Visualizing Yahoo Mail | Hacker News Reader

Visualizing Yahoo Mail

visualize.yahoo.com

94 pointspykello38 comments

Gah, automatically playing sounds is not okay. It's not Flash-based either, since I use the "click to enable" feature in Chrome.

I'm fine with it in this context, it's far superior to the way it's usually deployed. I think that sound control should be client side anyway, but this is pretty un-disruptive compared to things like news sites etc. that start streaming immediately.

Admittedly I was amused by the spam sound effect.

yes. At the time, I was listening to music, so I used to think that sounds were part of the music. Then I realized that from the website

Am I the only one who finds those "trending keywords" creepy? Email isn't public like Twitter, after all.

A single word, spread across several hundred million accounts is "creepy"? I think yes, you may be the only one.

Creepy? No. A clear violation of expected privacy? Yes.

This is tricky. I was shocked when I saw it, but this is really just a visualization of the terms they're looking at for spam detection.

I'm surprised they added this feature to the data-viz to be honest. People don't like being reminded that our emails are parsed, even if just for spam filtering.

It's amazing as to how ubiquitous email has gotten in the recent years in spite of being a relatively older technology. It was only a few years ago that you needed to afford the luxury of a blackberry to email on the go.

And now we have very affordable phones zapping out emails over reliable cellular data connections, hundreds of small apps and companies curating and shooting out content-rich emails that can be viewed in your palm, and browser based email clients on desktops evolving to have features comparable to installable thick clients. I wonder what else is in store for the trusty email.

It's not just relatively older, e-mail is one of the oldest technologies on the net (we're talking 1960s technology here!)

Frankly, I wish it would die already as it's pretty much held together with ducttape:

* it's all transmitted via ASCII; so any binary attachments have to be base64 encoded that increases their file sizes by ~30%;

* transport encryption still isn't the norm (this is the 21st century, why the hell are we still sending stuff in clear text!?),

* there's no standard error responses meaning it's often guess work whether mail has been received or not

* there's no standard way of rendering HTML mail, so anyone sending mailshots has to revert back to a 1990's web developer mindset (ie assuming that everything doesn't render so resorting to HTML tables and hours of frustration).

* it's not real time / real time daemons are not standardised. (I'm not saying we need something like instant messengers, but it seems silly that we have a small handful of proprietary push systems (eg Exchange) and the rest of us normal users have to instead rely upon re-syncs every 5 minutes (which means a fresh set of handshakes as well). A persistent connection would make much more sense for a 21st century e-mail network.

There's been so many attempts to "fix" e-mail, but most have either missed the point (eg Google Wave) or just added yet more ducttape to the existing problem (eg pretty GUIs that change the way we interact with e-mail clients but without actually touching the core technology itself).

I might actually write my own mail server and client one day because it's becoming obvious that most people are happy with "good enough"

I would add postage to the protocol, as well. Spam consumes so much resources because it's basically free -- adding required computational complexity to send a mail (or, even better, an escrow based real money postage system) would go a long way towards cutting the legs out from under the spammers.

Network effects mean that all this is idle speculation, however.

I don't think it would make that much difference to spam as most of it is sent from hijacked machines anyway and the legitimate stuff is heavily regulated so must have features like "unsubscribe".

There definitely does need to be a better way of managing it though. But I'm yet to find a better way to manage spam (every method I do consider would either be ineffective or open to abuse to blacklist legitimate senders). But I guess that's the $million question.

It looks like they are trying to level-up to Gmail's reputation.

The thing is that at the moment @yahoo.com is the best source of anonymous disposable email addresses. I'm sure they realize that and I suspect they will be taking steps to "rectify" this situation by trying to tie an address to an identity. It'd be interesting to see how that unfolds. Shouldn't be long now.

Ironically they used to be. I've not used Yahoo mail in 10 or 15 years, but back in the late 90s your Yahoo mail ID was the same identity for all of Yahoo's services.

