success. But the benefit for humanity could potentially
be huge if such an effort succeeded. Maybe it might just take a few tweaks to
JMAP to generalize it enough to realize some of that big picture?

~~~
brongondwana
JMAP is pretty generalizable to other datatypes! It's a large part of why we
split it into Core and Mail. We also have Calendar and Contacts modules in a
reasonable state already.

We also use JMAP-style APIs for Files, for Notes, and for all the extra
Preferences and group management stuff in both FastMail and Topicbox.

~~~
pdfernhout
Neat! Yes, I see the potential there, which is why I an interested in JMAP.
Just wondering how it might could get even better at all that.

As related market research, Kolab uses IMAP as a general-purpose data store:
[https://github.com/pdfernhout/Twirlip2/blob/master/design/ma...](https://github.com/pdfernhout/Twirlip2/blob/master/design/market-
research.md)

------
JoshMnem
The possibility that email content could change after receiving a message is
worrying.

Is there going to be a way to reject AMP emails? I won't accept any emails
that _require_ loading JavaScript or content from CDNs.

If other email providers reject AMP emails with a bounce message explaining
why, it might stop a disaster from taking hold. "Please resend your email in
standard HTML or text format without JavaScript or external resources."

~~~
chrismorgan
Anyone sending text/x-amp-html should still be including a text/html part,
which won’t have JavaScript _et al._ Unless just about everyone starts
supporting AMPHTML Email, the text/html parts will still be necessary.

~~~
simias
Like most emails send nowadays use HTML but still include a text/plain part.
Here's a live example from my INBOX: [https://svkt.org/~simias/mail-
hp.png](https://svkt.org/~simias/mail-hp.png)

Notice that this is from HP, not some small shop. Nowadays people expect you
to be able to parse HTML emails and don't bother to have it work in plain text
(I'd actually prefer if they got rid of the text/plain in this situation, this
way mutt would know to display the HTML instead).

If AMP becomes popular enough and gets integrated by the big players I have no
doubt that we'll see the same thing. Then it means you won't be able to
process email in any significant way without a full blown Web engine (probably
including JS).

First they ported everything to the web, now they're porting the web to
everything else. I don't want the web. The web is bloated crap. Stop it.
Please. Stop it.

~~~
JoshMnem
Embrace, Extend, Extinguish, then walled garden and/or broken things.

Emails should not include any JavaScript. It would give anyone a way to send
immediately executing code into your inbox. CSS animation in email is already
bad enough.

Maybe an AMP filter could check the plain text content against AMP and HTML
content and bounce the email with a custom message if there is no plain text
or standard-HTML way to read the content.

------
petecooper
I went through a phase a couple of years ago when I was with Fastmail and
looked around for alternatives [1]. I ended up staying with Fastmail and have
adjusted to some of it's UI quirks in the admin interface.

Posts like this remind me why I decided to stick with Fastmail. Do one job
well. Fastmail do email _really_ well for me.

(Disclosure: Fastmail user on paid plan, unsolicited review/pat-on-the-back)

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11319298](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11319298)

~~~
IntronExon
Agreed, with similar disclaimer. I’ve used so many email providers, and none
have had my love and loyalty like Fastmail. The highest praise I can offer
these days, they earn: Fastmail treats me like the customer, and not the
product.

------
jacknews
Excellent point. I'm a happy fastmail user, and actually I'd like to see the
ability to 'fetch and save images' in addition to the 'show images' button, so
that I can archive some of those remote-image-wrap emails.

Remote image links are a bane - look how many forums have been effectively
ruined because they relied on 3rd party image hosting, that has now changed
it's policy, or gone away, etc.

Another annoyance are the dynamic links to other stories that you see at the
bottom of news sites. I often spy a link I'd like to follow just as I leave
the page, and then when I reload, the links have all changed! Super annoying.

------
sfilargi
Outside marketing, HTML has no place in email IMHO.

Personally I run my self coded all in one mail server(SMTP & web & IMAP)
binary and only use the text parts, or convert them to text.

Any marketing email gets blacklisted(sender or domain) and don’t have to worry
about them anymore.

