I suggest you either stop responding, or actually respond to the issues people have, and don’t make excuses that are paper thin.
I personally don't like it and surely there's better ways of doing it, but it is definitely not unheard of.
A improvement like this is indeed in our feature backlog, and something we hope to implement in the future.
I would kindly suggest you stop wasting your time engaging them in their corp. troll techniques.
If you have additional questions hopefully other members can answer them here.
This is embarrassing at minimum, and show negative interaction with customers.
Is it that the developers 100% defer to a marketing rep without in-depth knowledge? Something else?
But yeah, they really need to control and focus their core message to a tech board. If you whiff that (which they did), there's a good chance in running off your core users. And that is generally considered a bad idea.
I know for a fact, Gmail on my phone doesn't have the ~15 years of email in my account downloaded. I bet that would take significantly longer to download than the actual search would would take to perform.
If the things to be searched aren't already on the client, a client side search doesn't seem too useful to me, regardless of how much compute power you have.
I can't even think of any? But also search isn't a core feature for the vast majority of sites. Something can be easy and still break if nobody cares very much.
Edit: Actually I can think of search breaking on one site that was notoriously badly run and had 0 to 1 part-time devs. That's not a flattering comparison.
Edit 2: So could the people that disagree name some notable sites with broken search? I feel like if I don't understand what "XYZ" stands for it's probably not something I should be blamed for...
Then there's MDN - a documentation site, whose 2nd most important function should be search. Yet, despite DuckDuckGo (a general-purpose search engine!) consistently finding the exact results I want, MDN's built-in search often misses even titles that are searched for verbatim.
If it weren't almost 2am and I weren't running almost entirely on caffeine, I'd probably be able to think of a few more.
When you can download a freeware tool that will find any file in the system instantly after maybe a minute of indexing you know the file search is not the problem here.
Just a month ago the only reason I could start a recently installed MS Office package on Windows 10 was its tendency to list newly installed programs first in the start menu. It did not show up anywhere else, could not be found by the search and Word could not even be set as default program for a file because the OS didn't seem to know of its existence.
Took me a second to figure out that you weren't claiming accessibility was only supported at an extra cost.
No real complaints besides the bridge sometimes pegging a cpu until I HUP it..
It’s way above my pay grade but I wonder if homomorphic encryption could be leveraged at scale without compromising security.
The mobile app has some way to go but more than adequate for daily use because I'm using it daily.
Ikea mass marketing emails are ~5.5 for me, and essentially all of the “false positives” in my spambox. The real spam is all 20+.
It looks like fastmail defaults the threshold to 5. Try increasing it to slightly above the score your legitimate emails get.
I remember a while ago someone promoting a new email service that "focused on privacy", etc. A few knowledgeable HN users quickly pointed out they were running Mail-in-a-Box on a single Digital Ocean droplet.
Your open source link contains nothing, your blog has no posts, your Windows app is not found in the store, your privacy policy is from a free policy generator tool, there are no reviews due to the service being new and there is no documentation for how to use custom domains, etc. You may offer an excellent service, but there's not a lot to base trust on.
Thanks for your feedback!
Oh, also, the open source repos are coming soon. Only so much time in a day. :)
TricepMail is designed specifically for privacy, and not only privacy for your data on TricepMail’s servers but for preventing others from tracking and selling your information as well. The privacy policy specifically states that there is no collection of your personal information. TricepMail is based out of Colorado, US, but considering moving to another country which might be better for privacy.
The UI is definitely very minimal, but that is on purpose by design. No need for a bunch of visual clutter when reading/sending email. Improvements can and will be made though, of course.
I could promise you I'll send you a legit authentic fancy gold Rolex worth $20,000 if you transfer me $15,000, so you can re-sell it and make $5,000 in an instant. Would you believe me?
You can imagine each user as a folder in the /var/mail directory, it depends on your implementation to encrypt the folder or not. Gmail encrypts all in-transit e-mails but I cannot find a reference for encrypting on their servers
I thought when they were referring to the server, it was email servers in general.
Their “bridge” lets you use a regular imap client, which makes it trivial.
// Or something like that, I’m dumb for cryptography :)
On the contrary: Google is absolutely interested in your startup's email, just not the content you think. They don't care about Susan writing to HR about vacation days, but they absolutely care about your IT manager's correspondences with that Oracle rep that's trying to sell you their cloud offering. That way, Google can advertise the shit out of their competing offerings to you in order to "steal" you as a customer from their competitors.
