Open letter to Jon concerning M3

Morg42

@ayespy said in Open letter to Jon concerning M3:

But that's just me, one user.

I accept everyone who has different views, workflows or peculiarities. I am only a single user, too.

Pesala

0_1518173088488_Opera 12.18 Workflow.png

Why open another application for email? I spend most of the day online. Even if I am using another application to write a book or publish a web site, I will have my browser open for looking things up. Meanwhile, I have Opera running too (on my secondary monitor) so I can see at once if some email comes in.

I stop whatever I am doing, saving my work, before reading the email and dealing with it at once. If I am unable to reply to it for some reason, I tag it, then get on with whatever I was doing before.

After many years of using Opera M2, I still have fewer than 100 emails saved, but I would not want them to be on a server where I cannot access them if my Internet connection is down, etc.

Morg42

@pesala said in Open letter to Jon concerning M3:

Why open another application for email?

Yeah. Exactly the kind of argument I'd been waiting for...

I will have my browser open for looking things up. Meanwhile, I have Opera running too (on my secondary monitor) so I can see at once if some email comes in.

So if instead of Opera it was another program for mail, this didn't make a difference? (while it's not integrated in Vivaldi)

I would not want them to be on a server where I cannot access them if my Internet connection is down, etc.

Which is an argument against web mail, but not against dedicated email clients, no matter of which make...

netwolf

Slightly off topic, but what's your problem with IMAP?

The secret service part is a joke I guess (nobody seriously believes a SS can't access server-side POP3 traces or MITM the mail fetch), and you can very easily keep a local copy of your mails with IMAP too if you want to.

A few years ago I switched all my account to IMAP and now have them perfectly accessible and synced(!) on all my devices. Nevertheless my Thunderbird is configured to keep local copies of all mails, so even offline I have perfect access to them.

WRT internal/external tool: IMHO only an integrated solution makes sense, as integration is the most important advantage over the dozens of very good email tools available, which are years of development and experience ahead.
THE advantage (at least for me) of M2 is/was that mail (and feeds) is just another tab, not a separate standalone application outside the browser.

Pesala

@morg42 said in Open letter to Jon concerning M3:

Exactly the kind of argument I'd been waiting for...

You are looking for arguments, contrary to your alleged acceptance that people have different workflows.

This thread is about the built-in email client, but you don't want it. That is fine by me, but I find that it being built-in improves my workflow as my screenshot shows.

IMAP would be fine if I can store local copies of my email, and then delete it from the server.

Codehunter

@Morg42 As a (commercial) developer you always move between the technical ideal, usability and what is economically feasible. You use as much code as possible over and over again. For object-oriented programming with inheritance and code morphing, for procedural programming with libraries and frameworks.

In this respect, it is wrong to believe that two separate applications would be safer than one monolithic application. The opposite is often the case. Because developers have to maintain and keep two different code bases synchronous, errors can creep in. How often has it been the case with Firefox, Samba, all sorts of projects that a bug was fixed in one branch, but then forgot to include the bugfix in the other branches.

Also, the renderer is not made any smaller by configuring it differently in the mail program. In the case of Vivaldi, it is and will very probably remain chromium. Either way, you will need to have Javascript enabled, because the mailer's program interface itself already needs Javascript. That was IMHO at Opera M2, too. So your "security concept" wouldn't work. The better solution is to close known security holes. If you only have to do it once, the better.

Of course you can say that I simply don't use HTML mails. M3 will undoubtedly have such a switch again. However, a mail client that does not have the ability to send HTML mails by default will not succeed in the market.

In practice, what you imagine would probably be built in such a way that you develop the same program twice and then deactivate the browser part in one case and the mail part in the other (e. g. as it was done with Opera Mail, which is still an Opera 12.15 (I think) but without browser function. However, I doubt whether this is an efficient working method for the developers.

Als (kommerzieller) Entwickler bewegst du dich immer zwischen dem technischen Ideal, der Usability und dem was ökonomisch machbar ist. Du verwendest so viel Code wie möglich immer wieder. Bei der objektorientierten Programmierung mit Vererbung und Codemorphing, bei prozeduraler Programmierung mit Bibliotheken und Frameworks.

