Re: Young people peering

On 5/14/24 19:55, Russ Allbery wrote:

It depends very much on what you want to do with it.  At my last job, I just used the Gmail web client (and various mobile clients) the whole time I worked there for all work mail (which was very high-volume). It worked great.  And I'm a fairly technically sophisticated user who uses probably the most sophisticated fat mail client (apart from HTML rendering) currently available.

I too used Gmail at my last job and I hated it and found it very limiting.

Lots of people just use Gmail's web client.  It's fine.

I disagree.

It even has a lot of the capabilities that you would expect in a fat client, such as very rich filtering, although its filtering syntax is pretty weird.

I found it's filtering capabilities to be quite limiting.  Both in what could be filtered on and how you could use them in combination.
It couldn't even touch on modifying messages.

And so many other people use the Gmail web client that messages generally look good in the Gmail web client, which sometimes matters.

Sometimes following the herd is a bad thing.

I still use a web-based email client for work (a considerably worse one than Gmail's), because I mostly don't use email for my job at all, I read work email about once a week, and the only task that I need to do in it is go through and skim and delete a bunch of messages and send an email maybe once a month.  Is that email ugly HTML top-posted crap? Yes, it is.  I cannot be bothered to do anything else given how little I use it and how much I dislike setting up IMAP, and no one cares.

Some people care.
Not enough people caring is a symptom of a different problem.

I really like my rich email client, but it's just not worth the afternoon it would take to set it up to talk to my work email server (and all the drawbacks of comingling work email with personal email, or an even more complicated project of setting up multiple clients).

So don't co-mingle accounts.

Not having to set up a client is a huge benefit for me that turns out to matter more to me than the web UI.  Which is, let me be clear, utterly godawful, but I only use it once a week and I only use like four buttons in the UI, so who cares.

Apparently not you.

Incidentally, if you want blocks of text to look good on the phone, you pretty much have to use one of the other things Usenet folks love to hate: HTML messages.

format=flowed ASCII text does that perfectly fine.  No need for HTML.

Not saying that Usenet should use HTML!

format=flowed works perfectly fine with Usenet.

But it's already there, everyone knows how to use it,

I question the veracity of that.
They know how to type and that what they type comes out the other side. I bet the vast majority of those people have no idea that HTML is being used under the hood.
People that don't do any formatting would be perfectly fine with text email.  But most of the web email clients take pure text and force it to HTML.

most of email is in HTML these days anyway,

More herd following.

and there are millions of people and entire industries devoted to making HTML look good.  It's very, very hard for a theoretically better alternative to compete with that.

Nonsense.  It just needs to be bigger, worse, more gaudy, and draw specific people's attention.  People will start to flock to it in droves.  But it will be worse than the current thing.
--
Grant. . . .