Last time I was on Gmail I remember that no matter how many times I would
report something as spam(and unsubscribe) it would somehow still land in my
inbox next time.

~~~
Spivak
Look, I'm for plaintext emails as much as the next guy but there is a value in
_something_ that provides formatting. Users, very reasonably, would like to
use bold, underline, strike-though, highlighting, section headers, lists,
tables, inline images, etc.. HTML was a convenient choice of format at the
time and it worked well enough with budding webmail clients.

In a forum of tech enthusiasts we might be able to get away with emails
exported from groff but we can't throw out all the useful features users like
along with it.

~~~
yoz-y
If only they have decided to use something like markdown or rtf at the time.
(Some mail clients do support it).

IMO the problem with choosing HTML is that then it becomes tempting to embed a
complete HTML rendering engine and try blacklisting elements or restricting
it. This opens up a door for vulnerabilities. If e-mail used some format which
only does formatting then it would be easier to avoid security problems.

~~~
petepete
A simple Markdown dialect would have been perfect, but Markdown's ability to
embed HTML would just lead to abuse.

For emails, headings, quotes, code blocks, hyperlinks, images and
bold/italic/strikethrough is surely enough. Perhaps tables.

Unfortunately, that ship has sailed.

~~~
yoz-y
Well, the advantage is that since e-mail is a plain text medium, it could be
"forced" if clients started supporting it.

And it would require zero hacks like this AMP thing and would also be 100%
retro compatible if a markup language with sensible plain text legibility were
chosen.

~~~
Spivak
Up to your ability to modify the client there's absolutely nothing that
prevents you from sending a multipart email with text/markdown as one of the
options. _Shoudln 't_ break any existing email clients.

Obviously very few clients will be able to read it, or even acknowledge that
it exists but it's something. Maybe someone on the other end will appreciate
it.

------
igammarays
Paper trails. Absolutely. The concept of keeping a recipient-owned copy of a
message is as ancient as the invention of money and writing itself - it's
absolutely critical for messages with legal effects, like receipts. Imagine if
a fraudster could change the content of their original messages after the scam
was done! Yes, Google could implement an audit trail mechanism, but that would
be obscure and extremely confusing.

------
suhastech
I'm a fan of FastMail and their philosophy. I believe you have to own your
data. It is hard to find companies with core values so deeply entrenched in
the product. I think it gets a little hard to stick by it when there are
variables like investments, hockey stick growth involved. There is an easy
incentive to not make your product open. I recently had to think about that.

That's the reason FastMail is small company. It's our collective
responsibility to support the company as best as we could. Of course, not many
people would have the mindspace to think about data ownership.

One of the examples I can give is, I can easily pull up a polaroid from the
70s from the attic. I'm not sure we can do that 30 years from now in the
digital space, unless we make a conscious effort.

I've built a small email backup app[1] for the Mac a few years ago. I try to
make the product as open as possible with open standards. I work with IMAP a
lot. I love how they are spearing heading the movement (JMAP) to finally
update a 20 year old protocol.

[1] [https://thehorcrux.com/](https://thehorcrux.com/)

~~~
arkades
I checked out your webpage, and I like the product, but it seems Mac only. Any
plans for a Win version?

~~~
suhastech
I'd love to have a Windows version. As of now, I only have enough bandwidth to
support the Mac version.

------
ianamartin
I'm so happy to see this blog. I've been a happy, paying customer of fastmail
since . . . I honestly don't know how long it's been. I never think twice
about it. Fastmail is the ideal of, "It just works" that Apple strives to be.
No offense to Apple or their employees, and it's a limited problem area, but
these guys are really, really good at it.

Yeah, I have a gmail account. It's mostly a spam folder at this point. Because
if you were able to get a good name when it was in beta in 2004 or so, it's a
shitshow, even with google's pretty good filtering.

Fastmail is one of the best examples of why you should pay for online
services. When you work with this kind of company, it's clear who the customer
is: me. They aren't mining me for data; they aren't trying to trick me into
anything. They reliably get my x dollars/year, and I pay them gladly.

A thousand thumbs up for the Fastmail team. It's probably not the most
glamorous thing in the world. But cheers to a company that is making a
profitable living without hype, without bullshit product marketing, and
without closing off access. By just being better at something than anyone else
is.

I'm hoping to start a company in the next year or so, and I want to do things
the way Fastmail does them. You guys really are a beacon in the tech industry.

------
piranha
I’ve been trying to switch to fastmail about once a year for the last few
years and checked it again to refresh my memory. My main gripe is still here:
if you are on a bad connection (or with no connection at all), Fastmail’s
mobile app cannot load interface and so can’t show your emails. Which makes it
reeeeally painful at times when an app is most useful in the first place. :)

Of course, I could connect native mail.app, but that makes your ui on desktop
and mobile too different...

------
Skunkleton
Hi Bron, not related to TFA but I am a happy fastmail user and just wanted to
say thanks. I really appreciate Fastmail's stable standards based services.
These are increasingly hard to come by.

