On 13/6/2016 19:14, Brandon Long via mailop wrote:
I would argue something differently: many email users (and postal
mail, for that matter), have an expectation that email is mostly but
not 100% reliable, due to spam false positives or just the lack of
delivery notification.
People can then choose to not respond to a message and later claim
they never got it, and folks are not surprised.
I'm not saying that as mail operators we should encourage this, but we
should understand user expectations.
Ie, if we decided suddenly to turn on delivery notification
requesting/responding for all Gmail users, that would be a huge change
to user's expectations, and probably wouldn't go over very well. It's
easy to see why turning on read notifications would be problemmatic,
but I think most users would be equally surprised by delivery
notifications. And this is quite different from several other
messaging systems that people routinely use where delivery and read
notifications are standard, along with typing and prescence notifications.
Brandon
I see your point about user expectations varying. Of course, users want
to have all mail accounted for but also simultaneously want to be
protected from spam and not to be "annoyed" by having to do
administrative work. I still believe we have a choice that does not
involve just giving up.
However, I'm not in agreement that users actually expect internet mail
to be occasionally lost. I have serviced thousands of users and none of
them told me they expect mail to dissappear. Maybe you have actual
metrics that I don't and the trend changes at scale? I think the
parallels between actual IRL post and internet mail have a limit, and
this is part of it.
As for delivery notifications, sure, I would not see a point in forcing
them on people. I was not suggesting we force delivery notifications on
everyone, I was referring to not swallowing up mails without a bounce of
some sort. Even time-delayed. Or even a compromise solution, like having
a special folder for those mails, putting then into Junk, Deleted, etc.
I believe we've actually made a choice as an internet society to get to
this point, bastardising what mail is.
I guess some would call it progress, but I don't.
--GM
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