I'm on the exact opposite end of the spectrum. I haven't used email outside of work for many years now, and don't miss it one bit. And even at work most communication now happens on Slack. The digital world has evolved since 1997, and email simply hasn't kept up.
I skimmed a couple articles on the blog and my biggest problem with it is that the author is making a social rather than technological argument (which are all anyways nonsensical).
"Liked a movie? Don't call or IM your friend about it, email them a long form review instead."
"Leave all your group texts and instead send your friends a weekly email summary of your life."
I'll give you an up-vote because I think a variety of different viewpoints is important, but I'm very much in the e-mail camp. My biggest reason is simply: it's the only ubiquitous, decentralized, open protocol that I can think of. I can run my own server if I want, an I can interact with anybody with an e-mail address. Sure, there was XMPP for IM, but that doesn't have wide adoption; same with other protocols.
If anything, I like email now because these days people in my circles only use it for informational purposes, which means no annoying chain messages, empty inspirational videos, Facebook conspiracies and their ilk.
Also, unlike the unfiltered stream model of chat, you can organize emails into folders, delete useless ones and actually have a decent chance at finding past things via keyword search (because email subject lines). Paradoxically, email also has really good convo threading. In other words, email has high signal to noise ratio.
I agree. My work has both an unofficial slack and official email. Email is for the serious, no nonsense posts. Slack can have a mix, but with the understanding that it is more informal. We do not pay for slack, so this informality is enforced by the message/content being unavailable as we go on.
The last paragraph can be done with a good IM, such as Telegram, as it has not crippled itself to virtue signal E2E, and has functional cloud sync and search. I even forward my emails to it as it’s easier to organize them there.
It's worth considering that there's a place in the world for both a security-first IM system and a features-first IM system. While Telegram does offer optional encryption, I'm not sure I'd trust it if I wanted to hide the content of my communication from a sophisticated adversary.
There might be if everyone in the conversation is sophisticated enough to use them. If you're trying to set up communication with a large number of people who have consumer-level technical knowledge in a country that had a coup two days ago and is now suffering a crackdown at the hands of the new military dictatorship, Signal might be just the ticket.
At this point, I use telegram for essentially everything, not just email either. I found this HN thread through the Hacker News telegram feed[0]. I don't check reddit, or have other RSS feeds anymore, I just subscribe to the equivalent telegram channels. I even use the "to me" telegram channel for searchable notes
Creating these channels is pretty easy, BTW. Just glue rsstail and a Telegram library such as Telethon together. I have a channel where HN posts with a certain score threshold are posted, for example.
Atleast for gmail , google has their own telegram bot (has the blue tick beside it) , just type “gmail bot” in your telegram search bar , it will have a bot with a blue tick beside it
I also use this, but it's not gotten any updates since it was introduced. I would like to rewrite a bot from scratch, but the Gmail bot's initial offering is still good enough that I don't have the motivation.
The worst problem it has is the lack of multi-account support. The reply functionality is also a bit buggy. I generally only use it as a read-only client.
Your points are even more valid when you start to move to different counties. You quickly realise that people in other countries often don’t use the apps you are using, in fact you most likely won’t have heard of the apps they are using.
But “everyone is using X” they will tell you, but you’ll have no way to know for sure. Are you really going to install every piece of software people say to install?
At least with email, it just works and there are minimal security issues, and it’s an open protocol etc etc, even if it’s a bit old fashioned.
In the countries I’ve been, people use all sorts of apps and each person is very shocked when you don’t have “the app” that everyone is using. And of course the fashions change over time, so app X is popular for a few years, then it’s app Y. It’s impossible to keep up with all these trends.
Mostly people are able to email, even if it’s a bit unusual, and perhaps, like you say, mostly a work thing.
When you move to a new country that has a dominant messaging app, you can't avoid installing it without making your life a lot more difficult. And moving already makes your life difficult enough.
Could you give an example of such a "messaging app"? I don't have any "messaging apps"; although I do have a 'phone which supports SMS (I assume it supports email too, although I don't know how comfortable email would be without a physical keyboard).
Do you have examples in mind about how my life might be "a lot more difficult" than if I installed the sorts of software you allude to?
I can't speak to your life, but not having Whatsapp would result in my being left out of some conversations and activities I want to be a part of. Email or SMS could theoretically substitute with reduced functionality in most situations; Matrix could substitute with no loss of functionality. Most of the time the other people in the conversations prioritize their activity/task/goal/socializing over technical or ideological concerns about their communication tools, so getting them to change tools would be an uphill battle.
In short, unless I'm really important to a group, I have to use what they use or get left out. If I'm the most important person in every group I'm in, I'm probably in the wrong groups.
It's not a heck of a claim at all, it's a pretty reasonable one.
I moved from a country that tended to use Facebook messenger and sometimes SMS (though that was fading), to one that primarily uses WhatsApp. While I already had WhatsApp installed from travelling there in the past, I almost never used it outside of travel purposes.
When I moved, everything ended up in WhatsApp. If I met someone and wanted to meet up with them another day, it was WhatsApp. I'd get added to a group because it was someone's birthday, it was WhatsApp. Many apartment buildings have a WhatsApp group to discuss building related things. It was how I told my landlord that something needed fixing. So on, so forth. Lately there are some people I talk to on Telegram, and a couple on Signal, but most of my social (and other things) organisation goes via WhatsApp. I could uninstall it, but then I'd lose a chunk of social contact.
For me, email has become mostly an avenue for notifications from companies or newsletters. The most back-and-forth I've done with it in a long time was when I was buying an apartment, a lot of documentation and organising was done through email.
As for SMS, no one uses that except perhaps one automated reminder about something every few months.
For example, in Spain, people will not communicate in written form with you outside Whatsapp. You can try sending an SMS, they won't answer to not risk being charged.
Your friends will communicate and organize events only on Whatsapp. Your colleagues will have social interactions on Whatsapp, even send you work messages when on the go. Your landlord will communicate via Whatsapp, including sending you utility bills to pay. The person you want to buy second-hand stuff from communicates via Whatsapp. The real estate agent trying to find you a place to live will send proposals by Whatsapp. Many businesses advertise customer support on Whatsapp also, although in that case it's never the only option.
It's not literally impossible to live without it. I know some grandparents without smartphones. But it does make your life a lot more difficult.
I'm not disagreeing with this, especially the social aspects, although I would point out:
> Your colleagues... even send you work messages when on the go.
> Your landlord will communicate via Whatsapp, including sending you utility bills to pay.
> The person you want to buy second-hand stuff from communicates via Whatsapp. The real estate agent trying to find you a place to live will send proposals by Whatsapp.
In each of these examples, the other party has something to gain (a client; a bill payment; offloading some work; etc.), which I'd wager is enough to tolerate the minor inconvenience of sending an SMS/email.
The real question though is how you determine the “dominant app”, that’s really not that obvious, especially when you don’t speak the local language. Long term you might be right, installing an app would be beneficial, but in the short term it’s a lot safer to just use email.
I think in most cases it's fairly obvious. I moved to a country that mainly use Whatsapp, and you can't miss it. People will tell you that they "Whatsapp" you, they ask for your "Whatsapp", your bank advertises customer support on Whatsapp, your local barber has the Whatsapp logo on his door, your colleagues want to add you to their Whatsapp group, your landlord sends the bills on Whatsapp, ads in the metro have the Whatsapp logo…
That sounds awesome. In many of the places I’ve been I couldn’t read any of the signage, it’s often not even obvious where the word boundaries are, it just looks like squiggles to me. And the apps people tell you by word of mouth, I often had never heard of. I just decided to stick with email. Boring, perhaps old fashioned, but safe.