~~~
brongondwana
Thanks! We aim to please :)

------
JohnTHaller
I'm moving email providers in the near future and was looking at Google. AMP
for Gmail ensured that I won't touch it.

~~~
x0x0
You should read the top comment here before you move to fastmail, and
fastmail's response.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15855081](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15855081)

I'm a founder of a company, and I use fastmail for my personal email and gmail
for my professional email. I like fastmail more, but I need the security of
gmail + yubikey because that professional email can manage DNS/domains/bank
accounts.

You should also be aware that fastmail doesn't really integrate that well on
Android phones. Eg in order to access calendars hosted on fastmail, you will
have to use a third party caldav program. I currently used caldav-sync, which
fastmail recommends. It's a piece of shit that stops working approximately
every other week on a stock HTC 10. The symptom is my calendar stops syncing.
I have to notice this, go to the accounts option, and manually trigger a long
term sync. This is very very very annoying and I'm going to find a new program
as soon as I have the time. Note this isn't fastmail's fault, but it does
significantly inhibit use of their service.

The email composition box on mobile firefox on fastmail is a little funky too,
but that's on me. I wouldn't be surprised if I'm essentially the only person
using mobile firefox/android/fastmail's web client. This was pretty much the
outcome of my effort to de-google myself.

That said, I'm really happy with fastmail and I think I'm prepaid for another
two years.

~~~
bad_user
> _Eg in order to access calendars hosted on fastmail, you will have to use a
> third party caldav program_

If using an app bothers you, stop using Android, because CalDAV is _the_
standard for synchronizing calendars. iOS supports CalDAV natively.

That Android doesn't support it natively is yet another example of Google
infecting the market with proprietary stuff.

~~~
lern_too_spel
You can expect the iOS implementation to be buggy and not fixable without an
OS update. Meanwhile, there are multiple open source CalDav implementations
for Android that update automatically.

The most probable reason it isn't installed by default is that CalDav is a
failed standard, which most people don't use and don't want wasting space on
their devices. ActiveSync and Google Calendar won, which is why even iOS paid
the Microsoft tax to support ActiveSync long before it supported CalDav.

~~~
bad_user
I used CalDAV on both iOS and MacOS for the last 2 years and worked just fine.
Never had any problems. Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.

It's true that back in 2015 FastMail was not doing invitations and RSVPs
through CalDAV, but they fixed that since then.

> _most probable reason it isn 't installed by default is that CalDav is a
> failed standard_

That is extreme bullshit, the same kind of bullshit that Google used to kill
Google Talk and its XMPP interop, while pushing for their shitty and
completely proprietary Hangouts.

People used Google Talk back in the day due to its simplicity and
interoperability. Who is using Hangouts now? I actually hope it dies, because
we can then put such bullshit arguments to rest.

CalDAV can only become a failed standard because unpaid fanboys and shills
keep normalizing this behavior.

