Gmail Blog

> “We decided it would be blazingly fast; it would be visually gorgeous; the whole thing would work offline; you wouldn’t need a multitude of browser extensions to get things done; and people would be materially faster at doing their email.”

I've not used the previous product(s) this guy has worked on, but from reading TFA, and notably the way they reiterate those claims a few times, I'm confused.

First, general nomenclature grumble, using an existing english word as a product name.

They seem to be positioning as a superior option to gmail, for current gmail users. Disclaimer - I've been using email since the late 1980's, and gmail since 2004. I've also used a bundle of other mail clients (kmail/kontact, outlook, thunderbird, etc).

Gmail is blazingly fast - I've not seen it stall or choke or any tasks

Visually gmail looks clean and effective to my eye -- and I don't think gorgeousness would be a compelling reason to move away.

Gmail can work fine offline - either mobile device, or the wonderful Gmail Offline extension[1] -- sure, it's Chrom* only, but I gather the 'gigabytes of offline' in this thing is Chrom* only also(?). That extension is fantastic for flights or when I'm working in remote regions, and don't want to deal with a mobile device.

Apart from that, I don't have any other gmail-specific extensions - but even if I did, is it believed these are harder to set up and learn than a different mail client?

Really at a loss how I could be faster 'at doing my…

I ran an experiment years ago. I used a throw-away email along with plus-addressing [0] to register and receive updates from democrat, republican and a handful of media organizations. I knew what the results would be: Unmitigated mayhem. And that's exactly what I got. It was interesting to watch for a few months.

All of these organizations shared (definitely) or sold (assumption) the customized email addresses far and wide. The only other possible explanations for what happened with these email addresses might be that they were stolen during a breach or that a bad actor with internal access shared or sold them. OK, I can buy either of these for one organization here or there, sure. When it happens across all organizations? No, the sharing or selling had to be intentional.

There was no effective way to stop the stream of emails that resulted from a handful of registrations. From my perspective, clicking on "unsubscribe" only served to confirm the email address was good. In other words, perhaps it did unsubscribe you from that specific organization, yet, what you actually accomplished was to provide them with a validated "live target" email they could sell or provide to another organization.

The result was an almost exponential growth of emails. Registering to, if I remember correctly, approximately six organizations led to a constant daily stream of emails form hundreds (did not count them) of groups. Crazy.

I never set out to quantify any of this or run…

Excellent article -- despite (like others) disagreeing with several of his specific points, I think his overall take to optimize for predictability, readability, and simplicity is great.

A few years ago I took over as tech lead at a previous workplace where the only tool they had used was C++ (really more like C with classes) with no use of the STL or other libraries they didn't build in-house. And this was for a hotel reviews and photos startup! At one point, in a few weeks we replaced 20,000 lines of horribly low-level C++ custom client and server code with 1000 lines of Ansible scripts. https://benhoyt.com/writings/using-ansible-to-restore-developer-sanity/

I disagree with his point about foo_list and bar_dict suffixes. In Python it goes against the duck-typing philosophy (and in statically typed languages you definitely don't need them). You should be able to write a function that takes an iterable sequence, whether it's a list, set, or other container type. I think it's simpler to name "user_list" just "users", and if it's a dict, name it for what the keys represent, for example "users_by_id".

As author of the article about that he linked to about escaping outputs rather than sanitizing inputs (https://benhoyt.com/writings/dont-sanitize-do-escape/), thanks for linking that. :-) The OP does provide some counterpoint to my article, but I think he glosses over the real issues here.

I still believe it makes little sense to "sanitize" input generally (you actually…

> The problem is that even though "+" is a perfectly valid character, a lot of services don't accept it.

did you know that the `.` character is also ignored? So you can actually devise a scheme where you put in dots into your email address (unfortunately, it has to be your email address, not any additional suffixes), and bypass these checks and filters.

E.g., youremailaddress@gmail.com is the same as your.email.address@gmail.com

and for some extra fun, you can do both - add a unique set of dots to your email, and also add a `+` suffix, and if the service emails you without the `+` suffix, you know they deliberately filtered it out to spam you.

See https://gmail.googleblog.com/2008/03/2-hidden-ways-to-get-more-from-your.html for details on it

E2E encryption has a very long way to go. If PGP or S/MIME were the answer it would had successes (conquered the world) by now. I do appreciate the security advocates preaching PGP, but in all fairness it may be a lost cause. Some security is better than none and so we should applaud google and others' initiative to improve the encryption at the transport (SMTP protocol) level, without too much involvement of the end-user. And hope more will follow, whatever it may be.

https://gmail.googleblog.com/2016/02/making-email-safer-for-you-posted-by.html
https://openbit.eu/projekte/trusted-internet-services/

A few people lost all their emails on Gmail in 2006. https://techcrunch.com/2006/12/28/gmail-disaster-reports-of-mass-email-deletions/

There have been other Gmail outages in the past though. My two favorites are:

1. The multi-hour outage in 2009 http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/09/01/gmail.outage/index.html?eref=rss_us.
2. And one where they had to restore data from magnetic tape backups https://gmail.googleblog.com/2011/02/gmail-back-soon-for-everyone.html.

Of course, there are other email providers too and their own outages. But I like Gmail and that's what I follow.