Old-school snail mail and voice telephony are just as open, distributed, and ubiquitous. The delivery channel providers are centralized, but that is just as true of email. Hosting your own server means nothing without an ISP.
That said, I think all three methods of communication feel obsolete and useless to me for the same reason, they're drowned out by marketing chatter. The one nice effect of the recent real estate bubble is I've effectively divorced from even using a phone. I don't even move it from the counter most of the time and don't take it with me when I leave the house. It's like 1995 all over again, but if I have it with me, it's a non-stop cacophony of people claiming to have heard from a friend of a friend that I want to unload a house.
Email is no better. Every single company I have ever conducted even the slighest and smallest transaction with suddenly thinks I want to know everything that ever happens with their products and offers. Regular mail is 99% re-fi offers from obscure mortgage providers I've never heard of.
Massive scale direct marketing is probably the worst thing to ever happen to remote communication between parties actually interested in communicating with each other, as the only practical way to do it now is pseudonymously through closed systems you never use to conduct real business with your real identity, to avoid being hounded by everyone who shares a constant contact account with someone you once gave a dollar to.
Maybe it'll force us to actually interact in person again.
I really want a way to take an old eve online thing of charging people who aren't a contact for the ability to ensure delivery.
If I have a business relationship with someone I'll add them to my contact list. I assume they can do the same. Otherwise gimme see BAT or something for the spam
For a brief moment, there was a service (Earn.com/21.co) that did this. It was a company that had previously made a SoC mining rig for crypto and the pivoted to this thing where people would pay you to open their messages. Eventually it was overrun by spam messages from scammy crypto ICOs and there were conditions on payouts where you had to sign up for an external email list or register for an airdrop. I think they were bought and shut down by Coinbase.
You really can't run your on email server nowadays though, you need to have been running one for several decades otherwise the email common email providers(gmail, outlook) will automatically just assume its spam. Also due to the way extensions added to the email protocol configuring and learning how to properly configure it so it gets accepted will be a dayjob.
This isn’t universally true, although your broader point (it could change at any time!) is a risk.
As a data point, I have run my own email servers for years. Both professionally (couple million transactional emails per year) and for my personal.
If you follow best practices (which is a pain to setup!), deliver ability is generally on par with other providers, unless you got unlucky and got a bad IP.
This is my experience too: there are a couple providers that are more difficult (Verizon, iirc), but I’ve never found a personal email server much of a hassle to maintain.
I run my own email server, and have for many years. More recently, Verizon/Aol/Yahoo have been a pain in the butt for our larger email lists, even though we run a very clean operation. Still, our deliverability is, on the whole, better than through the much more expensive providers, such as Mailchimp.
I've recently given up on running my own email server and changed to postmark. The deliverability has gone up, but most importantly I spend less time managing it.
Postmark would cost us around $10k a year. I spend maybe 10 to 20 hours in a year dealing with the server and deliverability issues. It's not clear to me that Postmark could improve our deliverability much either, as it is already pretty good. How much did it improve for you?
I also just found out about a service called Tailscale (maybe 30 mins ago). It's not a field I have investigated but both your services and theirs sounded vaguely useful for some problems I'm having. Are they somewhat similar? It sounds like I could solve the same problems in perhaps two different ways.
I think they are pretty different, just both using the same underlying protocol.
Tailscale (which we have been using to great effect over the last year or so) provides effectively a 'LAN' where the devices can be anywhere. It provides you with a second interface in the 100.x.x.x range. You can trust that any traffic from that range has been authenticated to connect to your Tailscale network.
Hoppy (as I understand it, I've never used it) is more solving the issue of getting a static IP assigned, with the advantage of it following your device if it moves between networks. You get a second interface that is publicly visible, but can't trust traffic coming in from it.
This is a recurrent FUD dropping. I’ve run my own for about 15 years and it works. Occasional mails get sent to spam by Gmail, but that can happen if you use a big provider, too. Take an hour to set up DKIM, etc., and you should be OK.
I just switched my long running SMTP to a new IP. I've got SPF, DKIM and DMARC all dialed in. I'm not getting tagged as spam. Even when I add new domains to this host for sending - still gets through to G, Y and MS based services.
As SPF, DKIM and DMARC have become more widely implemented, is IP reputation less of a factor than it used to be in spam detection algorithms? This is just my speculation, but it seems plausible.
Why would it be less of a factor? These things don't prevent spam. I can create a proper mail server with all these and send billion messages from it wherever I like. These technologies prevent various kinds of forgeries.
Quick look at my archive, of 37k spams only 7k fails SPF. (I accept all email no matter what.) So it's some signal, but not nearly enough.
I don't know. But a) I'm low volume and no list services and b) I checked my IPs against the BL before setting up the VMs. I still believe the terror-tales of trying to get an IP off them. My own spam filters still use them.
Not true. With some effort, it's possible to set up a pre-made email server script like Mail-in-a-Box or Mailcow and make sure its reputation is clean enough to send and receive email from the big providers like Outlook, Gmail and Yahoo.
It's much easier these days. The ecosystem has gotten more complicated, but the community has put in a lot of effort into automating that complexity away.
The only “common” email provider that has given me problems is Zoho. They’re annoying and do not respond on their mailer daemon email or whatever. I tell people we can’t correspond if they use Zoho and no one has had a problem with that yet.
I want to throw my hat in here because there are plenty of the "works for me" crowd.
I've run a personal mail server for the last 5 or so years and I have SPF, DKIM, DMARC setup correctly, get 10/10 for mail-tester.com and get graded "not spam" for all the other spam tester sites. Spam Assassin loves me and I have a .com mail server.
I can land more or less into personal emails (occasionally I get filtered into spam), but when it comes to corporate emails I pretty much get /dev/nulled each time and can't even land into a spam folder. I can't give out my personal email as a point of contact and have to use my gmail or protonmail instead.
I've all but given up on owning my own email because the protocol has effectively made it impossible to reliably land mail in a mailbox if you don't have a certain amount of outbound mail traffic.
hotmail and icloud are very sensitive and if IP isn't reach a certain reputation(mail volume+age) it's easiser to land on spam even SPF/DKIM/DMARC are passed. But if the recipient interact with sender(mark as non spam, send a reply) then moving forward email send from that won't be flag as spam anymore. So their spam filtering is kind of weak and they used previous interaction as a signal.
gmail, on other hand is rock solid. They have their own false positive obviously but they are rock solid in term of not relying on IP reputation(or less). They are smarte and righfully land your legitimate email on inbox even an email come from a spammy IP.
I've not tried icloud, but for personal email addresses that I have tried (gmail, outlook, hotmail, protonmail) I've not had many problems landing in inboxes. For corporate mailservers I almost always have trouble even getting beyond the mail filtering solution. Microsoft EOP (which seems to be the most ubiquitous) will basically blackhole any mail I send without telling me.
It's fine to want all your communication on an open protocol, but email is just plain clunky and not good at all for the types of online communication people have grown accustomed to. It literally is just an electronic equivalent of sending a letter, and inherits most of the limitations that implies.
If any of us are ever going to convince friends and family to leave proprietary platforms like Messenger and Discord, we are going to need an open protocol that allows for the same features and level of polish. Trying to get everyone to just use email is a complete non-starter.
> It literally is just an electronic equivalent of sending a letter, and inherits most of the limitations that implies
that's not giving email enough credit. Email has zero limitations unlike real snail mail - the email client is the limitation, and that's "just" software.
The fact that gmail client was so successful is evidence that email could've been _the_ premiere platform for open communication. Instead, we now have many separate walled gardens vying for dominance. Imagine how the world would've been if snail mail back in the 20th century needed different stamps for different recipients!