But until then I'll keep using CalDAV and I'll be happy about not
participating in this charade ;-)

~~~
brongondwana
CalDAV has some issues - we're working on making it easier to work with at
[https://devguide.calconnect.org/](https://devguide.calconnect.org/)

(when I say "we" \- I haven't actually attended a CalConnect for a year, due
to spending half my life traveling as it is - but FastMail has sent someone to
every event for the past few years, and Ken has been going for ages before
that)

And JMAP calendar support will be really nice:

[http://jmap.io/spec-calendars.html](http://jmap.io/spec-calendars.html)

With the JSON format on the standards track now:

[https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-calext-
jscalendar-00](https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-calext-jscalendar-00)

------
habosa
When I saw the AMP for email announcement I was not excited, but I did not get
the online dread until I read this post.

The immutability of my email has saved me so many times. I also have this
feeling (which may be unfounded) that emails are "proof" of something when I
get into a dispute. If my email can change or rot underneath me, I will have
to change the entire way I operate online.

I like AMP websites (at a basic level they're fast and that's all I care
about) but I have no interest in AMP email. I hope I can opt-out of it.

------
e12e
From the Google announcement[1]:

> With AMP for Email, you’ll be able to quickly take actions like submit an
> RSVP to an event, schedule an appointment, or fill out a questionnaire right
> from the email message.

Form the company that prides itself on doing advanced natural language
processing and machine learning. How about I just _reply_ to the email? You
know, via text.

Do some simple sentiment/content analysis and leave the rest to the _senders_
integration between email client, calendar, crm whatever...

We tried "send people code". It was called office macro virus (viri). Running
the code as js doesn't really improve things as long as all your important
data lives in the same js namespace...

[1] [https://www.blog.google/products/g-suite/bringing-power-
amp-...](https://www.blog.google/products/g-suite/bringing-power-amp-gmail/)

------
ggm
Gmail has a reasonably nice small inner-core functionality with keyboard
accellerators which is javascript-portable to my life. I won't trust a cafe
computer to run gmail to login, but I can trust my changing personal device to
let me run gmail in some consistent manner through keyboarded commands I like.

And the spambot is good.

But adding rich features? gaaaaah. I want to go back to MH. I want to go back
to my shell. I'm so tempted to walk into a dark corner, rather than have the
HTML actively engage with me.

because many things, but perhaps I'm kidding myself? I bet I didn't realize
how many tracking events exist through my email reading patterns, that google
know, and can monetize.

this AMP thing is just a more overt moment. I'm a frog, and I've been boiled
slowly.

~~~
latexr
> I'm a frog, and I've been boiled slowly.

That is a myth:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog)

~~~
zaphar
These days it's more of a metaphor than a myth.

~~~
ggm
Also _I am not actually a frog_

------
nofunsir
AMP for gmail will be the straw that moves me completely off of google's
platform.

~~~
dleslie
For me it was when I had location services disabled on my phone and Android
_still_ popped up a notification about the commute time between my home and
work, as I was walking out the door.

~~~
Whitestrake
At the risk of venturing off the topic of the main thread... Could that
behaviour possibly be explained by timing rather than location? My Android
gives me commute data around 7:30AM, regardless of where I am or whether I'm
moving. Perhaps they simply guessed you'd be at home.

~~~
badwolf
Not just timing... but you're connected to "CompanyWiFi" and it's the end of
the business day when you usually disconnect your charging cable/leave. There
are many signals they could use to show that

------
yeukhon
I mentioned this the other day when a "Google Talk" discussion [1] was
featured on HN. The reason I love Google Talk is the fact that conversations
are saved in my inbox, and I can export the history to a local drive and
encrypt the files. Pictures can go 404, but text, never. Email should be
simple, but I know in 20 years, our Internet technology will end up like
futuristic anime world technology. A simple, non-interactive, non-multimedia
e-mail will last like a paper.

[1]:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16349897](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16349897)

~~~
Tom4hawk
E-mail and IRC. Relevant XKCD:
[https://xkcd.com/1782/](https://xkcd.com/1782/)

------
reducesuffering
Finally interested in getting off gmail. Could someone summarize the pros/cons
of fastmail vs. protonmail or any other major email provider?

~~~
benoliver999
I can't compare services too well but I'll toss Migadu into the hat.

[https://www.migadu.com/en/index.html](https://www.migadu.com/en/index.html)

It's basically just an IMAP server. They have webmail but otherwise it's on
you to provide a client.

So far it's been great, I switched from gmail and I am not looking back. They
give really nice clear instructions on setting up your DNS properly and the
pricing isn't too bad.

My main motivation was to get onto a service that lets me have my own domain.
Once you're off gmail you are then free to choose and switch between whatever
you like.

------
pvdebbe
I'm disappointed at this. If everybody ignored this AMP business, it wouldn't
get mainstream attention.

I don't like the idea that some day use need to have a full blown web browser
to check your mail.

------
tyingq
This is pretty fun in an F500 org where email retention is 2 months or less.

Many of you have the luxury of several years of searchable email. Not all of
us do. And MS exchange search functionality isn't anywhere near what Gmail's
is.

------
enitihas
I do want to use Fastmail, but their ToS are no better than Gmail i.e, that
they can terminate your account any time for any reason whatsoever. Source :
[https://www.fastmail.com/about/tos.html](https://www.fastmail.com/about/tos.html)
This is the biggest reason I am hesitant to try fastmail.

