One more damn thing to do after prelims

[sniffnoy]

So the University of Michigan has switched to having all its email handled by Gmail! If there was any warning about this, I sure as hell missed it.

And sure, Gmail has IMAP access, of course, but it can't behave like just an ordinary IMAP server, no. It has to do its own crazy shit. And that potentially screws with my ability to do things client-side. Which is how they should be done. It's fricking email. The server shouldn't be doing weird things on its own.

Now I guess when you consider that Gmail is primarily a webmail service, this makes sense. But I have no intention of using it that way. Then why did I sign up for it, if I didn't want to use that? I didn't sign up for it voluntarily, the school just suddenly migrated my official school email account over to it!

To hell with this. Maybe, sometime after prelims, I'll just get a free email account somewhere else and forward everything to that. Anyone know one that *doesn't* insist on doing weird things on the server and that I can use like just a normal IMAP server?

I mean, OK, I might never get around to this -- consider that I still haven't gotten around to switching from Thunderbird, even though I *know* of better mail clients out there. Back when I first started using Linux back in middle school, I used Kmail. Then of course that didn't exist on Windows, and I used Thunderbird, which is (SFAICT) noticeably inferior. Somehow when I switched back to Linux again I... continued using Thunderbird? And still haven't taken the time to switch back? Yeah. (Also, anyone know anything that might be yet better than Kmail? I expect there's still room for improvement there.)

Tangential: I actually did open up Kmail today intending to switch over, then decided against it on the basis that I'd like to at least see what the hell's going on with just the one switch before I add an additional complication. Looking through the options, I notice it has an option for X-Face. (IIRC, back when I used it, you had to do that manually. But at least you could do that manually; with Thunderbird I don't think you can even do that sort of thing manually without an extension. Also, I think I'm misremembering and you didn't actually have to do it manually, because I think it could display them and taken together those don't make sense.)

Now I'd say, "Does anyone really use X-Face anymore?" But I noticed when looking through the Gmail settings that there was an option for "send a picture with your email". Somehow I doubt that was via X-Face -- I think most people would be pretty disappointed if they found they could only send black-and-white images -- but I have to wonder...

-Harry

Comments

[autumnmist.livejournal.com]

Heh, UChicago is also switching to Gmail in the coming year.

[grenadier32.livejournal.com]

Gmail-in-a-browser is certainly better than Thunderbird, and I've never really liked Kmail myself. You may find that you like it more than you think if you give it a try; I use two Gmail tabs at once every day in my browser, one personal and one work.

Also, doesn't Thunderbird know how to integrate smartly with Gmail?

[sniffnoy.livejournal.com]

No, why would it?

Actually, Gmail does have instructions on what settings to use if you're using it over IMAP so that you get results that make sense. And when you do this, it's not actually that weird. But I still don't trust it. :P

I suppose Kmail is not actually significantly better in situations likely to come up these days. What, is the interface worse than Thunderbird somehow? I don't even remember. It's a mail client, it's got a usual mail client interface, whatever. I doubt it's seriously different.

But it is great in all sorts of situations unlikely to come up! For instance, Thunderbird won't let you customize your reply/forwarding templates, or have any sort of non-static signature, or send custom headers. And I'm just like... yeah, I'm not going to use any of that, but shouldn't a mail client be able to do that?

[grenadier32.livejournal.com]

I know "usual mail client interface" sounds like a straightforward thing but it's really not. There are so many tiny ways a mail client can drive someone batty, and numerous small dev teams have tried to "get it right, how hard can it be?" only to fail miserably. You, for example, seem to expect mail clients to support signature output from a script or custom header writing--I don't know of any clients that support the former apart from like, mutt, and the latter sounds like a disaster waiting to happen with false positives from spam filters. There's also Gmail's "conversation" auto-threading, which is an extension to email that I wouldn't dream of not having these days.

Dev teams focus on features they know people want. I'm all but certain that you *can* get all those features from extensions, but you say you'd rarely if ever use them, so... why? :-P

Also, I took your challenge and configured my Thunderbird to talk to my work Gmail account and it worked pretty much flawlessly, like any other email account--the only thing you lose is IMO one of the nicest features of Google Apps, organization-wide contact auto-fill. (Until you've typed the first few letters of a the name of a person you barely know and had their email address pop up, without ever having to populate a contact list, you don't know how much you want this.)

