Category: internet

Thinking about email services

Seeing the changes to OtherInbox Organizer this past weekend got me thinking about email in general. I’ve been using Gmail for more than ten years, and I’ve been using Organizer since 2011.

Every once in a while, I consider switching from Gmail to a non-free alternative. I last looked into paid email services in 2014. Not much has changed since then, but a few things have. Generally, the trend seems to be towards offering more space and charging a little more.

FastMail is probably the best example, and the likeliest candidate, if I were to switch. Their basic account is $30/year, for a 2 GB mailbox. That’s probably not enough for me, since I currently have about 2.3 GB in my Gmail account. (Of course, if I switch, I don’t need to bring all of my old mail over, but I’d like to, if I can.) Their standard account is $50/year for a 25 GB mailbox, which would be more than enough. That also includes the ability to use your own domain. (When I last looked at FastMail, a few years ago, the standard account was $40 and included 15 GB of storage.) They’ve got pretty much all the features you’d want in an email service: a nice web interface, IMAP support, an iOS app, two-factor authentication, calendar/contact management, and support for importing old mail from Gmail (or wherever).

I signed up for a free ProtonMail account back in 2014, when the service was still in beta. At the time, I found it to be too limited to be really useful. Looking at it again now, I see that it’s improved quite a bit, and it’s seriously worth considering for use as my main email account. The main selling points for ProtonMail are security and privacy. So if those are your main concerns, definitely take a look at their service. They have a pretty good web-based interface (much better than it was during the beta), and an iOS app (that I haven’t tried yet). They don’t support IMAP, though, since that just wouldn’t work with their secure architecture, so you’re stuck with either their web interface or app. You can’t hook your account up to Apple’s mail app, or Outlook, or anything like that. Free accounts have a 500 MB limit. Paid accounts are $5/month for 5 GB. One other downside with this: they don’t support any easy way to import mail from another account. (And since they don’t have IMAP, you can’t use an IMAP-based migration approach either.)

I host this blog at 1&1, and I have access to 1&1’s mail services as part of my hosting account. Occasionally, I think about switching from Gmail and just using my 1&1 account for mail. There would be a couple of advantages there. First, I’m already paying for it, and second, I can easily use one of my own domains, which are all hosted with 1&1. The included mail service gives me an IMAP account with 2 GB of storage. They have a web interface, which is OK but nowhere near as good as Gmail’s (or ProtonMail’s or FastMail’s, from what I’ve seen of them). And they have an iOS app, though I don’t think I would ever use it. The 2 GB limit is a little low; you can up that to 50 GB by signing up for a “business” account at $7/month. They also have Exchange 2013 hosting for $10/month, including a 25 GB mailbox, which is kind of interesting.

Of those three options, FastMail is the only really good one for me, I think. The 1&1 basic mail account has that 2 GB limit, and bumping it up costs a bit too much. And their web interface isn’t great. The ProtonMail service is pretty cool, but without IMAP support, there are too many things I just wouldn’t be able to do.

Well, I guess I still haven’t talked myself into switching away from Gmail. At this point, the one thing that might push me into doing it would be if OtherInbox Organizer becomes a problem. Then, I might be able to talk myself into switching providers, as part of an effort to switch to SaneBox or some other system for organizing my mail.

 

Organizing Email (and related privacy issues)

I’ve been using OtherInbox Organizer to keep my Gmail inbox clean since 2011. it’s a service that scans your Gmail inbox and moves commercial email into various folders under a main “OIB” folder, for example “OIB/Shopping” or “OIB/Finance”. It’s a good service and it’s free. I’ve had some concerns with it over the years, partly because of it being free. Obviously, they’re doing something with the data from their users to make money. I don’t necessarily mind that, if they’re just using aggregate data and not telling people which brand of underwear I’m buying or which books I’m reading or anything like that.