~~~
veidr
But they probably _wouldn 't_.

That's the whole advantage of building up a business reputation over years
(part of which is blog posts like these; another part of which is just _not
doing_ shit like that.)

As a potential customer, I knew that Fastmail didn't have a reputation for
abusing customers or capricious/erroneous/fucked-up account termination.
That's why I chose their service, and today I'm a mostly-satisfied customer.

I didn't and wouldn't choose Google for this kind of service because I don't
have that level of trust in them (because, as we all know here, they not only
_can_ but also _do_ engage in fucked-up account terminations all the time).

Even if the Fastmail terms of service said "we will not ever terminate your
account unless you are convicted of felony child abuse" they could always
terminate your account by going out of business.

So I get your concern, but that's really _always_ a concern. You have to judge
that risk, and the primary way to do that is by checking out a company's
reputation.

~~~
enitihas
I understand your point, but prior to the recent update their termination
criteria were really broad, basically on whatsoever reason your account could
be terminated. Now they have modified their ToS and the termination criteria
now seem reasonable.

------
rootsudo
It's bad because people can manipulate email. It is not absolute. An
overzealous email admin/exchange admin can work horrors.

But maybe that's just me. I've been an Exchange admin.

~~~
brongondwana
For sure - anybody who can modify your mailstore can change emails - that's
not really under debate. The same way anybody who has access to your hard
drive can change your files.

The issue at hand here is whether the original sender can modify the message
after you've received it.

~~~
superrad
I guess they can by brokering a deal with the bad actor in charge of your mail
server. Unlikely but email is still bound to social manipulation.

~~~
brongondwana
We're in the "you're screwed regardless" territory here - like having an ISP
who intercepts TLS connections and substitutes content as you download it.
There's no real way to work around that, though you might be able to detect it
if there are unforgeable signatures on some of the content (e.g. DKIM
signatures from third parties on incoming emails) - though the intermediate
can strip those too, so all you see is "unsigned" rather than "modified".

~~~
Alex3917
> if there are unforgeable signatures on some of the content (e.g. DKIM
> signatures from third parties on incoming emails)

FWIW, in many cases content can be changed even if signed with DKIM without
breaking the signature.

[http://noxxi.de/research/breaking-dkim-on-purpose-and-by-
cha...](http://noxxi.de/research/breaking-dkim-on-purpose-and-by-chance.html)

I think email clients should be rethinking how they communicate to users
whether or not an email is signed, e.g. if the headers haven't been oversigned
and/or the full body hasn't been signed then it may be better to just show the
message as having been not signed at all.

------
skybrian
This is the first convincing argument I've read against AMP email.

On the other hand, if someone sends you a link to a web page, sure the _link_
didn't change, but that's not very useful, since anything can happen to the
web page that the link points to.

So it might just be about not confusing the user about what's immutable? Which
is itself pretty important.

~~~
notatoad
It's the first convincing argument i've read against AMP email, assuming it's
a valid argument. It doesn't look like amp4email is any less immutable than
standard email is - it fetches some resources from external servers, but
mandates that those resources must be static and cacheable. Gmail's current
behaviour is to download and store all images in emails when they are first
opened, which makes the images in emails as immutable as fastmail wants them
to be, and i don't see why they would treat any other resources delivered in
amp emails differently to images. To me, this seems perfectly reasonable - the
responsibility to store email contents in the state they were first recieved
should be on the recipient's client, not the sender's server.

i love this blog post, because it's great to write down in clear terms why
email being a read-only log is so important. but it looks like in the case of
amp it might be a bit of a straw man.

~~~
brongondwana
That is absolutely a good point. I should have shown my working a bit more.

static is boring, because every email can still have a custom endpoint.

proxyable is more interesting.

You say "cacheable" \- I don't see that in the AMP project notes:

[https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/issues/13457](https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/issues/13457)

@ras9929 yes amp-list allows you to generate dynamic content populated from a
json endpoint. The demo shown today did exactly what you are suggesting. See
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8Eo4gAoDBA&feature=youtu.be](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8Eo4gAoDBA&feature=youtu.be)

The only reason to host images remotely rather than including them as cid:
links inside a multipart/related is size and encoding overhead. Likewise, a
new dynamic multimedia format could be entirely self-contained within the
email if you wanted to design it that way.

Instead what we have is something which is very tightly coupled to short-lived
online services. It's a really poor archival format, but it has just enough
sweet bits that people will want to use it for things that it shouldn't be
used for. It's really short-term design.

------
agnos_tic
I read this

    
    
      Of course, we’re a hosted “cloud” service. If we turned bad, we could start silently changing your email. The best defence against any cloud service doing that is keeping your own copies, or at least digests of them.
    

Does this remind anyone else of that old _Gmail Paper_ April Fool's prank?
Last bastion of immutability.
[http://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,288...](http://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1888721_1888719_1888655,00.html)

Wait why do they have a legit link to it still?
[https://www.gmail.com/mail/help/paper/](https://www.gmail.com/mail/help/paper/)