End-to-end encryption, large attachments, managing group messages (aka "reply all" problem), changing message subject, quoted messages when replying, HTML/CSS formatting, sorting/labeling/folders, tracking protections, sending messages over websocket, heck even basic message threading. None of this works consistently across different clients.
That is the problem. The protocol doesn't dictate how prior messages in a thread should be included or referenced. So any given thread is a hodgepodge of different solutions, making for an ugly, unreadable mess. Some clients try to clean this up, but it's basically an impossible task when you have no way of knowing what other clients will do.
Yes we should, but people have been trying for 20 years and it hasn't happened yet. The wheel has been successfully reinvented already.
The biggest reason for it is that in practice email isn't as open and decentralized as people like to think. For most of its history all advancements were controlled by Microsoft, AOL and Yahoo, and today it is controlled by Microsoft and Google.
I don’t understand how your client can solve for someone else sending you top-quoted replies, or word-html-engine compatible HTML designed to work in outlook. Or eighty other people hitting reply all on the email chain you’re on. The clients other people use can behave completely differently, because the protocol leaves so many decisions up to clients.
You're adding things not in the OP list I was responding to so I didn't claim that. But let's try:
Reformatting top-quoted replies. This is possible with email because you can pipe the messages through any preprocessing you want. Inserting custom processing into the delivery pipeline is generally impossible with all proprietary systems, but easy with an open standard like email.
HTML formatting: Again, easy due to customizable preprocessing and/or viewers.
Eighty people responding to a thread: This is threading, handled natively by most good email clients. Gmail makes a mess of it though, so I get why it'd be painful if you use gmail. Don't use gmail.
> because the protocol leaves so many decisions up to clients.
I feel like this is a misunderstanding. The clients have nothing to do with the protocol (SMTP), that's the job of the MTAs (mail transport agents).
The client provides the UI/UX interaction part. It is an immense strength of standards like email that there are tons of clients. You may want a completely different UX with your email than me, so you're free to have it exactly the way you want and so am I. And we can still message each other. This is impossible with proprietary walled gardens.
Client support for the features you’re talking about has everything to do with the protocol. How are you threading if not based on SMTP headers? What SMTP headers are meaningful for threading? What does SMTP have to say on the subject? Nothing - because it only talks about MTA behavior not clients.
Slack threads are the worst possible UI ever, so that's not something to aspire to.
Email threading is trivial, nothing magical about it. Most every decent email client will properly thread conversations. Gmail will not, so yes gmail is super painful for long threads. Use a better client.
Isn't the "reply all" problem a user issue? If people used BCC instead of a bunch of To's, we'd never hear about it. Heck, I would think email clients would prompt if you tried to sent more than a dozen people without BCC.
I agree with everything else and think "managing group messages" has other issues. For example, it's nice that I can duck out of an iMessage group, but can't duck out of a text message group or email chain.
Not understood at the protocol level, not visible as such in the client.
> Your own client or provider can store history. you also don't own someone else's history - a good feature imo.
It's a nightmare in practice. Catching someone up on a conversation ends up being a mess of forwarding multiple overlapping but partially distinct emails and then constantly having to resend messages as different people get dropped in different replies. Exiting such a conversation is even harder.
> A preference for individuals to decide.
The cost is much bigger than the benefit.
> What's a "real" identity? my email address is my identity.
There's no authentication. You can't associate yourself with multiple organisations except by using multiple addresses, and then there's no way to reflect that those are somehow the same.
Sending private information is the first thing I think of--from a bunch of aspects. Secure in transit has had a bunch of different, awkward implementations. My biggest concern is sending tax documents and it sitting in someone's archive folder (or sent folder) for years until their account is compromised.
So I often have organizations that send email pointing to their proprietary webmail. The alternative is sneakernet, hard copies, or even faxing.
Unless you physically hand your taxes in, isn't any solution technically vulnerable to being compromised?
Also, wouldn't encryption fix this problem? I don't understand how it might be implemented in the real world, but if you encrypt with your private key, then their public key the message should be safe in transit, and at rest (unless they leave it decrypted on disk)
> Unless you physically hand your taxes in, isn't any solution technically vulnerable to being compromised?
If that's all there is to it, then why do people use other solutions?
> Also, wouldn't encryption fix this problem?
Kind of. The problem is the protocol and lack of consensus prevents this from being feasibly implemented. Personally, I think encryption in transit is a low probability threat for me. I would also like certain data to "expire" or go into "cold storage" after a period of time. Sending it in a side-channel, like Dropbox or Google Drive means I can delete it or revoke access after a period of time but this breaks email.
> If any of us are ever going to convince friends and family to leave proprietary platforms
I’ve kind of thrown in the towel on this fight. People are going to use what they like. For me, it’s E-mail. My friends and family know how to get in touch with me if they need to: using E-mail. If they want to text each other or WhatsApp each other or Snapchat each other or whatever it is they do, they can go right ahead: it doesn’t affect me. And that’s all OK!
> If they want to text each other or WhatsApp each other or Snapchat each other or whatever it is they do, they can go right ahead: it doesn’t affect me.
So when Facebook slurps up your email address by virtue of your friends using WhatsApp, that doesn't affect you?
Not really, because I don't use Facebook. I'm avoiding the bulk of the harm from Facebook (e.g. the dopamine spikes, wasted time I'll never get back, feed addiction, emotional manipulation/experiments, etc.) by simply not using it. Until I start getting ads from them even off of Facebook properties, I don't really care what they think they know about me.
Sure, they now have my E-mail address. I guess that sucks, but it was due to some other idiot's lack of OpSec, and there is nothing I can do about it. I'm not going to convince 2,000 people to stop using Facebook, let alone 2 million or 2 billion.
Pretty sure he's talking about the original chat embedded in the Gmail interface. The earliest records I can find in my logs are from February 2006. For at least 7 years I used it, and for many years my usage was quite extensive. Either due to changed preferences when I got older or iMessage or other things, it looks like I generally stopped chatting in there around May 2013. From my perspective, Google was sitting on a gold mine because so many people I knew in the USA and across the ocean were using it and it worked very well until they started fiddling with the product in ways that made it more clunky.
> I can interact with anybody with an e-mail address
Why is that a good thing? My email is full of spam both literal and mundane (email notification from stuff I only occasionally care about like CI or products). My Messenger account has zero noise because I can't be contacted by companies - only friends I've chosen to let in.
There’s nothing preventing you from automatically filtering those emails. All of my GitHub / CI emails go straight to a subfolder. All spam gets added to filters, etc.
Depending on the registrar you use, you can set up a 2nd inbox or aliases for junk mail and filter anything that goes to those, etc.
You're coming from a position that email is good and it's worth configuring it to work well. But I don't particularly like email. I have zero interest in setting up aliases or filters when the problem simply doesn't exist when I use a better tool.
This doesn't make much sense to me. We're talking about functionality (being contacted by companies or automated processes) that doesn't exist at all in Messenger. You can't say it's the better tool in this case when it makes no attempt to compete with that feature.
> You can't say it's the better tool in this case when it makes no attempt to compete with that feature
Sure I can. Something isn't better just because it has more features. Easy ability to be spammed with nothing more than a widely shared string ID is not a positive feature.
Even if I used FB auth to log into all of my various internet accounts, my Messenger still won't get spammed. It's a better tool (at least for me).
My email inbox just annoys me while Messenger is so good I haven't deleted my FB account.
> Something isn't better just because it has more features
You're right, but being able to be spammed with a string ID absolutely is a positive feature. While your inbox may annoy you, I'm sure you also use to sign up for services, get marketing info that you're interested in, get billing notifications, etc. Could Messenger do all that? Yeah potentially, but now you've just moved the spam problem into Messenger. That's why I'm saying Messenger isn't the better tool because it doesn't have spam, it doesn't have spam because it lacks the features that introduce spam.