Insofern ist es genau verkehrt zu glauben, dass zwei getrennte Anwendungen sicherer wären als eine monolithische Anwendung. Das Gegenteil ist oftmals der Fall. Weil man als Entwickler zwei verschiedene Codebasen pflegen und synchron halten muss, können sich Fehler einschleichen. Wie oft war es denn schon so, bei Firefox, bei Samba, bei allen erdenklichen Projekten, dass ein Bug in einem Branch gefixt, aber dann vergessen wurde, den Bugfix in die anderen Branches zu übernehmen.

Auch wird der Renderer nicht dadurch kleiner, dass du ihn im Mailprogramm anders konfigurierst. Im Fall von Vivaldi ist und bleibt es sehr wahrscheinlich Chromium. So oder so wirst du Javascript aktiviert haben müssen, weil die Programmoberfläche des Mailers selbst schon Javascript braucht. Das war IMHO bei Opera M2 auch schon so. Dein "Sicherheitskonzept" würde also nicht funktionieren. Die bessere Lösung ist es, bekannte Sicherheitslücken zu schließen. Wenn man das nur einmal tun muss, umso besser.

Klar kannst du sagen, ich benutze ganz einfach keine HTML-Mails. M3 wird mit Sicherheit auch wieder einen solchen Schalter besitzen. Doch ein Mailclient der von Haus aus die Fähigkeit zu HTML-Mails nicht besitzt, wird sich am Markt nicht durchsetzen.

Das was du dir vorstellst würde in der Praxis wahrscheinlich so gebaut, dass man zwei Mal das selbe Programm entwickelt und dann wahlweise im einen den Browserteil und im anderen den Mailteil deaktiviert (so wie es zB bei Opera Mail gemacht wurde, was ja auch nach wie vor ein Opera 12.15 (glaube ich) ist, nur eben ohne Browserfunktion. Ob das aber eine effiziente Arbeitsweise für die Entwickler ist, bezweifle ich.

Codehunter

@pesala Thanks for the screenshot. You can't see too much in the thumbnail but the layout looks very familiar.

--

Danke für den Screenshot. Man kann im Thumbnail zwar nicht allzu viel erkennen aber das Layout wirkt sehr vertraut.

Morg42

@pesala said in Open letter to Jon concerning M3:

You are looking for arguments, contrary to your alleged acceptance that people have different workflows.

Of course I'm looking for arguments. Only those will be able to make me rethink my positions. "Just because" has never been a strong incentive for me to question my own arguments.

And I don't say your point is invalid. It just might not be valid enough for me. If your workflow and your tools suit you, that's great.

This thread is about the built-in email client, but you don't want it. That is fine by me, but I find that it being built-in improves my workflow as my screenshot shows.

Which is your core argument - I can accept that (though I won't adopt it).

IMAP would be fine if I can store local copies of my email, and then delete it from the server.

I'm not far enough into IMAP to know if that's possible - AFAIK IMAP is just about the opposite, keeping all mails on the server. While you can surely keep an offline storage synced, I couldn't say if it allows mails to be deleted only on the remote system. I think POP3 might stay your way to go, especially as you seem to have it set up just right for you

Codehunter

@morg42 said in Open letter to Jon concerning M3:

I'm not far enough into IMAP to know if that's possible - AFAIK IMAP is just about the opposite, keeping all mails on the server. While you can surely keep an offline storage synced, I couldn't say if it allows mails to be deleted only on the remote system. I think POP3 might stay your way to go, especially as you seem to have it set up just right for you

I totally agree with you on that point! IMAP is not really a real transmission protocol but rather a control interface for a (cloud) mail service. Cloud is simply a modern term for everything that is provided on external servers by external service providers. IMAP actually represents the cloud very well, even though the term cloud did not exist before IMAP was invented.

Thus IMAP is actually in a fundamental conflict with what we long-serving M2 users want: A high-performance database engine that can search for keywords in hundreds of thousands of mails at lightning speed. IMAP cannot do this at all on the server side, because IMHO supports a full text search in the IMAP protocol. However, it is only offered by a few mail providers, especially not in freemails. And even if it is available, the search performance varies greatly and also depends on the performance or latency of the Internet connection.

In my opinion, full text search as we know it from M2 can only be done with a local database engine. Therefore all mails from the IMAP server would have to be mirrored locally. This may seem trivial at first glance, as long as you only dock a local mailer to an IMAP account. But as soon as there are several, which is actually one of the advantages of IMAP, the synchronization of user actions on other local mailers becomes very complicated. The developers of M3 like to correct me if I'm wrong.