> Product-wise there is not a thing wrong in the world with GMail.
I'm guessing you haven't been around HN for long enough to hear the myriad of horros stories about entire GSuite orgs being deleted because of things like a false-positive abuse detection on an employee's private account or one pirated movie uploaded by an employee by accident. And how none of them were able to even reach support without going through personal connections at big G (and even then, few were able to get things fixed).
Google is a faceless corporation, managed more by algorithms than by people. You don't need an ideology to tell you why that's bad.
Blindly choosing ideology over self-preservation is what isn't sane here.
Conform, citizen!
It’s not as if the client can’t maintain an encrypted index, they just haven’t implemented it.
Also, apart from all of the important advantages of encryption, there’s always the privacy angle compared to Gmail: Google uses mail to target ads and scrape purchases, which a lot of people don’t want.
Also if you have multiple clients, which one is going to update the index and how do they sync up? Building index on a mobile device potentially kills its battery esp. if it needs to index pdfs and images. So it needs to be done while charging over night which means you can only search emails from yesterday. If multiple mobile clients build their own indices merge conflicts might arise.
So yeah, if you're opting for an encrypted email then your search experience will suffer. It's the user's choice obviously.
The advertisement on Gmail is for free accounts btw and it seems extremely dumb. I get ads for Google Fi in Gmail even though I'm a Google Fi subscriber.
I initially read “hundreds of thousands” and would have agreed that it might be a problem for those rare users (not even sure about that), but no, “hundreds or thousands” is a trivial amount of data. Normal mailbox operations already need to synchronize state; you just apply index operations along with this. (As for indexing PDFs and images, I don’t expect that in a basic implementation, or maybe ever. Doesn’t mean the entire feature should be missing.)
Which is why other services (e.g. Tutanota) have already implemented it, and also manage encrypt things like subject lines, which Protonmail doesn’t (!).
I'd like to first see a real example of a mail service that in addition to e2e encryption is also best in class in terms of usability (quality and speed of search, spam filtering, auto categorization, ...).
For my use cases, usability comes first and e2e encryption comes second or even third (after price)
The index doesn't need the attachments, does it? At a couple kilobytes per message you can fit a whole lot of text into a reasonable amount of phone storage. And there's no reason it should be slow.
> Also if you have multiple clients, which one is going to update the index and how do they sync up?
Each client can either independently index new emails as they come in or upload something like a compressed csv of new entries for the index database. A hundred new emails should only take milliseconds to process.
> if it needs to index pdfs and images.
How do you index images? Indexing pdfs is much more of a nicety than a necessity, and it could be a setting on whether you want to spend the data. It shouldn't take long though, as far as I know. You don't need to render it or anything.
> If multiple mobile clients build their own indices syncing them and merge conflicts might arise.
If they build their own then you don't need to sync.
If they share and do sync, I still don't see how you'd get merge conflicts. Emails don't change, and index updates are just adding and removing entire emails.
Building the index independently on each client means if you login from a new device you need to wait for the index to be built. That said, maybe the index can itself be encrypted and uploaded to the server to be downloaded by new clients. Also building index is potentially expensive on a mobile phone and I don't want to wait for my phone to be plugged in to be able to search recent emails. The alternative would be to have an always on computer at home that decrypts, indexes your emails and then your mobile client updates its database from there. This whole system feel so fragile though.
I'm no expert in cryptography or syncing databases but imagine there are a lot of technical and usability issues.
But how often do you log in from a new phone? And yes it could be.
> Also building index is potentially expensive on a mobile phone and I don't want to wait for my phone to be plugged in to be able to search recent emails.
As I said in more detail before, I don't think it is.
> I'm no expert in cryptography or syncing databases but imagine there are a lot of technical and usability issues.
There's a few. But making an app is already a process of dealing with dozens of technical and usability issues. None of these new ones sound like dealbreakers.
The email search is completely useless. I don't understand how it can possibly be so difficult to do a substring search on a corpus and rank them in some kind of sane way. Searching for old emails based on content is an exercise in futility. After a few years of using an email service, search becomes really important.
It is exceedingly difficult to pull data out. You need dev ops skills to do it.
They charge for users that are disabled, and you can only stop paying for them if all of the associated data is deleted.
So they effectively hold your data hostage (yes, you can get it out but it time-consuming and requires technical skills).
I finally bit the bullet and paid a dev ops person (and gave him access to all my data) and switched to fastmail (at least it's not google) a few months ago. It's been an incredible relief.