It didn't read my mind, it's just that my instant messaging is 0% automated messages and 100% people I know. My email is 98% automated messages from services I signed up for using my email, and 2% my mom.
The configuration is never over with email, because every time I sign up for something, I've got more filters to set up. With instant messaging? There was never a problem to begin with
So you're saying you voluntarily gave out your primary email address and then don't like that they are emailing you? Why give it out in the first place then? It's free to setup a dummy email address for these purposes.
Unless you're complaining about getting reminder emails from upcoming doctor appointments, bills and the like. But my impression was that getting those are a feature...
I could set up multiple accounts. But then I have to check multiple accounts. Either way, I have to go out of my way to make email as pleasant to use as instant messaging already is.
This is definitely a case of "that's just how you use it", as my phone number is relatively accessible and many services have asked for it, so I get plenty of spam straight to my phone via almost every messaging means that can be tied directly to my phone. That means things like whatsapp in addition to plain old SMS.
No it just read my pre-existing social network graph. And then very accurately predicts who I might want to add to that graph. But practically speaking it comes out to the same thing - I have never had to create a messaging whitelist.
While email and email tooling is completely ignorant of my multiple social network graphs that are stored in various places on the Internet.
I don't feel that's a medium / tool issue, I've found it's a usage pattern issue.
I have many email addresses. My most personal is known to people I like and trust. I use it the way many people use IM. I get zero zero spam in it. The emails I use for business or subscriptions or untrustworthy friends of course is spammy.
I imagine if one uses any IM service to enroll into dozens of services / products / subscriptions / websites / etc... Spam will come regardless of medium :)
> I imagine if one uses any IM service to enroll into dozens of services / products / subscriptions / websites / etc... Spam will come regardless of medium :)
Not if I use FB auth. My Messenger would remain spam free. Because ability to authn someone and ability to send someone a message were decoupled, which is just better than email.
> > I can interact with anybody with an e-mail address
> Why is that a good thing?
Because it is useful to have a communication mechanism which is universal. It is a standard and not owned or controlled (censored) by anyone. Sure there a dozens, possibly hundreds, of fragmented chat protocols that can't talk to anything other than their own proprietary clients. But only email is universally available.
> only friends I've chosen to let in
You could configure your email client the same way and then you have the same behavior.
> Because it is useful to have a communication mechanism which is universal. It is a standard and not owned or controlled (censored) by anyone. Sure there a dozens, possibly hundreds, of fragmented chat protocols that can't talk to anything other than their own proprietary clients. But only email is universally available.
I have never found that to actually be useful in practice. Non-universal protocols with proprietary clients have worked well for me - they have been convenient, well-engineered, well-designed, and well-populated by the people I want to talk to.
Not as easily as just using a tool that doesn't need any configuration to avoid spam. And it's disingenuous to say that email spam can just be filtered out to get an experience that is as spam-free as Messenger.
XMPP is having a resurgence with OMEMO being added to clients and some new clients (Dino) being made. However, I'm not sure if it will ever be the popular thing even among the free software options.
We have Matrix now, and although most clients are lacking and it can be laggy, in 5 years it will probably be pretty good. I'm especially excited about their P2P work which sounds like it'll allow account migrations, offline messages to nearby people via bluetooth or LAN, etc.
I switched from primarily using a matrix.org account to using one on a smaller server after the big matrix.org hack a few years back. However, my main server is now incredibly bad. I get messages out of order, it goes offline a lot, etc. I don't want to lose my contact list and history again, so I'm kind of holding out for the option to change homeservers/have multiple/have none. It's also annoying how incredibly few Matrix clients support multiple accounts. I know of Quaternion and Neochat, but that's about it. Every XMPP client I've ever used supports multiple accounts. Dino did from version 0.1.
I still use XMPP and IRC at the same time, but I have most IRL contacts only on Matrix. I think it'd be hard to get them all on XMPP as well, so I'm just enduring.
> However, I'm not sure if it will ever be the popular thing even among the free software options.
I'm one of the many people actively working on XMPP projects. Is there something in particular that makes you think this?
People often talk about XMPP in the past tense on HN. It's understandable, XMPP had a peak of popularity with the adoption of Google Talk, but Google being Google and shutting that down did not end XMPP. It continues to be active and growing.
I run my own XMPP server, have done for years (now just out of the fact it'll take more work to turn it off than to keep it going.)
I almost never use it to talk to people these days, and typically see one, maybe two other people logged in at any given time, when it used to be a lot more. And I think one of those is someone like me who just has a client always connected. I like what XMPP stands for, but it really does feel like it's faded in at least the "general instant messenger" sense.
I feel it's right that a protocol doesn't need to be in the general consciousness. See the even worse Google trend for SMTP, for example, despite email still being considered a growing network.
Those are great aspects of email, and I certainly wouldn't want it to go away. But that doesn't mean it's the most effective or efficient tool for all use cases. Like the GP, our team switched to Slack some years back, and our email volume dropped to near zero, while quality of communication went way up.
I really think all email needs is a fresh coat of paint. I believe the ruby on rails team worked on something like this, but I forget the name of the service
You’re probably thinking about Hey https://www.hey.com. The issue I see with it is that it goes beyond a refreshed interface and breaks IMAP compatibility.
That makes sense in principle, but in practice I think this is a case where the technology is eventually going to have to meet the real world needs and not the other way around; email just doesn't match typical patterns of personal communication in my experience.
> Signal is an open protocol and supports E2E encrypted text, voice and video.
It's open in name but proprietary. How many competing open source clients exist? Right.
Also, it's extremely limited like every other proprietary system, by the fact that the client is proprietary and thus can only do what they feel like supporting.
How do I pipe incoming signal messages to a script which will process it in ways I like? How do I programmatically send messages based on the output of other scripts? And so on.
All this is trivially easy functionality with email because it is an open protocol.
>The digital world has evolved since 1997, and email simply hasn't kept up.
Evolved beyond instant text messages? because that's all email is.
Honestly I hate IM tools. The threading is crap, the search is crap, the startup time is crap. there's no understanding of who can read what or what the edit history of messages are (I've been in IMs with people who will edit their messages days later to gasslight you, that alone is enough to make me hate IM apps.)
That is a good point. I like to say `s/foo/bar/` to correct myself rather than edit the message. This is also important if people are receiving e-mail notifications for new messages but not for message edits.
Honestly, invisible edits are a UI problem that people really ought to solve - highlight (or in some way indicate with a color change or such) that something has been edited (and specifically, what has changed vs what is unedited in the comment).
Or perhaps restrict editing, e.g. instead of being able to delete text, you can only strike through+slightly shrink+grey out text.
Not that I really like Facebook, but that's one thing they handled well with their comments. You can click on the edited link associated with a particular comment that was edited and see all versions of the comment.
So if someone edited their comment three times, you would be able to read all four versions of it.
That's the obvious stance to take though. The point is that IM has problems, IMO the largest of which is that all prevalent platforms are privately owned services rather than being a protocol like email is. Sure you may have a gmail address, but you can talk freely to any other email address. That's not the case for iMessage vs FB Messenger vs Slack vs Signal vs WhatsApp vs TikTok vs Telegram vs hundreds if not thousands of other independent platforms.
My understanding is that this is the point of Matrix, i.e. to create an open protocol that you can use for IM regardless of who serves your messages.
