New email service OnMail

[TenFour]

Frome the makers of the Edison email app. https://www.onmail.com/

[jeffpan]

Originally Posted by TenFour

Frome the makers of the Edison email app. https://www.onmail.com/

Mail service or mail App? Thanks

[TenFour]

Mail service. Read more about it here: https://medium.com/changing-communic...e-5ad72328d4c4

[TenFour]

Interesting idea to have the ability to make it so that you can choose who you want to receive email from, but I wonder how it will work for the first email received? In other words, you sign up for some service and they always want to send you an email to confirm, but you don't usually know the exact address it will be coming from. Plus, I have found that companies I want to hear from change their email addresses all the time, making it extremely inconvenient to only accept a particular address from the company. Sometimes emails come from different addresses in the same thread. I guess we will find out eventually how this is supposed to work.

[janusz]

Pure speculation: it's conceivable you allow emails from all subdomains for your potential correspondent. For example, you buy something from example.com and you designate example.com as an allowed sender. Then messages from sales.example.com, support.example.com, news.example.com would be accepted.

Wait and see, and speculate in the meantime

[Tsunami]

Interesting concept for sure. Instead of marking the email addresses you don't want to receive from and block them, you mark those addresses that are allowed to email you.

I think this would be perfect for someone who needs an account just to communicate with close friends, family etc in all privacy ; only people (s)he knows the email address from.
Of course you'd need an additional mailbox for receiving mails of people whose email address is unknown to you (for example to sign up for a forum or mailinglist, or if someone promises you "one of my colleagues will email you" etc).

But for private communication with friends and family only, people you know the email address from, it looks very interesting.

Adding an entire domain as OK to accept emails from can be tricky, you can maybe do that with the domainname of your employer or your local sports club you're member of, but the moment someone would --without thinking-- whitelist all gmail.com addresses or hotmail.com addresses, the concept loses its power.

In other words: excellent for some purposes, but a secondary email account is needed for those mails not being amongst those purposes.

[TenFour]

One issue I see right away is that people I regularly correspond with use multiple email addresses, and they change email addresses often. Even close friends. I'm one of the worst offenders since I have so many email addresses. Another problem might be newsletters you want to receive but only come out once in awhile--it would be easy to forget to somehow whitelist those. I have some that only come once a month or less.

[TenFour]

Launched: https://9to5mac.com/2020/08/31/eidso...-mail-service/

[jeffpan]

Originally Posted by TenFour

Launched: https://9to5mac.com/2020/08/31/eidso...-mail-service/

Can you send me a free @onmail.com invitation?
Thanks.

[ankupan]

This is a new era, where blocking option is more highlighted.

in same way, hey.com was introduced.

Wait for a few days, Google and Microsoft will come with the same feature.

[TenFour]

Can you send me a free @onmail.com invitation?
Thanks.

Not sure who that question is directed at, but I have nothing to do with Onmail. Do you need an invitation to sign up?

[janusz]

Originally Posted by TenFour

Do you need an invitation to sign up?

There is nothing about invitations on the signup page.

[Fenman]

What happened to me was that I had to sign up first. Then they offered a free and a range of paid accounts. The free one required an invitation. Not quite what I expected from their blurb.

[ioneja]

Agreed with ankupan -- and the similarities will continue to grow with services like HEY.COM, and it's just a matter of time that some of these features will make it into the large providers too. OnMail, HEY.COM, Superhuman, etc., all have lots of good (and similar) ideas, so it's exciting to see email evolve like this IMO, but other providers are already picking up on these ideas. Even veterans like Fastmail seem to be noticing -- https://fastmail.blog/2020/07/24/email-workflow/

I do think it's the beginning of a new era.

For me, OnMail already raised a big personal red flag though -- YMMV, but I did not like the privacy policy. HEY.COM and Fastmail have far better policies and approaches IMO. In particular are OnMail's/Edison's policies regarding email analysis and usage for their Edison Trends product. And while you can theoretically opt out of Edison Trends, the policy did not give me much comfort about how much collection and analysis has actually been going on at Edison, and how strong those boundaries really are between products. Sounds like Google-lite to me.

Reading through https://www.edison.tech/privacy did not inspire the same level of trust I get from Fastmail's or HEY's policies.

You won't see anything like this in Fastmail's or HEY's policies (I've highlighted some things in bold):

"Edison accesses and processes email messages in any email accounts you have connected and data collected from other internet accounts you connect. By linking our Services to your email or other internet accounts, you authorize us to collect, process, and retain information, including personal information, from those accounts. We use this information to provide our Services to you and, as permitted, use Commercial Data, which is non-personal data such as seller, product and price extracted from information we collect, to help us and our Edison Trends’ subscribers aggregate and understand commerce trends."

Commercial Messages. Commercial Messages are emails you receive or you auto-forward from businesses about subscriptions, sign-ups/cancellations, any account requests and confirmations, purchases, travel, reservations, event tickets, boarding passes, promotions, bills and package shipments, and similar transactions. We access, store and use Commercial Messages to provide our Services. As permitted, we extract information, Commercial Data, from Commercial Messages to provide our Services to you and to develop Edison Trends.

At least you can "opt out of having your Commercial Data used in Trends at any time and continue to use the Edison Services with no degradation to your experience." They also say, "You can always decline to share your information for Edison Trends from the ‘Manage Privacy’ page in the Email app settings or OnMail settings. If you do so, we will not share your Commercial Data with any third parties."

Does this mean that it's on by default? If so, that's troubling. And, it looks like they also can connect your email with your social media accounts.

To assuage those who might be concerned about all this, they explain how this data collection is different than selling personal information here:

"Edison sells Commercial Data that is deidentified information to its Edison Trends subscribers. This is not the same as selling personal information and it is important that you understand the difference.

Thanks but no thanks. I just read up on Edison Trends, and I don't want my data going through their system, abstracted/deidentified or not. Even if I opt out, assuming my data actually is truly opted out and is never run through their extra AI-based algorithms (and they don't actually say that in their policies), it's not going to work for me. If I am the product... even just a little in "deidentified" form, I'm not interested.

There is plenty more in there of concern to anyone who cares about privacy. However, I'll admit it is at least better than Google. It's Google-lite. So if someone is already happy with GMail, then this will be a step up in terms of privacy policies. But again, Fastmail and HEY.COM are far better in terms of their policies IMO.

[truemagic]

I would like an invite too. Can anyone spare me one? Much appreciated