[sniffnoy.livejournal.com]

(Oh boy, this got long. It's been split in two.)

I know "usual mail client interface" sounds like a straightforward thing but it's really not. There are so many tiny ways a mail client can drive someone batty, and numerous small dev teams have tried to "get it right, how hard can it be?" only to fail miserably.

I'm not making any claims about what's easy to write. But, like, Thunderbird does it, Kmail does it, and they seem to do it essentially the same (IIRC)... I don't know, are others worse? I haven't used anything else (except occasionally for crappy webmail interfaces when necessary) in years. :P

I don't know of any clients that support the former apart from like, mutt,

or Kmail! :)

and the latter sounds like a disaster waiting to happen with false positives from spam filters.

I don't see why. A custom header that doesn't exist elsewhere in the wild will be distinctive to you and hence a strong signal of not being spam.

There's also Gmail's "conversation" auto-threading, which is an extension to email that I wouldn't dream of not having these days.

So, this is interesting. Threading is obviously something I expect -- and that both Thunderbird and Kmail will do -- but one of the annoying things about threads in email has always been the asymmetry; other people's posts go in your inbox, but your posts go in your sent folder, and you have to keep flipping back and forth, and it's damned annoying. Up till now I hadn't really thought of doing anything about it.

What's an appropriate solution? Maybe just not to distinguish. Tell your client to put sent messages in your Inbox, instead of in your Sent folder, leaving the latter unused, and hey! Everything's nice! (Well, except perhaps that the client behaves inappropriately when you try to reply to a message you yourself sent.)

And this seems to be basically what Gmail -- considered as a webmail client -- does; it has its All Mail folder. Of course its folders are nondisjoint, so it also still has Inbox and Sent, but with a fancy client you can accomplish that even with disjoint folders by using a mechanism other than "folders" (though if you're using IMAP, the results won't transfer when you log in from somewhere else).

And this is, I think, a good solution (and since the client expects it, it gets around the potential problem mentioned above). But I'm not sure I'm comfortable with an IMAP server doing this sort of automatic-message-moving-around for me; it could screw with any further customization I wanted to do.

[grenadier32.livejournal.com]

A custom header that doesn't exist elsewhere in the wild will be distinctive to you and hence a strong signal of not being spam.

If you can name a feature of email, spammers have used it to try to deceive filters; this exact logic would suggest to a spammer "hey, I can use an exotic header to make myself look like a real person!". I wouldn't be surprised if any sort of unrecognized (or at least uncommon) header would be grounds for a very high spam score; I'd love to be proven wrong about this though (I've never tested it).

Not sure we're on the same page regarding conversations. Where Thunderbird shows you single messages, Gmail-in-a-browser shows you "conversations", which are really single threads including both your messages and other peoples'. When viewed through IMAP, however, it doesn't appear that way at all; you see each individual message as a line item like any other email server, and that leaves Thunderbird to apply its own threading if appropriate.

[sniffnoy.livejournal.com]

I hadn't considered that -- while it's potentially a way to appear less spammy, since isn't actually visible to the user, it's free to become a dumping ground. Yikes.

I wasn't thinking of truly unusual ones, though IIRC back when I was reading Usenet some people would use those as a sort of easter egg signature. But I think that was before Bayesian spam filtering became a big thing? I was mostly thinking more usual things like X-Face and X-No-Archive and such. Yes, you can see from my choice of examples that I'm really thinking more of Usenet than of email. :)

Having a whole conversation in one window does seem convenient, but IINM it collapses the tree down into a linear thread so obviously I'm wary of that. :P And in cases where you really are looking at a lot at once, I doubt scrolling up and down is actually that much easier than switching back and forth between messages, especially if you bother to open them up in separate tabs.

[grenadier32.livejournal.com]

I never really got into Usenet like you did so I'm not as familiar with its conventions. Exotic easter egg headers sound funny though, I can imagine some possibilities.

It does collapse the thread to a linear format, yes. IMO it's well worth it though; conversations look more like single exchanges of communication than huge sprawling trees, which I've never been fond of. It enforces organization and keeps the thread from spinning out of people's grasp by sprouting little subconversations elsewhere that are hard to keep track of.