But the point of saying "just use email" is that we don't need anything new, we just need to shift our idea of what email is. It's only slow and clunky because we still think if it as such. Our email clients and infrastructure are all built around email being something you get around to checking, like a digital version of your physical mailbox. But it doesn't have to be this way. You have a uniquely identifying email address, and everyone you know does too, this should be all we need to have communication that's as responsive and highly compatible as we want/need it to be.
>The digital world has evolved since 1997, and email simply hasn't kept up.
Email has its warts I'll give you that, but since 1997 the world has gotten objectively worse in terms of open, distributed messenging. Everything is a fucking walled garden controlled by some data-harvesting megacorp these days.
I like email because I can roll my own server (and have done so) or I can choose to trust one of several commercial providers and we can all interoperate.
Slack is fine for transient communication. That is, it's fine unless you might need to dig up a particular conversation a year after, or five years. Actually, finding stuff as old as one week can be problematic already.
Maybe for you this is not important. For me it has proved to be key many times.
Also, filtering. You cannot withstand the same stream of info and notifications from Slack as you can from email, because there are no filtering and classification rules. Channels help, but in a limited way.
Slack works well for casual and ephemeral communication. For other use cases, you need a serious tool like email.
No useful threading in Slack, which is still one of its silliest issues. You must be using a paid version of Slack to see messages from a long time ago, as they have a limit on the no-cost version. This probably makes you dependent on your employer. When one switches between channels in Slack, oh boy is that think laggy! Sometimes I can wait for 5s, before the thing has switched, on a fairly modern CPU and up to date browser. In Thunderbird I can switch to saved searches and folders seemingly no matter how many e-mails I have in there in what seems to be perhaps 100 milliseconds. Lets face it: Slack is hopelessly bloated slow and laggy to no end. E-mail does not have these issues, if you use the right tools, as in not using anything like MS Office 265 Outlook to access e-mails, because that is broken in similar ways.
> This probably makes you dependent on your employer.
I did not understand this.
I use Slack at work. I would assume my employer owns all the work related discussions we have and keeps that as useful documentation around many issues? And if someone leaves the company, it is a feature and not a bug that they will not have access to those internal discussions.
Today was an old friend's birthday. We haven't really talked in years. Figured I'd send him a happy birthday note. You know what still works after 15 years? Email. Now, will he _see_ that email? Hope so.
Yeah, this person's position is totally baffling to me.
> group instant messaging is, largely, distracting and of little value (more on this later) and can best be dealt with in weekly ‘batches’, if it’s required at all.
I mean, I dunno about this guy, but I like interacting with my friends. I'll leave a group chat open all day on my other monitor. It's like a break room where you can chat with whoever's around, or all get together and have a nice conversation. Group chats are one of my favourite forms of online social interaction. You don't have to like them, but I can't imagine not at least understanding the appeal.
> people are finding ways to pushback on the ‘instant’ part of instant messaging, to put space and breathing room between when a message is sent and when they ‘deal’ with it.
Uh, yeah! That's part of what makes them work. They slide seamlessly between synchronous and asynchronous discussion. If I want to hear your thoughts at 1pm, I can message you. If you're busy, you can reply later. And if I'm available when you reply, then we can have our conversation synchronously. But if our schedules never align, we'll keep going back and forth until our discussion is over.
It surely is nice to be able to chat with friends during working hours. However, it seems, that this is a big source of distraction, which is unwanted in an efficient working environment. Unless of course your friends are working on the same project or you are free to discuss work details with friends outside of the project or employer. Many people are not free to do so. Many people have come to realize, that they focus best, when not distracting themselves with friends and family business while at work.
While many people shift effortlessly between async anc sync communication, many people also have problems with that. When you do not respond in time, they get impatient. Some people are seemingly not able to do this shifting as effortlessly.
Just a few points to consider, before getting to any conclusions.
As far as distraction goes, you can just mute your notifications and be inactive for a while. Bring up a slack window from work, and keep up-to-date with work events while tabling discussions with your friends for the time being — move from sync to async.
Granted, I'm sure some people do have trouble shifting fluidly between sync and async. I don't really have a solution to that, but in practice it hasn't been a problem for me. Maybe if I had different coworkers it would be an issue.
I remember using email in an IM-like fashion, having a real-time back and forth conversation. The only difference is that most email clients quote the entire conversation on every reply.
A lightweight client could have an IM-like interface that does not quote the original message on replies. Who cares if it's SMTP under the covers, the whole experience could feel quite IM-like and it would have all the other benefits of email (not being locked in to a specific provider being the main one).
The problem is that the moment you try and add even the most basic value-add features, other email clients can't understand you anymore. And this applies to fundamental things like identity verification, encryption and group chats.
Technically I don't see an issue with doing these things in a portable, standard way. Email signature and encryption (s/mime) has existed for a long time and most mainstream clients know how to handle it. The nut that has still not been cracked very well AFAIK is how to create and share public keys in a seamless way.
That's the basic idea behind "Chat over IMAP", which for various reasons hasn't seen as much effort put into it as many of us would like (not that I can talk, I haven't done anything).
Right now I need to maintain (and routinely check) a physical mailing address, a telephone number, and an email address just in order to set up and use various day-to-day services provided by government and businesses. When will it end?
Outside of work, I use whatever channel people interact with me on. That's largely SMS, various chat apps, and some e-mail, and a fair amount of voice.
I like talking to people who I value. Like that a lot.
For work, or anything with complexity in any major axis, time, number of elements, etc... I continue to use e-mail.
The best thing about that is being able to go back into those e-mails and recover info. My archive goes almost all the way back, and the little bit I don't have in there really doesn't matter much. Surprisingly, the rest has more times than I can count.
People can contact me, literally decades later, and it's there, I can spool it up, and act on whatever it is almost as if I never missed a beat.
Maybe when the new tools are around and endure in a similar fashion I would reconsider. Kind of hard to do so in such an open, portable format though.
I think the thrust of this article is mostly work related. He talks about being a consultant and seeing people waste so much time on SaaS tools, for example.
Personally I don't mind using "throwaway" services in my personal life - all your examples are things that don't matter - but for important stuff like work I want one place with all my information - not lots of crappy silos that don't integrate that I have to search for that key bit of information.
The list is endless. I have no idea how people can claim they can get away from email.. The only scenario where I can think of it working for me is if I give everything up and go live in the mountains.
All the "evolution" is is getting you to use bespoke rich clients for email-like store-and-forward systems (fb messenger, instagram dm, et c) that show you ads that you can't configure and can't replace.
If "email" simply means "gmail.com" to you then it's natural to assume that you'd think it hasn't evolved.
I'm pretty sure that's not what the author meant in the movie and helmet examples.
> A) Call Leia and show interest in her weekend, and in her as a person, and after some pleasantries are exchanged, mention how amazing the main character is in the movie he watched.
---
> Situation: Kylo has been fascinated with helmets since time immortal. He custom designs and builds his own helmet. Knowing most of his friends don’t share his passion, he is hesitant to wear his new helmet at their next gathering.
> Answer: Send out an email to all his friends and include photos of his new helmet.
The first one heavily implies that Luke just calling his friend is a better and more personal way of catching up, and the second one doesn't say the person should send a weekly email summary, it's saying for big projects one is passionate about, email may be a better choice than instant messaging.
Messengers are just whitelisted users. Email providers or clients simply provide a shit interface for managing that list.
To me it’s like that story about NASA spending millions on a zero gravity pen when Russian astronauts just used pencil.
Someone was looking to impress people with their spam filtering code and never thought “maybe I can just drop all by default and only allow who I want?”
NASA didn’t spend a single dime developing the Fisher space pen. It was developed by the Fisher company at their own expense, in the hopes that it could be profitable. Yay, capitalism. Lead pencil tips frequently break during use. Carbon pencil lead is electrically conductive. You really do not want random pieces of electrically conductive debris floating around in your spacecraft.
