https://youtu.be/05od01TvM6Y What does he (jk) mean at 47.45 ? Mail app end of the year 2019.
He’s saying he will have an alternative to Apple Mail later this year. Kissell usually doesn’t have good insider info about Apple products, so maybe it’s something else new or upgraded that he’s writing a book about.
(FWIW, Kissell’s books are excellent, in my opinion – worth collecting.)
He could be referring to recent rumors that a well-respected Mac/iOS developer (I don’t want to say more, sorry) is working on a mail app but who knows. If it’s that I will be as dubious as I am about any v1.0 product.
The problem is that enough people don’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 “research with deep geographic resolution and compete at a granular level”
Apple doesn’t do any of that (although if you’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 isn’t lured in the ipadall path…
I’m treading water right now with Apple Mail, web views, and Yahoo’s surprisingly decent iOS mail app (I use it only for my Yahoo accounts, not my other ones).
I’ll wait to see what comes down the pike later this year that’s gotten Joe excited, but if I’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 it’s generally considered a bombproof app on the Mac.
Haven’t searched but do you all have a link to the scrape and sale.
“For example, apps like Edison and Spark both scrape your info and resell the metadata.”
Three days ago I posted a link to Edison’s own commerce page showing the data they’re selling from their scraping.
According to Spark’s privacy policy they stated several things that gave me me pause when I looked at them a couple of years back. They:
• send statistical data to several services known for bad privacy policies (Google, Facebook) to which there’s no way to opt out. (“We use third party services, such as Google Analytics, Facebook Analytics and Amplitude, to collect and analyze how you use Spark.”)
• automatically create an account with the first address entered, and subscribes you to their newsletter. (“The first email you add to Spark is used as your username. We might use that email address to reach out to you periodically”)
• store credentials for your email accounts on their servers.
• store your emails on their servers to push them to your devices. (“We then use the authorization provided to download your emails to our virtual servers and push to your device.”)
I’m a little unclear on how everything works now. In a 2015 blog post entitled “How we handle your account information in Spark” they wrote, “Some people raised a question about why do we store access tokens even if you have decided not to use Push Notifications. It’s a valid question and, in the next update of Spark, we will change this behaviour.” Does it currently still storing the tokens even if you don’t use Push notifications - I don’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 wasn’t really exited
Kissel’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 ‘knows’ who’s been working on an email client solution that excited him. But even then he said the app was behind schedule.
I’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, I’m still considering MailMate. Just came across this blog post which has me considering trying it soon.
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‘go over his head’ you mean he’s criptic? #jk