Ja in diesem Punkt gebe ich dir vollkommen recht! IMAP ist eigentlich gar kein richtiges Übertragungsprotokoll sondern mehr eine Steuerungsschnittstelle für einen (Cloud-) Maildienst. Cloud ist ja einfach ein moderner Begriff für alles was auf externen Servern durch externe Dienstleister bereitgestellt wird. IMAP repräsentiert die Cloud eigentlich sehr gut, auch wenn es den Begriff Cloud noch gar nicht gab als IMAP erfunden wurde.

Damit steht IMAP eigentlich in einem fundamentalen Konflikt zu dem, was wir altgediente M2-Anwender uns wünschen: Eine hoch performante Datenbankengine, die in Hunderttausenden Mails blitzschnell nach Stichworten suchen kann. Das kann IMAP serverseitig gar nicht leisten, weil IMHO das IMAP-Protokoll eine Volltextsuche zwar vorsieht. Jedoch wird die nur von wenigen Mailprovidern angeboten, besonders nicht in Freemailern. Und selbst wenn sie vorhanden ist, variiert die Suchperformance stark und hängt auch noch von der Leistungsfähigkeit bzw. Latenz der Internetverbindung ab.

Volltextsuche wie wir sie von M2 her kennen, kann man meiner Meinung nach nur mit einer lokalen Datenbankengine realisieren. Deshalb müssten alle Mails vom IMAP-Server lokal gespiegelt werden. Das mag auf den ersten Blick trivial erscheinen, solange man nur einen lokalen Mailer an einem IMAP-Account andockt. Sobald da aber mehrere dran hängen, was eigentlich einer der Vorteile von IMAP ist, wird die Synchronisierung von Nutzeraktionen auf anderen lokalen Mailern sehr sehr kompliziert. Die Entwickler von M3 mögen mich korrigieren wenn ich mich irre.

becm

An IMAP client can mirror all mail data locally for offline access. So it can fully replace the non-strange operation mode (keep mails on server) of POP3.

Additionally, M2 kept a local search index even for mails not mirrored on the client.
This had the advantage of effectively managing large mailboxes with relatively small locally required storage space.

becm

Concerning privacy implications on keeping mails on a server:

There are (at least) 18 (interior) secret services in Germany alone.
And your provider will not really delete them, just not show them to you anymore.
Oh, the provider of the sender will of course keep a copy (or two).

So I would assume there are somewhere between 10 and 1000 persistent copies of every mail ever sent. The only result of "mark as deleted" is the loss of a backup location the end user had access to.

Morg42

@becm the "p" in mail stands for privacy

For privacy, you don't need to think about mail if you don't completely encrypt mails in your client (and SSL or TLS don't count).
Still, all header data is plainly there for anyone interested to see. Much like postcards, just less secure and less private...

Steffie

@morg42 said in Open letter to Jon concerning M3:

Much like postcards, just less secure and less private

Thank goodness you alerted me to this. I've now ditched emails in favour of postcards -- there, in one fell swoop i have enhanced my security & privacy. Job well done.

saudiqbal

M3 needs to come soon, I said it before, hide it in vivadi://experiments this way advanced users know what they are doing, I am responsible for any losses this way.

Codehunter

Hello, Jon,

Thank you for your personal feedback on my post. I've only seen them now, because the forum is sorted a bit strangely. I hope very much that we will soon be able to watch a M3 beta of non-Sopranos. Hopefully, Intel or Microsoft will not add any updates until then, which will shut down Opera 12.18 finally. I have the feeling that the last meltdown and spectre updates didn't do the stability of Opera any good.

I fully support @saudiqbal's proposal:

@saudiqbal said in Open letter to Jon concerning M3:

M3 needs to come soon, I said it before, hide it in vivadi://experiments this way advanced users know what they are doing, I am responsible for any losses this way.

Greets
Cody

CWM030

@jon I think one thing that could be good is comprehensive mail filtering.... Right now for instance in M2, there is basic filtering, where other mature email clients have more filtering options

Like, lets say I don't want to accept an email from someone, I can set up a rule.

IF ANY HEADER CONTAINS FROM [email protected]

MOVE TO TRASH

MARK AS READ

Something like that....

Or if ANY HEADER CONTAINS [email protected]
FORWARD TO... [email protected]

etc etc... More complex filtering than what we have in Opera 12.16 for Windows. That would be really great...

I think thats all I can think of for now... If I can think of anything else, I'll come back!

Thanks,
Chris

Steffie

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CWM030

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Ayespy

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Steffie

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