I hadn’t given them much thought recently, but, yesterday, some stuff changed, so I did some digging. Part of their service is a daily review email that summarizes all the emails they’ve organized in the past 24 hours. That email has looked the same since I first signed up for an account, but the design on it changed yesterday, along with a couple of other minor things. And, previously, they’ve always applied two labels to each email: the main “OIB” label and the more specific folder label, like “OIB/Shopping”. Now, they’re only applying the specific label and not the general “OIB” one. (Gmail, of course, doesn’t really have folders, just labels, which can be nested to look like folders.) So I was wondering if they’d been acquired recently or if the service had been sold from one company to another.

Surprisingly, I didn’t find much information via Google. I did discover that they’d been acquired by Return Path, but that happened back in 2012. I might have read about that previously, but I don’t remember it. Up until yesterday, Return Path wasn’t mentioned in the summary email, but that changed with the redesign; the copyright notice at the bottom of the email now says Return Path instead of OtherInbox. Nothing about the changes has shown up on either the OtherInbox or Return Path Twitter feeds. And I couldn’t find any recent reviews or news about the service, other than seeing it included in some typical clickbait “top five ways to organize your email” articles, but none of those were that recent either.

Reviewing Return Path’s privacy policy, it sounds like they’re only sharing aggregate and/or anonymized data with their (business) customers, not personally identifiable data, so that’s good. If I was worried about that, I’d probably switch to SaneBox. Their service costs money, so their users are actually their customers; they’re not selling the data at all. But they charge $7 per month for their service, for their low-end accounts. (It goes up to $36 per month for their high-end accounts.)

Or, I could just use Gmail tabs. They were introduced in 2013, after I started using OtherInbox, so I’ve never really tried them. I think I did notice at one point that they only work with the regular Gmail client and don’t affect the view of the inbox through a third-party client like the mail client on iOS. (And I really want to have a clean inbox on iOS, so that could be an issue for me.)

Of course, if I’m worried about privacy, and being the product rather than the customer, I could probably switch from Gmail to a paid email provider also. I’ve considered switching to FastMail in the past. Their standard account is $5 per month, which is pretty reasonable. Combining FastMail and SaneBox would give me an email account with great organizing tools and no obvious privacy issues. (I’m pretty sure SaneBox would work with FastMail.)

For now, though, I’m going to stick with Gmail and OtherInbox Organizer, and just keep an eye on the Organizer product and see if anything weird is going on with it. The recent changes may just be the result of some long overdue maintenance work. Or they could be related to some further changes that could compromise privacy and/or make the service less useful.

Pocket acquired by Mozilla

Well, this is interesting. Mozilla has acquired Pocket. I blogged recently about Instapaper, and their acquisition by Pinterest. Now, their one big competitor has been acquired too. That’s a little disappointing, but maybe not unexpected. Though I wouldn’t have guessed that Mozilla would be the one to buy them out.

I’m still using Instapaper. They’ve restored all the data that was lost in their big crash a few weeks ago, and their site has been working fine for me ever since. So I’m hoping that they’re doing OK.

Amazon Affiliate Links

Amazon has recently made some changes to their affiliate program that are going to have a negative impact on some bloggers. Here are a couple of articles about the change, from The Verge and The Digital Reader.

I’ve been using Amazon affiliate links here on my blog for a long time. And I’ve never earned a penny from them. And that’s fine. I used to use SiteStripe to generate fancy image links, but I’ve had problems with those since I switched from Blogger to WordPress. So lately I’ve just been using SiteStripe’s short URL links. For me, it’s really just a way to get a short URL that might (but probably won’t) make me a buck or two at some point. But there are some sites that have based their “business model” on Amazon affiliate links, and they’re going to be in a bit of trouble. The Wirecutter and The Sweethome used to be in that category, but since they’ve been acquired by the NY Times, maybe they don’t have to rely so much on Amazon.

Either way, relying on something as fragile as affiliate links for anything other than a little extra coffee money has always seemed a bit daft to me. On the other hand, online advertising is a mess too, with so many people using ad blockers, and getting people to pay for content doesn’t usually work out too well either. I’m glad I have a good day job!

Harvesting Government History

Here’s an interesting article about a group of librarians archiving pages from federal websites, prior to the start of the new administration:

The ritual has taken on greater urgency this year, Mr. Phillips said, out of concern that certain pages may be more vulnerable than usual because they contain scientific data for which Mr. Trump and some of his allies have expressed hostility or contempt.

