Mail Joe Kissell macvoices

https://youtu.be/05od01TvM6Y What does he (jk) mean at 47.45 ? Mail app end of the year 2019.

Heā€™s saying he will have an alternative to Apple Mail later this year. Kissell usually doesnā€™t have good insider info about Apple products, so maybe itā€™s something else new or upgraded that heā€™s writing a book about.

(FWIW, Kissellā€™s books are excellent, in my opinion ā€“ worth collecting.)

He could be referring to recent rumors that a well-respected Mac/iOS developer (I donā€™t want to say more, sorry) is working on a mail app but who knows. If itā€™s that I will be as dubious as I am about any v1.0 product.

The problem is that enough people donā€™t want to pay for mail apps when web views are free and there are already many competing apps out there - some better than others, some with problematic privacy issues. For example, apps like Edison and Spark both scrape your info and resell the metadata. Edison even has this scary commerce page in which they crow about being able scrape emails to offer travel booking behaviour, info on items sold by companies and their final prices, what groceries, stores, brands are involved, and ā€œresearch with deep geographic resolution and compete at a granular levelā€

Apple doesnā€™t do any of that (although if youā€™re using another email provider, like Gmail, Google has that info already).

And if using Spark (Readdle) facebook has the info too.

Joe Kissell is a fan of busycal. BusyMail? He obviously isnā€™t lured in the ipadall pathā€¦

Iā€™m treading water right now with Apple Mail, web views, and Yahooā€™s surprisingly decent iOS mail app (I use it only for my Yahoo accounts, not my other ones).

Iā€™ll wait to see what comes down the pike later this year thatā€™s gotten Joe excited, but if Iā€™m not impressed - or I just want to give it time to shake out the bugs - I might just swallow hard at the $50 price and pick up MailMate; while the app is not much to look at its filtering and smart mailbox features are powerful, and itā€™s generally considered a bombproof app on the Mac.

Havenā€™t searched but do you all have a link to the scrape and sale.

ā€œFor example, apps like Edison and Spark both scrape your info and resell the metadata.ā€

Three days ago I posted a link to Edisonā€™s own commerce page showing the data theyā€™re selling from their scraping.

According to Sparkā€™s privacy policy they stated several things that gave me me pause when I looked at them a couple of years back. They:

ā€¢ send statistical data to several services known for bad privacy policies (Google, Facebook) to which thereā€™s no way to opt out. (ā€œWe use third party services, such as Google Analytics, Facebook Analytics and Amplitude, to collect and analyze how you use Spark.ā€)
ā€¢ automatically create an account with the first address entered, and subscribes you to their newsletter. (ā€œThe first email you add to Spark is used as your username. We might use that email address to reach out to you periodicallyā€)
ā€¢ store credentials for your email accounts on their servers.
ā€¢ store your emails on their servers to push them to your devices. (ā€œWe then use the authorization provided to download your emails to our virtual servers and push to your device.ā€)

Iā€™m a little unclear on how everything works now. In a 2015 blog post entitled ā€œHow we handle your account information in Sparkā€ they wrote, ā€œSome people raised a question about why do we store access tokens even if you have decided not to use Push Notifications. Itā€™s a valid question and, in the next update of Spark, we will change this behaviour.ā€ Does it currently still storing the tokens even if you donā€™t use Push notifications - I donā€™t know. But as far as I know they do continue to scrape data to pay for the app development and server-side infrastructure of the free app.

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The macvoices host wasnā€™t really exited

Kisselā€™s comment actually slipped by Chuck, as he noted on Twitter soon after that podcast/video was posted. He said something like Kissell often says things to him that go over his head.

Over a year ago, in yet another MacVoices interview Kissell referred to a guy he ā€˜knowsā€™ whoā€™s been working on an email client solution that excited him. But even then he said the app was behind schedule.

Iā€™ve heard positive reports about the Superhuman email service, which has been in development for a couple of years and is still in closed beta. I have no idea what the features are or what the privacy situation is.

In the mean time, Iā€™m still considering MailMate. Just came across this blog post which has me considering trying it soon.

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ā€˜go over his headā€™ you mean heā€™s criptic? #jk