This means spammers, right?
i.e. juggle between allowing allowing some paid spam and not being outright blocked by google/microsoft. That's the service they provide: VC-backed connections to get traffic unblackholed on behalf of their spammer customers.
>There are plenty of things I subscribe to which are marketing emails I want to see.
Therefore: that's how I feel about my e-mail, meaning let's send a billion messages a day, surely a billion people also feel same as me about it.
That's another name for spam.
You'll get a link to unsubscribe (to just that campaign), or unsubscribe, but somehow get your email back into the victims table.
Me personally I won't give a pass to business with an unsubscribe link, I have extreme disgust that we're in some make-believe pretend world that I asked for this in the first place
The fact that you have to frame it your way speaks mostly to the fact that apparently your income depends on spam being seen as acceptable and not a scourge to humanity. But that's just my perspective...
Define "low quality" and "not liked". Each person will classify a given message differently. At least in the general case it's hardly realistic to expect a sender to classify a message from the perspective of a specific recipient prior to sending it.
On the other hand, it is reasonable to expect addresses to be acquired via legitimate means (ie collected only with the consent of the recipient) and to cease attempts at contact when requested. That's essentially the boundary between reasonable conduct and harassment.
> At least in the general case it's hardly realistic to expect a sender to classify a message from the perspective of a specific recipient prior to sending it
I guess from the perspective of someone doing mass mailings that is true. A pointer to what I assume is your bias on the topic. But from the perspective of the recipient, who actually has to invest the cognitive effort of reading that message, I think it's only natural to expect a certain amount of average value out of that effort. And lets be honest, that mass mailing doesn't usually deliver that. It's just another trigger designed to manipulate people into buying shit they didn't even really want.
Let's rather have the default newsletter checkbox to be "off" and legal repercussions for repeated offenders, then I'll be on board for the term "reasonable conduct" too.
I'm sure you'll get mostly useful feedback.
But it almost never is, isn't it?
https://www.forbes.com/sites/panosmourdoukoutas/2017/02/24/a...
This is something that shocked me when I built https://mailpace.com I just assumed that everyone doing email ran their own smtp servers. Turns out YC and others are funding wrappers on aws ses left right and center!
A groundbreaking innovation that will totally disrupt everything including pizza delivery!
Given what a giant pain in the ass (for good reason, fuck spam) it is to get into the Gmail inbox I can understand why the spammers do it.
I have forward/backward dns configured as well as dkim, spf, etc. With TLS endpoints configured for secure transmission. It's worked pretty well in general. That said, I'm not using it that much, and there's no spam coming from my server (dedicated box on OVH), I dedicated a VM/IP to the mail server.
No (real) customer has ever, or will ever, care about this. Discord and Slack are pretty much case-in-points: bloated Electron apps that just about everyone on the planet has installed on their computers. I personally hate React, but technology decisions are irrelevant to the long-term success of startups. (As long as they don't grossly interfere with customer experience, the feature set, etc.)
> Final Warning: After analyzing hundreds of email startups, the evidence is overwhelming - 80%+ fail completely. Email isn't broken, and trying to "fix" it is a guaranteed path to failure.
First, I'd bet money that figure is actually wrong: the failure rate is likely way higher than 80%. And I'm honestly not sure how anyone could seriously think a 20% exit rate is bad in just about any vertical (but especially a "boring" one like email).
> Resources: Volunteer developers can't sustain enterprise-level software
What am I even reading here? Author does realize openssl[1], Linux[2], and many other "enterprise-level" pieces of software are entirely (or almost entirely) maintained by volunteer developers, right?
Anyway, the post had its opposite intended effect on me: it made me think about ways I could reinvent email.
Worked at two companies full of "real" users who cared enough to look elsewhere.
Yes I know it's easy to find exceptions to every argument, but it's worth pointing out that it's such a bad experience that even some "normal" people care.
If all you do is run games and discord on your home PC memory consumption won't matter.
If you have multiple uses or work from home ... Discord expanding to 4 G to display the meme channel with all those cat photos will be annoying to say the least.
Case in point, I stopped running Discord on my laptop. Still run it on a desktop to keep in touch with some people, but it's not my default goto for any communication.
Also, just because most users don't know better, it doesn't mean that Electron apps aren't basically disrespecting the user's resources and passing needless costs to them. Especially if you have hundreds of million users the extra cost they pay dwarfs whatever you the app developer would have paid for a working native application.
The amount of people who won’t adopt based on pricipal is exceedingly small.
This is just flat out false. Even my girlfriend - the least tech interest person I know - complained to me how its possible that a damn chat app (teams) is bad enough to make her entire computer feel slow.
So yeah, average users maybe don‘t hate Electron or React, bad many people hat the bad user experiences these solutions often entail.
The real question is; has your girlfriend stopped using teams since finding out how slow it is?
> The real question is; has your girlfriend stopped using teams since finding out how slow it is?
Don't know about his girlfriend, but two companies I was at did (one stopped with MS Teams, one with Slack).
I disagree. The crux of his argument was slowness, sure, but that's not why these applications fail because as I said, unless you know what to look for (Electron and React being the two main offenders), by the time you've found out that the application is slow, you're "locked in". Leaving these kinds of software after you've got setup with them is a lot more effort than starting with them. Email arguably more than any other, but messaging apps like Teams and Discord also suffer from this network effect.
That is the neat part. Teams, Slack and some other applications within that realm aren't actually something that we're choosing to use. It usually is something that is imposed onto us by the organization you're working for. With discord the effect is different, but the consequence is the same. Network effects basically force you to be on Discord.
At least in my department, Microsoft Teams is universally hated by everyone (that's only n=60). But we don't really have a choice in using it and we never had a say in the matter when the software was bought. With teams especially, it's basically an open secret that Teams is frequently only bought because its basically packaged in with an Microsoft 363 subscription.
And because of how software like this is imposed, I don't think the size of the user base serves as a good proxy to judge how well liked a piece of software is, at least in the enterprise space. For B2C apps, the effect may be less strong to non existent, but I would argue that the network effects of some apps can act as a similarly strong force.
In our case, we see Salesforce as our biggest competitor, so we did not want our corporate history on Slack (I don't think that's particularly a high risk issue, but our leadership does, so... Teams it is.)
And because they don't know, the heat is in somebody else. Like the tech support, or windows, or internet, or the anti virus or whatever (because even some tech support, if even exist, don't know but surely have a theory about it).
Let me tell you an example: When the local network, cloud flare, printer, windows, their firewall, etc fails and by coincidence they are using our app. they call US.
And blame US.
A sizable portion of the support calls that are handled by any provider of tech for small companies is about other peoples software.
And, even more on point, so is Postfix!
i guess im the one guy left that has neither
edit:quote
This is actually better than overall failure rate. At 80% I would absolutely be investing in more email companies!
The entire analysis is skewed to satisfy their own messaging or perhaps internal motivation. Mentioning Cyrus IMAP and SpamAssassin is ... being stuck in a time warp.
Being self-funded, their position is not surprising. However they really need some perspective.
Small team yes, but one person? https://runbox.com/about/runbox-team/ indicates otherwise. (I am a happy customer.)