~~~
TuringTest
> _" It's paper, plain and easy. I sometimes find myself wondering: what will
> Google think of next? Cardboard?"_

Keeps you wondering where they get their product names...

[https://web.archive.org/web/20141217113440/https://www.gmail...](https://web.archive.org/web/20141217113440/https://www.gmail.com/mail/help/paper/more.html)

------
MattyRad
I've begun to see immutability as a common theme in some of the most esteemed
tech in production. Email, git, cryptocurrency, and stream processing
(although I admit I don't know a lot about that one) just to name a few big
ones.

------
moogly
For me, email is just a repository of order and shipping confirmations. I
can't even remember the last time I sent an email, or I even read one written
by a human.

------
igammarays
Here's a free B2C startup idea for you aspiring founders: a personal email
(local?) archiver and search engine. Pull all my logs from my 15 different
addresses I've had over the years, and give me super-fast realtime search on
all of it. I wouldn't hesitate to pay 10 bucks a month for that. This idea has
a super-useful B2B angle as well (think of the explosion of MailChimp clones).

~~~
danieldk
If you don't want to put your data in another silo, this is what mu [1] and
notmuch [2] provide. I have been using mu/mu4e for a while and it is
absolutely great for quickly finding e-mail, creating virtual search-based
mailboxes, etc. Combined with isync and Fastmail's standard-conforming IMAP
support, you have a really nice e-mail setup.

Of course, it's not for the general public, but this is _Hacker_ news ;)

[1]
[https://www.djcbsoftware.nl/code/mu/](https://www.djcbsoftware.nl/code/mu/)

[2] [https://notmuchmail.org](https://notmuchmail.org)

------
staticelf
I love FastMail and this is just one of the several reasons I recently updated
to a 2 year plan.

I hope you can implement some feature to download the amp-content or similar
so it works like normal email. I do not like amp at all but I understand if
you have the need to do something to support it, but as other have written
please leave it off by default!

------
paulie_a
Email is quickly becoming the equivalent of linked in notifications. When you
have 100 unread emails you might be flooded with something important. When you
have 20-100 thousand unread emails: Email is broken

It's the electronic memory of nobody cares. I will potentially spend 5-30
minutes a day on email... Most days it is zero

~~~
stordoff
You don't need to read everything for it to be useful. I get email reminders
of things I need to do - I don't need to read past the subject line (same with
shipping notifications), and purchase receipts are useful to keep in case
there is a problem (you have a searchable record of when/where you bought it)
but don't need to be actively read.

There's a high percentage of emails I get that I don't get any extra value
from actually reading them, but I would lose value by not getting them at all.

------
JustSomeNobody
Great post!

> The email in your mailbox is your copy of what was said, and nobody else can
> change it or make it go away. The fact that the content of an email can’t be
> edited is one of the best things about POP3 and IMAP email standards.

I rely on this feature of email _all the time_ as I'm sure most people do. We
cannot let this change.

------
Aelius
This makes a convincing argument for the general adoption of ipfs as a the
backbone of the internet.

As I understand it, nothing can be truly deleted, you only need to know what
the hash of the object was and chances are it will still be accessible in
cache for quite some time.

~~~
TheRealPomax
So, literally illegal in Europe, where you have the legal right to be
forgotten from the internet? There is a lot to be said for being able to
delete data from an internet-connected computer and trust that it is, in fact,
deleted. Email definitely falls in that category, but while deletion for email
has a fairly obvious value, remote mutability of emails is extremely
questionable at best.

~~~
Aelius
IANAL but I don't believe ipfs in of itself runs afoul of "right to be
forgotten". Skimming Wikipedia, "the right to be forgotten" only requires
search engines to not index things which are "deleted", or more realistically,
things which have been unlisted.