Source: Harvesting Government History, One Web Page at a Time

I would have assumed that something like this would just be done as a matter of course by archive.org, but I guess it is a big enough job that it needs some human guidance and curation, beyond just pointing a web crawler at *.gov and calling it a day. The Times article doesn’t mention archive.org, but they are involved:

…the Internet Archive, along with partners from the Library of Congress, University of North Texas, George Washington University, Stanford University, California Digital Library, and other public and private libraries, are hard at work on the End of Term Web Archive, a wide-ranging effort to preserve the entirety of the federal government web presence, especially the .gov and .mil domains, along with federal websites on other domains and official government social media accounts.

As a cynic, I want to say that this is largely pointless, but I guess I do still have some hope for the future, since I’m actually kind of enthusiastic about this. It seems like the kind of thing my brother Patrick (who was a librarian) would have been interested in. (Though he, too, was a bit of a cynic at times.)

Cable TV shenanigans

About a month ago, I blogged about how my cable TV provider was discontinuing my old plan and moving me to a new one. That’s happened, so I now have BBC America, Disney XD, and a few other channels that I’ll probably never watch. For the first year of the new plan, it should have been slightly cheaper than my old plan, so I was OK with that.

For a while now, Cablevision has been tacking on a “surcharge” of $6 per month for “sports and broadcast TV.” This is basically just a way for them to raise prices without saying that they’re raising prices. Well, this month, they announced that they’re splitting the surcharge into two separate surcharges, a $5 sports surcharge, and a $4 broadcast TV surcharge. As silly as the original surcharge was, splitting it into two separate charges is even sillier. And, while it’s not a huge price increase, it does wipe out the price difference between my old plan and the new plan, so I’m now paying about $1 more per month than I was previously.

Ever since Altice bought Cablevision, I’ve been wondering what kind of changes they’d make. It looks like they’re taking the path of eliminating legacy plans and bumping up prices a bit, while taking some steps to avoid losing customers (like the promotional pricing they gave me for the first year). So, I’d say they’re still better than most of the other cable companies out there, but that’s not saying much. Cable TV prices keep rising at a rate higher than inflation, and I don’t think that situation is going to get any better, as the industry continues to consolidate into a few very large companies.

This is all pushing me even further towards cord-cutting, though I’ve decided that I won’t do that until at least a year from now, when my second year of TiVo service is up, and my promotional pricing from the cable company expires. The NY Times recently published an interesting guide to cord-cutting, with advice based on your viewing habits.

On the cable TV side of things, I think that cord-cutting will, at some point, exert enough pressure to keep prices in check. Even without that pressure, TV service isn’t a necessity, so there’s that. I’m worried about the internet service side of this thing though. High-speed internet service is becoming more of a necessity, especially for people like me. The tendency for prices to go up while service quality goes down, when one company has a monopoly in a given area, is well-documented. For now, I’m quite grateful that I live in an area where Cablevision/Altice has to compete with Verizon, so there’s at least some incentive for both companies to provide good service at a not-too-ridiculous price.

Instapaper Premium is now free

It was announced yesterday that Instapaper Premium is now free. I’d been paying the old rate of $12/year for it, so it’s no big deal for me. I’m not sure what the current rate was, but I don’t think it was that expensive.

When Pinterest bought Instapaper a few months ago, I wondered what they’d choose to do with it. Discontinuing their only source of direct revenue from the product is an interesting decision. I thought that maybe part of this would be eliminating the ad-free option, but their blog post makes it clear that they’ll now be ad-free for everyone.

My first thought when I read an announcement like this is the old saying “if you’re not paying for the product, you’re the product.” That does seem to be at least partially the case here, as someone from Instapaper pointed out in this Hacker News thread:

Pinterest receives value from the ongoing operation of Instapaper in the form of continued parsing improvements and aggregate information about links on the web, and that value is enough to justify our relatively small operating costs.