It has nothing to do with hating or not, it just depends on the number of friends and the intensity of incoming communication - not all people are the same. After you cross certain threshold synchronous communication becomes unmanageable and basically prevents you from doing your daily activities as you'd want.
At old job, I remember working with external orgs and my coworkers. Coworkers would pretty much talk over Slack. We would use email/zoom for communication with external orgs. At new job, we use Slack Connect and I think it replaces a lot o that external emailing.
As someone who has to interface as a client with companies that want us to use Slack Connect, I just hate it.
It's one more information stream I have to monitor, by manually going and checking it. Even if work used Slack - we don't - I'd still have to manually navigate among teams to cycle through all my incoming communications. And bringing additional colleagues into the conversation on a purpose-specific, temporary basis is much higher friction than it is with email. Instead of just CCing them on an email, I have to get them invited to that company's Slack, and they have to go through the hassle of setting up an account. And then, since they didn't install the app, I still have to manually prompt them to sign in whenever I see that they aren't remembering to include that Slack in their manual rounds. Which they aren't, because Slack Connect is oftentimes their first experience with having to do manual rounds to purpose-specific locations in order to communicate with people like that.
I've never really got their "move out of siloed email communication" sales pitch. It's like, out of the silo and into a different silo that's deeper and also on fire.
Also it's moving from a more decentralized silo to a completely centralized one. Email continues to be a groundbreaking communication technology. I feel like one company being able to pull the plug on that might be really scary. I guess email is pretty centralized, but if you get banned by Gmail for whatever reason, you can always go run your own email and continue to work within the larger ecosystem.
There are some other interesting implications from centralizing it like that, too. For example, clients who communicate using Slack Connect are unlikely to be retaining their own independent records of the communication. This potentially puts them at a disadvantage in the event of a contract dispute. They may be unable to obtain a record of past communication without resorting to a legal discovery process, and you need to lawyer up and file a lawsuit before you can do that.
With email, on the other hand, retaining one's own copy of the communication is baked into how the mechanism works.
I don't know what there is to keep up. email realizes a basic concept of open, federated, async, text based communication. it has its flaws but it's as useful as it was.
I don't think this kind of Luddism is useful. It's purported by the same kinds of people that, upon seeing a new SaaS, quickly retort: "couldn't you just do that with Google Docs/Word/pen and paper?"
Not to mention that email absolutely sucks. The confusing threads, the forwarding, the constant CC'ing, someone making it or not making it into a list, the spam. It's absolute garbage. In fact, people have been seeking alternatives since the late 80s. IRC was a precursor to Instant Messaging/Slack that many techies favored. Not that async is some perfect communication strategy (it has its own baggage), but it definitely fills some of email's gaps. Personally, I think Google Wave was ~15 years ahead of its time, and we'll see something akin to it soon.
Will the author's next big revelation be "How to use a hammer for everything?"
Usually when I talk to people about the “confusing threads” in email, it turns out that they are using a broken client like Gmail. Threading in email is great. Your email client is broken and not respecting the protocol:
Though optional, every message SHOULD have a "Message-ID:" field.
Furthermore, reply messages SHOULD have "In-Reply-To:" and
"References:" fields as appropriate, as described below.
For the uninitiated, SHOULD denotes the following in RFCs:
This word, or the adjective "RECOMMENDED", mean that there
may exist valid reasons in particular circumstances to ignore a
particular item, but the full implications must be understood and
carefully weighed before choosing a different course.
In my current job we've had 3 ticketing systems in the last 5 years.
We now use Slack and Jira but we still archive certain important emails for some things because, well, the archive of email and the fact that someone sent an email is something we can trust a lot better than the rest.
> Not to mention that email absolutely sucks. The confusing threads, the forwarding, the constant CC'ing, someone making it or not making it into a list, the spam. It's absolute garbage.
This says to me that you have bad tools for email, not that the protocol or concept sucks.
If you use email like a rube, it is expected to be absolute garbage. The same goes for Facebook or Twitter or Reddit, though: you have to change a lot of settings to get a decent experience.
The good ones are fairly technical, but there are services that make them easier. Sieve or procmail filters and clients like macOS Mail.app and mutt are good ones.
My main email client is macOS Mail.app and it's pretty great when configured properly in conjunction with serverside preprocessing/filtering.
Though for those used to a GUI, Thunderbird works reasonably well for threading, quoting conventions, and support for plain text mail. It's also cross platform (at least for the desktop environment).
Agree about Google Wave, but I want to point out that we already see its evolution in just about every real-time collaborative system today – from Google Docs to Slack to Figma and more. "The next Google Wave" isn't going to show up soon, it is already here and widely in use.
unfortunately each of those apps has their own protocols. I don't really remember wave well but wasn't the idea there is that they provide the networking portion but allowed people to build apps on top of the wave protocol. Essentially giving you the potential for a 'global inbox'.
I think this concept of a 'global inbox' is exactly what I want. In a general day I'm using Jira, Slack, Email, SMS, gitlab issues, etc for my 'work input'. Which means many different interfaces that I'm constantly checking or are constantly beeping at me.
Sometimes I get a glimpse of my wife's email account ... And it is no surprise she doesn't use email.
She gets dozens of emails a day. None of them are spam exactly. Every single website you've ever signed up for your in your life sends out email "for engagement purposes". Drips, reminders, flash sales, weekly roundups.
A dozen different job boards from when she was looking for work a few years ago. Several dozen shopping websites. Four or five pregnancy apps. And more and more and more.
You could argue that normal, non-technical people should know better. That they should be vigorously jumping through hoops to cancel all those email notifications from services they no longer use.
Don't they know there's fine print (in light gray text!) at the bottom telling you how to unsubscribe? Don't they know there's a tiny button in GMail that will (sometimes) unsubscribe for you?
But I expect that my wife's email is like a lot of people's. It is almost entirely impossible to find any signal among all the noise in it.
I religiously unsubscribe from every drip I get, and my email is still a barrage of 40+ mostly noise notifications every day. I used to love Unroll.me before they started selling ppls info, am trying LeaveMeAlone these days as a replacement and it's pretty good so far. In general I think this is an uphill battle though, email is too prone to being the catchall noise bucket and it takes constant work to stop it from becoming unusable.
> Not to mention that email absolutely sucks. The confusing threads,
I mean, the threads are only confusing if people keep insisting on using shit email clients.
> the forwarding, the constant CC'ing,
Think of it as defining a chatroom. Most of the time it can be handled just fine automatically by your email client, but you can also have more finegrained control if you wish.
> someone making it or not making it into a list,
?
> the spam.
This I will agree with.
> Will the author's next big revelation be "How to use a hammer for everything?"
Yeah, I don't agree with the author that email should be used for everything. But for non-instant, asynchronousm, flexible, decentralized, cross-platform communication it's pretty damn near perfect.
Email works O.K for one-way communication (e.g. mailing lists or bill notification). Maybe sometimes infrequent one on one communcation
When its comes to having a converstation, particularly with multiple people, I can't think of anything worse. I always dread tracking down information when I have to dig into achived mailing lists
> When its comes to having a converstation, particularly with multiple people, I can't think of anything worse. I always dread tracking down information when I have to dig into achived mailing lists
Can you give an example of a communication medium — where having a conversation involves multiple different people over the course of weeks or months, with message frequencies varying from several-per-minute to a-few-per-month, and message sizes varying from single sentences to essays — works better than e-mail (and e-mail lists)?
I agree that unwinding a sprawling email thread after the fact can be a lot of work, but I also haven't seen any other medium make that job any easier. It seems to me to be an inherently hard problem.