In fact quite a number of search engines modeled themselves in this (search, mail, online chat, etc - all using the same single sign on). Then Google came along and reminded those search engines that many users just want a plain and responsive search engine. And those portals closed. Lycos shut down their free hosting, Yahoo closed their chat sites, and so no. And now we have Google integrating chat, mail, and all manor of other things into their search engine. It's funny how trends come full circle.

Funny

Yahoo Mail has been really slow these past weeks. Like in "worse it has ever been"

So much I'm considering alternatives (and yes, I use gmail, yahoo is for 'second nature' emails, I use a 3 tiered approach, gmail for the serious/can't miss stuff, yahoo for important but may be subject to annoyances and another one for a throwaway email for non-important stuff signup)

At the time of this posting, it seems the whole of Australia is not getting any Yahoo! Mail delivered. ;)

Neither is Africa or South America.

Well the eastern states are (Sydney/Melbourne), Western Australia hasn't pinged once it seems..

Neither Singapore.

This visualization challenges the claim that Yahoo! mail has a very strong user base in Asia. The volume of email delivered in Asia, Australia, South America and Africa looks negligible compared to the volume delivered in the USA. Email volume is an indirect indicator of users, but it is a good indicator of "usage" - spam or otherwise. It's not a stretch that there wouldn't be usage without users, ergo "indirect".

If I were a number of the Yahoo! mail BizDev or Accounts teams, I would ramp up my marketing efforts in the areas that are sans bubbles on this visualization. This is a great tool for marketing and marketers (of the service) alike. Kudos to Yahoo! for making it without Flash.

I find it interesting that the only "live data" that it appears to be grabbing (at least in my case) is an occasional "YouAreHere1.mp3" and "YouAreHere1.1.mp3". Instead, in the console I get "Port error: Could not establish connection. Receiving end does not exist."

I really like how all the trending keywords are words you'd typically see in spam mail.

Worldwide subject line keywords are interesting. So many of them are commerce related.

‘Commerce related’? That’s a very nice way of putting it. I’d say it’s all spam.

From the pile of keywords Yahoo considers ‘good’: free, rates, coupon, vacation, deals, save, today, lingerie, wants, shipping, alert, extra, daily, favorite, sale.

Sounds about right for me. Quite a few of those words occur a lot in subjects I get from legitimate mailing lists relatively regularly, while "non-commercial" e-mails that I receive from individuals tends to vary a lot more and would be unlikely to make the list.

Before I send out an email campaign with MailChimp, it lets me test whether my emails will be caught by spam filters of the various major ISPs. If I were to include any of the earlier listed keywords in the subject line, I can be sure that those emails wouldn't arrive in all of my recipients' mailboxes. That's why I refrain from using those, even though I only send out commercial emails that cusatomers have signed up for themselves.

Wonder how many are spams. No. of emails means little if most of them are spammy.

Press the "Reveal blocked spam" button at the bottom.

in my experience, Yahoo is terrible at catching spam. Maybe half of it is caught, with some legitimate email marked as spam too.

It's interesting how different peoples experiences of that are. I have an "ancient" Yahoo Mail address that I don't use much but that receive a massive amount of Spam, and pretty much nothing gets through.

Yahoo keeps 80% of all emails from being sent, because they suspect it’s spam. That doesn’t mean the remaining 20% isn’t spam.

I do not believe Yahoo Mail's assertion here. I have a Y! Mail account (which I do check once a week) and almost 80% of mails are spam. So they are not doing a good job at it (vs. GMail which is the other email provider I use) and thus their metrics here look skewed to me.

80% is Yahoo's assertion

Being snarky on purpose but is this visualizing the spam, or phishing emails Yahoo sends on behalf of people without them knowing about it?

At the bottom you can toggle visualizing spam on/off. As of writing this, it's about ~70k legit e-mails per second but ~330k spam e-mails per second.

This might be a stupid question, but why subject line keyword data from UK, Germany, France, Italy & Spain has been excluded?

Just a guess, but privacy laws related to e-mails may be stricter in those countries.

Created 2011

Spam email is out of control.

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