Because even in the infrastructure we have today, objects aren't truly
"deleted" for quite some time, at least not where CDNs and Google and Facebook
and others are involved.

~~~
Aelius
Perhaps a better place to start the discussion about the legality of ipfs
would be to ask if bittorrent is illegal in Europe.

After all, if even one seeder is online somewhere in the world, a torrent is
accessible and cannot be deleted. Does bittorrent have the potential infringe
on someone's right to be forgotten?

ipfs operates in a similar way (peers and seeds).

------
mrmondo
As always Bron & teams - so happy with your take on this and proud to be a
Fastmail user and advocate.

-Sam.

------
joshu
This is why I hate docsend pitches. I can’t go back a year or two later and
look at things - someone will ask me if I know a founder and I search my inbox
and find them, but the pitch is gone and I can’t rememeber what they did or
what we talked about.

------
dustinupdyke
Perhaps not to the point, but I find more interesting pieces that I want to
remember occur in Hangouts, Slack or some other more expeditious medium other
than email.

I suspect that for some, email is losing priority.

------
tanu057
Google just wants to take control of publishers. And then dictate to them what
they can do or not, when a publisher page is displayed in an email. No, to AMP
for email

------
imron
> We strongly believe that our customers stay with us because we’re the best,
> not because it’s hard to leave

That's why I stay with them.

------
alt678
I love seeing posts like these where a company demonstrates what their core
values really are, not just shallow slogans. I'm a happy Fastmail customer and
just renewed for 5 more years.

Off-topic -: Do you plan to ever open source your Android app?

------
yorby
an email service would be the only instance where I would consider disabling
my ad blocker if ads are not targeted... could FastMail consider?

------
baxtr
A bit unrelated, but since, Bron, you are obviously reading this: I love your
blog, the only thing that drives me crazy: I can’t see the scroll bar in your
blog posts on my mobile. I guess it’s because it’s rendered in white. Scroll
bars, however, are great to have an indication how much of a page I’ve read
already, like a download bar. Not having it drives me nuts :-)

~~~
brongondwana
Yeah, our blog is currently a pain to work with in a few ways. It's generated
straight out of our source repository from Markdown files, and you have to do
the full pull request, merge, deploy to get posts out.

We're looking at moving the blog to another platform, and usability review
will be part of that!

~~~
ianamartin
I recently wrote a blog engine that's pretty lightweight. Sort of tries to hit
a middle-ground between a static blog and a wordpress type of thing. It also .
. . doesn't work perfectly. I fucked something up with drafts, and I need to
get back to it. But if you are interested, it's not too bad. Insanely fast.

[http://actuallysprained.net/](http://actuallysprained.net/)

Source code is here:
[https://bitbucket.org/tronflux/pyrant](https://bitbucket.org/tronflux/pyrant)

~~~
brongondwana
I'll pass the link on to the team looking at it. I think they already have
something in mind though. Ta.

------
gt_
_> (even more specifically, an email with remote images can totally change
after being content scanned)._

Can anyone speak to the prevalence of this abuse strategy? Are our anti-spam
engines able to handle this?

------
mtgx
Then why isn't Fastmail adding some kind of end-to-end encryption at least for
its own users? Shouldn't our memories be private (unless we choose otherwise)?

~~~
jhasse
[https://blog.fastmail.com/2016/12/10/why-we-dont-offer-
pgp/](https://blog.fastmail.com/2016/12/10/why-we-dont-offer-pgp/)

~~~
brongondwana
Thanks! The benefits of having blogged all this already :)

------
samstave
Gmail inexplicably deleted all my email prior to sept of 2009.... and later I
needed the emails I had in the account.

So yes - ___email_ __is and should be your digital mem, but the system sucks
and the companies suck that promise you free "digital memories" \-- so I am
still on the fence in general regarding all tech firms that provide a free
service - but what should one plan to pay for this:

\---

I was born in 2028. I was immediately augmented from what I was organically
contrived to be/become; a Human.

Human.

What did that mean exactly? What is the definition of a Human? What the FUCK
is this bag of potential intelligence? This bag of potential revenue? This bag
of potential fealty? This.. bag... of... ...potential???

Out of the gate the system labeled, confined, contrived, pre-determined and
then finally ___programmed_ __me as to what, no, WHO, I was....