Thats funny, because I hate facebook message threads because it is effectively impossible to have a conversation there because everything overlaps and I can't take the time to write something clear and in multiple paragraphs.
Honestly at this point I wonder if the right solution is a private usenet server: just like email it is not instant but async, unlike email it is spilt into topics better and you can have new people catch up on threads easily.
> I hate facebook message threads because it is effectively impossible to have a conversation there because everything overlaps and I can't take the time to write something clear and in multiple paragraphs.
I've actually adopted some email like conventions when participating in Facebook comment threads. When I click the reply button, it will fill in the name of the author of the comment I'm replying to. I then will append "wrote:" to that line, add a line break, type a > character, and then paste the part of the comment they wrote that I plan to respond to. It almost looks like a quoted email message :)
> I wonder if the right solution is a private usenet server: just like email it is not instant but async, unlike email it is spilt into topics better and you can have new people catch up on threads easily.
With a private NNTP server, you will still need to set up accounts for others to use it. Though if multiple people run their own servers and set up the peering arrangements between then, then it could work without having to set up accounts fro multiple people.
But, the flexibility one can get with email in terms of organizing messages into different folders is lost with NNTP, since that organization is determined by the configuration on the server itself.
> When its comes to having a converstation, particularly with multiple people, I can't think of anything worse. I always dread tracking down information when I have to dig into achived mailing lists
This is one aspect where newsgroups do better than email. But, unlike email, you need to establish peering arrangements with other NNTP servers (if you run your own). Wtih email, the MTA can rely on DNS MX records to route the message to the correct server.
Isn't this exactly like adding/mentioning someone in a chat room? Problem is that in a chat room all communication is public and you're seeing/getting notified of every single small message. This is hugely inefficient. For e-mails, one can define filters to park e-mails where you're on CC to read later. You don't have this flexibility with Chat/Slack - the tool defines much more how you should be reading the incoming stream of messages.
Gmail alone currently handles over 50% of US email traffic, with Microsoft and a handful of other service providers taking up a good chunk of the other half. These large providers all use internal blacklists and filtering rules, which cannot be queried, and no support is available if you get blackholed.
Worst of all, Gmail especially isn't great about tagging messages as spam; a good chunk of messages sent from outside the Gmail network simply disappear. As a Gmail user, there is nothing you can do to verify that you're getting all of the legitimate mail traffic that is being sent to you.
Further, if you're trying to send any kind of business correspondence over email, you have to contend with a massive industry of scammers that are also targeting people with lookalike messages.
I love the email protocol, but from a broader service standpoint, email is terribly broken right now.
> Worst of all, Gmail especially isn't great about tagging messages as spam
My experience is the exact opposite of yours - I find Gmail's spam detection absolutely amazing. I get essentially zero spam in my inbox, and perhaps 4-6 false positives in the spam folder a month.
>As a Gmail user, there is nothing you can do to verify that you're getting all of the legitimate mail traffic that is being sent to you.
What other communication service/protocol would allow you to do this?
Your mileage will vary I guess. It has been _years_ since I got a legit message caught in gmail spam; every few months I glance at it and go "yup, that's all spam." Proofpoint however, they capture a legit email every other month or so.
I think the fact that “check your spam” is so widely understood is a testament to false positives in the inbox being an issue for Gmail.
Ideally this phrase would not be so widely known and understood if Gmail didn’t have so many false positives going to the spam folder. I’d imagine that, as a performance metric, the Gmail team would consider false positives to be a metric for improvement, not a metric of pride.
little value in a single number like this, it would be better to give a percentage wrt monthly incoming mails... 4-6 seems true to me but I subscribed to way too many mailing lists and the false positives basically always come from them
That seems like a lot; with FastMail I get basically 0. The last time this happened was years ago.
I do get the very occasional spam, maybe 5 messages/month or so. Most of them are from marketing agencies that want to "collaborate" on my website or some such and have a spam score of 0 or close to it, and arguably isn't "spam" in the same way as "grow a bigger dick!"-spam is. I doubt gmail would catch those too.
With Fastmail I get a lot of messages purporting to be from Fastmail threatening account termination/verification, something along those lines. Most of them are automatically sent to spam.
I don’t have this problem with the mail server that I set up for myself. It works as intended. My Gmail account, that I maintain mainly for email lists, gets tons of false spam positives, however. Gmail is garbage.
I run my own email server. The most important people in my life have accounts on my own server. No gmail needed or wanted. I can answer all of those questions of delivery for myself.
We get so much spam from gmail that gmail has earned itself an increased spam score just because its gmail. Its unlikely that my users see much from gmail, unless they want it.
From my experience Microsoft is the worst one about disappearing messages. You send a message to an Outlook user, they say it's delivered, but then the recipient just never gets it. At least putting it in spam means they can eventually find it if they check there.
This is an extremely important point, and I find it weird to see so few people mentioning it.
I run my own mail server and have been for years. My e-mails use SPF, DKIM, DMARC, I have a reverse DNS record set up, a score of 100/100 on mail-tester.com... yet Microsoft refuses to accept my emails. They are sent to the spam folder of my recipients.
I tried contacting their support about it, I'll let you guess how well it went. A man from a warm country told me to join some sort of Microsoft partner program, for which I would have to pay.
This is a disgrace. E-mail is behind closed gates now, because of bullies such as Microsoft.
Ok, emotional me really hated this site, so rational me will try to calm down a bit and explain why.
I started with the "Dislikes about email are Questionable" post, which was perhaps my mistake, but every point in that post had a dripping "I'm sorry peasant, you're doing it wrong" vibe to it.
I can fully understand why someone may choose to use email over other forms of communication, but to be incredibly dismissive of problems other people have with the medium, while furthermore often not even addressing some of the root frustrations people have, is incredibly condescending.
Take the "email is unreliable" point. You can write all the missives you want about how email is the most reliable form of communication known to man, at the end of the day a huge number of messages can get "sent" which never make it to the intended recipient for a myriad of reasons. And furthermore, pretty much everyone has had an experience where this has happened.
I started with that post as well, and had a similar reaction.
Also I find it misses most of the real points against email and focuses on the relatively minor ones.
- email enforces much higher latency communication, which maybe good sometimes, but most of the time is not helpful
- much more difficult to actually keep track of a threaded conversation with multiple concurrent subtrees, it's a stack when instead you want a tree like Zulip / Slack threads. quote replying a subthread in an email tree without disrupting convos in the rest is a painful experience even in the nicest clients.
- file attachment and embed preview experience is worse than most modern IM apps
- no emoji reactions, these are huge for efficient async communication without spamming everyone with notifications
I wonder why no one ever mentions my big problem with solutions other than email: archiving and backup.
Let's play dumb here, back with POP3 if you configured it to leave the messages the server already had a copy. If you use IMAP you can still have a local copy. (I'm not saying these are valid backup strategies, but if all else fails it's still a decentral copy).
But more importantly, importing and exporting to different email clients and hosts (and even different IMAP server) is varying degrees of work, but it is doable EASILY by default. I can't be the only one keeping 15-18 years of email history and regularly referring back and searching for stuff there? (could be 5 more years but I was careless and didn't properly backup and maybe it's still on some medium...)
Even with matrix, the completely open new hip thing I don't see a good archival strategy by anyone except "somehow keeping logs" like on IRC. Maybe DB backups if it's your own instance. Not cool, but at least possible. And don't even get me started on all the other messengers here. Sometimes the backup works (via Android and maybe iOS) but not always and it's surely not open or accessible.
I'm actually not using email for a lot of private communication these days, but mostly because most of my communication to friends isn't really worth saving (except for logs in matrix/irc channels), I've never been a fan of formal emails between friends. But it's perfect to ask a random question to a semi-stranger. Surely beats Twitter DMs by a mile.