So, basically, it sounds like Pinterest uses the Instapaper parsing engine for other stuff, and gets value out of the aggregate data produced from Instapaper’s continued operation. So making the premium product free gets more people to use the service, giving them more data to work with. I guess that’s a win/win, if it’s entirely true, since it lets me keep using a valuable service, for free. And it doesn’t sound like they’re selling customer information to anyone else, or doing anything shady with it.

Despite all the usual snarkiness in that Hacker News thread, I think Instapaper is still a great product, and I hope it sticks around and continues to improve. Thinking about the costs associated with something like Instapaper, I can see how it could be sustainable with a fairly low budget. They only really need to store simple text and metadata, not images or video, so their storage costs can’t be that bad. And, for ongoing development, I think they probably just need to keep tweaking their parser to keep up with the web as it evolves. The basic products (web site and mobile apps) aren’t flashy and probably don’t need much ongoing work.

Oh, Yahoo

After the recent disclosure by Yahoo that hackers stole a bunch of data from them in 2014, I of course changed my Yahoo password. I could see in my 1Password file that I had last changed my password in 2014, probably after this reported incident in January 2014.

I used to use my Yahoo Mail account as my main email, back in the days before Gmail. Lately, I just use it when I have to give an email address to somebody I don’t really want to get email from. So, now, it’s a dumping ground for email from various retail store reward cards and stuff like that, and I check it only very occasionally. I should probably close it out entirely, but I do still need a Yahoo account for Flickr. I don’t use Flickr as much as I used to, but I still like it as a place to keep my photos.

This time, I also went in to Yahoo and cleared all of my security questions too. (Yahoo actually encourages you to do this, and switch to using two-factor authentication for password resets, instead of relying on security questions.) I’m more worried about hackers having the answers to those questions, than I am about them having my old password. Back when I first set up my Yahoo account, it was fairly common to answer security questions with, well, accurate responses. So the question about my first pet actually has the name of my first pet. Doing a full-text search in 1Password, I see that I used that “first pet” question on a number of other accounts too, and gave a correct answer in those cases also. And, checking on those accounts, I see that changing the answers to your security questions isn’t even possible with some accounts. (I guess they just figure that the name of your first pet is never going to change, so why let you change it? That probably made sense at the time.)

So, in some cases, I guess I’m stuck with a little security issue, if somebody in possession of that Yahoo data ever decides to try a password reset on an account where I used the same security questions. On nearly all of the important accounts I have, I’ve set up two-factor authentication, so hopefully that would kick in and prevent someone else from taking over the account.

Meanwhile, for accounts that still use security questions, I always make sure I answer them with random words that don’t relate to the actual questions and that are unique across all accounts. I know people who answer them with random GUIDs, but that might be a hassle if you ever have to recite them over the phone.

paying my bills. (or not.)

I’ve moved almost entirely to paying my monthly bills online, and receiving the bills online. I’ve been doing it slowly and carefully though. I only just recently gave my electric company the OK to send my bill electronically. I just went online to download the first one, though, and I got a message saying “Error: Injection found.” Well, that’s not very reassuring! I assume the “injection” they’re referring to is SQL injection. If I try to log in via their home page, it says they’re “making some upgrades.” I hope that’s true and it’s not that they’re madly scrambling away trying to clean up after a successful SQL injection attack. Either way, if I’d just kept receiving my bills on paper, I’d have paid that one by now, instead of having to defer it until tomorrow or Monday.

Instapaper

I’m a long-time user of Instapaper, going back to when the original creator, Marco Arment, still owned it. He sold it to a company called Betaworks a few years ago. They’ve done a good job of keeping it going without screwing up the base functionality. They’re now selling it to Pinterest though, which seemed kind of weird, but makes sense when you think about it. Pinterest is all about saving images from the internet, and Instapaper is all about saving text from the internet, so I guess the two products complement each other.

I’m hoping Pinterest continues maintaining the product without ruining it (or shutting it down). I know some people are already jumping ship, but I don’t see any reason to do that just yet. (Now if Yahoo had bought them, I’d be looking for alternatives right now…)

If they do shut down or screw up the product, I’ll probably either move to Pocket or maybe try to use Evernote for this.