I had to then begin to ___PAY_ __to be " __ _HUMAN_ __" \-- I had to pay for
maintenance of my body, pay to feed it, pay to educate it, pay to protect it,
pay to get it loved, pay for everything that I either required or desired...
-- this is what the 'definition' of being human has become.

If you are born and cant be intelligent enough, beautiful enough, lucky
enough, rich enough or evil enough... You are not allowed to be human.
Survival of the fittest at its best. And the only ones who would agree with
that, are those that can state that they are better than masses who cant
compete....

This is the new 'Human'

\--

Who is greater than what.

When youre a "what" \- a plumber, a coder, a low life, a socialite... yeah...
there are lots of layers in WHAT....

But there is really only one "who". WHO is that WHAT? is the basics....

Who is that master plumber?

Who is that elite socialite?

Who is ___that_ __low-life?

\---

Then the system judges " __ _how much_ __"

"How much has that low life cost ___society_ __"

"how much does that plumber give to society?"

"How much is that socialite worth?"

"How much does that engineer contribute to my life's well being?"

"How much do these jerks make?"

\---

So, as we discover who and what we are, we need to look at ___how_ __we became
that [thing].

How? Parents predilections, socioeconomic status, location born, innate
abilities, genetic modifications, external modifications....

Human is a basic condition that is manipulable and shall be exploited through
whatever given tools are available to those who are in a position to exploit.

Now, where is my blood-boy.

/fiction-rant

------
mehrdadn
Email is not immutable though? It's pretty easy to just copy an email out of
your favorite IMAP client, modify it, and drag it back. Do they not know this?

~~~
ocdtrekkie
I think the point is that it's immutable to the user. Nobody can go in my
mailbox and change the content of emails that are there. You can't unsend an
email (except for weird hacks like delaying sending the email in the first
place). The use of the term immutable here is not intended to suggest your
inbox cannot be modified in any way by yourself.

A good example of how Gmail has futzed with immutability with "dynamic"
content before is how they embed Google+. It lets you +1 and comment straight
from inside Gmail, which is pretty awesome! But... in the case of a
notification for a deleted post or comment, the dynamic overlay Gmail uses
will try and obscure the content. You end up having to go to a mobile or IMAP
client to see what was actually contained in the email notification of the
deleted G+ item.

~~~
mehrdadn
> The use of the term immutable here is not intended to suggest your inbox
> cannot be modified in any way by yourself.

Okay, but then, is this any different from cloud storage? Would you also say
Google Drive is immutable for the same reason? Or for that matter, wouldn't
the same go for files on your computer?

~~~
brongondwana
Yes - assuming you trust Google not to fiddle it. I would expect that a
document I stored in Google Drive wouldn't update itself a week later.

~~~
mehrdadn
OK, so by "immutable" you really _do_ mean "static" then? Static stuff can
change, but stays unchanged until you actually change it. Dynamic stuff can
change even without input from you. Mutable stuff is possible to change.
Immutable stuff is impossible to change. etc.

The bigger issue though is I'm trying to square what you're saying here with
your blog post:

> I admit it annoyed me when I first ran into it – why can’t you just fix up a
> message in place

If this was a poor wording, maybe go back and rephrase? Because I it seems
pretty _undeniable_ that after reading this sentence the reader gets the
impression that you claim it's not possible to go back and fix up a email in
your own inbox. Which wouldn't really matter, except that people who aren't
aware otherwise will actually believe you and spread misinformation on this.
Last thing I want is someone reading your blog post and falling for a scam
because they read from a presumably reputable source (you) that emails can't
be edited post-facto.

~~~
hueving
Once you send an email to someone, you can't change it. It's that simple.

It has absolutely nothing to do with what you can do to your own inbox. The
entire point is that you should be able to rely on the fact that what you see
in the emails you receive from a sender cannot be modified by that sender.

If someone sends you threats over email, you just archive them as evidence.
Now with amp, they can send you threats that only show a threat the first time
and then load inane text the rest of the time.

I'm sure someone thought this was a good idea but I can't imagine they used
emails very much themselves because this is idiotic. Email isn't a web
browser.

~~~
zlynx
There are tons of games you can play with email. If it isn't signed with PGP
or S/MIME or DKIM someone on either side can make it look like something
completely different than the original.

A bad actor can claim their edited copy of your email is death threats.