[sniffnoy.livejournal.com]

But conversations aren't single exchanges, and shouldn't be! I mean, real life conversations are single exchanges, but this is a limitation of the format. In fact, I claim that linearizing a thread actually results in disorganization.

The tree format -- or even such things as the point-by-point quoting and response -- allows you to do things you can't do in an linear thread, in particular, keeping on multiple points simultaneously and non-disruptively.

A linear format encourages forgetting and dropping earlier points. Or, if earlier points are kept live, the result is a jumbled mess, as distinct topics alternate with each other. If instead distinct topics are segregated to different branches of the tree, they can be kept live while still maintaining organization.

In general, I would say, the proper format for writing is not necessarily linear -- nor a tree, either. (Writing my recent paper with Josh, I recall thinking how much easier it could be if I could just write it as a DAG. Nowadays you can write things as hypertext, which helps somewhat, but you can't do that in a journal. And of course you can't expect a mail client to support a DAG. Is having multiple In-Reply-To headers even supposed to be allowed?) But a tree is still better than nothing.

I'm not sure what you mean when you say little subconversations elsewhere are hard to keep track of. The software keeps track of them for you -- it organizes them into a tree, so you can look and see which other messages they relate to. By contrast, if you force them into a linear format, they won't necessarily be near the things they most relate to; you can't collapse a tree (or a more general graph) into a line in a distance-preserving way. And note that this organization means that if the subthread is about something that isn't even relevant to you, you don't have to read it! Whereas with a linear thread, it's hard to predict this in advance; the branches are bound together so you have to read them all unless you're ignoring the entire thread.

Unrelatedly -- rethinking the custom headers thing; if it's free to be a "dumping ground", that means it should be ignored entirely, because it shouldn't offer evidence either way. Spam tries to hide its spamminess, but it necessarily has giveaways in A. the parts that contain the payload, the parts the user can see and B. anything it can't fake. These are the areas that matter. Something like custom headers should be simply irrelevant.

[sniffnoy.livejournal.com]

Dev teams focus on features they know people want. I'm all but certain that you *can* get all those features from extensions, but you say you'd rarely if ever use them, so... why? :-P

Actually, some time ago, I was trying to find an extension to Thunderbird to write custom headers -- I think because I had decided it would be kind of nifty to use X-Face again :) -- and I couldn't.

But more generally, well, I expect completeness. It's a mail client, it should be able to do everything mail-related I might want to do. Maybe not entirely conveniently, but it should at least have a complete basic set of tools that everything else can be built out of. If that's not there, then, well... it just doesn't seem right. It's an incomplete toolkit. I prefer having every case covered to optimizing for the most common case. I'm not sure what else to say about that.

Also, I took your challenge and configured my Thunderbird to talk to my work Gmail account and it worked pretty much flawlessly,

Like I said, yeah, if you use their settings, it essentially works. It's just not clear to me how well it can handle further customization. (Also, I've already noticed several times that a message might be marked as read in my Inbox, but unread in All Mail.)

organization-wide contact auto-fill.

Question: Where is it drawing this from? An LDAP server? Because I mean if you've got an LDAP server then well any client can do this[0]. (We did back at Chicago, and I must admit I miss it. Maybe there is one here and I just don't know about it; I should check[3].) And if you don't have an LDAP server, well, how is it doing this?

[0]Where "can" here is in the broad sense of it has enough information to, not that it actually will. :P Thunderbird definitely does, at least.
[3]Hey! Looks like we do! I'm gonna have to go set this up now.

[grenadier32.livejournal.com]

Gmail automagically adds faces in organizations, and when using a personal account, through GTalk.

I didn't know you could have LDAP do that, that's pretty nice. I should've thought to set that up at Vassar.

[sniffnoy.livejournal.com]

But I'm confused; where does it get the info from? Is it just "it's an organizational account so it can look and see what other accounts are associated with that organization"?

[grenadier32.livejournal.com]

Yes, exactly that. It doesn't just do this for email: it autofills for things like Google Docs collaborative editing and sharing (another amazing organizational feature for documents), and lets you easily see and share to the calendar of anyone in the organization (at my company anyway--that might be a privacy issue at bigger places).