Instead of installing and/or visiting 100 different apps and services daily, I just redirect all notifications to my email (Reddit, HN, Discord, Matrix, Zulip, Mattermost, Slack, Discourse, Matrix, YouTube, StackExchange, VoIP.ms, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, bank, forums, etc).
For news websites I refresh all the time, I set up weekly digests. For important keywords and mentions, I set up instant alerts.
It’s easy to setup rules and filters for emails. Except for specific emails that trigger a notification on my phone (confirm registration, verification codes, security alerts, IM messages, important people), I only check my email once a day, and make sure to process it down to inbox zero (with the occasional email snooze).
Having a single inbox to worry about has improved my quality of life a lot.
Feel free to share or ask about specific tools for email digests, mention/reply notifications, and keyword alerts.
I'd disagree. E-Mail is useful for invoices, customer contact, first point of contact or 2nd point of contact if someone tried to reach out per Facebook etc. and a serious business relation needs to be formed. However at work we switched to Slack a while back and it was such a relieve! Trying to organize projects per mail was just horrible. Especially when you got non technical staff involved that doesn't correctly forward or answer email and uses reply-all and reply interchangeably, or switches between personal and shared accounts without noticing it. Slack is not perfect but for us it did the job and still does.
One aspect I miss with Slack/Teams/IM is a good ability to postpone stuff. For example, I receive an e-mail I know I need to do something in 1-4 months. So I keep that mail in my inbox and as long as something is in the inbox, there is some work pending/due.
I have not yet found a good way to do that in Slack (reliably) and not relying on another tool.
E-Mail in that way is just great as a message is just a text file. You can put it wherever you want and reorganize it the way you want.
Try to attach a slack conversation to an issue tracking system. Won‘t work. Do it with e-mail: it‘s just a text file.
Try to post-pone stuff or organize information in folders. Won‘t work. Do it with e-mail, hell I can even move messages from one account to another.
My point is: Slack will never replace e-mail, it is just an extension of ways we communicate. And that‘s is biggest advantage and disadvantage: it‘s a tool that makes communication sometimes easier, but is‘s also another tool I need to regularly check besides all other communication tools I already have.
It really depends on the personal and companies workflow though. My personal email account also only has messages that I still need to deal with. However our shared accounts can get quite messy at times. Slack does have the option to set different reminders though, you can even ask Slack to remind you to go back to a specific message in let's say four months. ;) But to be honest, if there is something that needs to be done at a certain point I'd always use an actual reminder/task or calendar app. Otherwise the risk of it being overlooked, maybe because someone is sick, or there is a flood of mails from another project that day and I don't get too look at the one email I wanted to deal with today. So I guess it really depends on the workflow and the people you work with. I think flexibility is the key in adapting your workflow to everyone's abilities and the companies needs but the same time if something has been working for a specific use case, then why change it. : )
It was in response to Google promoting AMP for email (aka: you don't get a permanent copy of the content) - but more generally, the advantages of email aren't so much in the right now, they're in the long term searchable and immutable archive.
See also the nice immediate triage features of heyhey - there's some nice stuff in there, but long term their users are going to find that they're living in the moment and not building the value that's stored in the data to the same extent that users of more traditional mailboxes do.
I want to point out something from one of the articles which is so far from the truth that it somewhat undercuts the authors credibility:
> For instance, if WhatsApp goes down, not only can you not send/receive messages, you won’t be able to see your old ones, and no one else on your network will be able to either. You could argue that a single email provider has the same effect, but you’d be wrong. If Gmail goes down, I can still send emails to Gmail recipients and I can still see past messages from Gmail users.
Obviously you will be able to see all your WhatsApp messages when WhatsApp goes down. The same is true for Facebook Messenger and many other applications, because everything is saved locally. It's even possible to send WhatsApp messages while being offline which will then be delivered later on.
> Obviously you will be able to see all your WhatsApp messages when WhatsApp goes down. The same is true for Facebook Messenger and many other applications, because everything is saved locally. It's even possible to send WhatsApp messages while being offline which will then be delivered later on.
I wonder how long this has been the case. My experience in the past is that these applications are not usable without a stable internet connection. That said, email clients have a concept of an outbox where messages that were sent are placed until an internet connecton is established. At that point, those messages are actually sent to their recipients.
>That said, email clients have a concept of an outbox where messages that were sent are placed until an internet connecton is established. At that point, those messages are actually sent to their recipients
This is also possible with WhatsApp. Messages can be sent while not being online and will be delivered as soon as you go online.
If Instant Messaging were a Thing, I'd be happy to use it. But it's not.
IM is twelve things. And they're a different 12 things at different times. And you need to have clients for all of them installed and check all 12 of those clients regularly for messages.
Email, on the other hand, really is a Thing. I can check my mail and be done.
Fix that for IM and I'm there. Or rather, fix that again for IM and convince all the major players not to drop support for the common protocol again and you'll get me back.
Evernote uses a custom email address to route whatever media, link or text you want to send, to the specific notebook you select in your email subject. This is one of my favorite uses of email.
You are given a unique email address that is linked to your account and defaults to your default notebook.
The formatting of the email subject lets you choose any notebook as the destination for your email. You can also create a new notebook by simply adding a new notebook name after the "@" symbol.
You can add in hashtags to the email subject, after @notebook. These tags are included in the note and immediately searchable.
Simply add #planning or whatever existing tag you find useful. You can also create a brand new tag straight from email.
Using “!” then the full date and you can activate reminders.
Does anyone have any other apps or workflows that use this type of content-addressing?
Is that an accurate description for what this is? a content addressable macro?
I'd love it if Roam had a similar feature for emailing content into a specific block.
I found this short blog post that outlines this email feature if anyone is interested in checking it out :
I love this idea - I am so totally uninterested when yet another forum/IM solution is suggested to me. email works and (most) everyone has it. The last thing I want to do is install yet another client app or sign-up to some online website app. Enough already!
Email is hardly a thing in India for general use. One of my interns hates email so much that he built a bot which IMs him the contents of his email to Telegram.
There is simply no alternative for information exchange which is so ubiquitous, not locking you to specific vendor who loves to do data farming on you. Extremely reliable and flexible.
For years there have been different projects claiming to be "email kiilers", however email is still there and most of those projects have been long forgotten.
Sadly email is starting to die as the universal protocol for communication it used to be. My organisation has now implemented so many filters and blocks that a huge range of simple things are just broken now. It's pretty hard to send an attachment through other than a few predefined doc types that wont get physically removed by the spam filter. Every link gets re-written in some horribly mangled way and virtually clicked that often causes undesirable side effects. Giant warnings and labels get inserted into the body text telling me this or that is suspicious, and subject lines are frequently rewritten, breaking the feeble semblance of threading that my poor email client attempts.
And meanwhile people are flocking to walled garden proprietary systems like Slack etc and saying how great they are. But half of it is to escape the monstrous mutilations that have been applied to email.
Email might be like the venerable cockroach that will survive nuclear war, but it's not a healthy cockroach.
I've had this idea on a back burner for a while, however having looked at your site, it's clearly being used by people for landing pages that get linked to from spam emails.
If that's how these services get abused, I'm glad now I didn't waste any time on my version :(
My biggest gripe with email today is that it's become normal, at least in my current line of work, to leave emails unreplied. You write detailed and thoughtful messages, with direct questions and point of discussions, and you get an ack on IM or passing by the corridors
I'd like to plug in a small tool that I run. It's called EmailThis and it brings bookmarking/read-later functionality(similar to Pocket and Instapaper) to your email inbox.
This ticks me in the right place. Where I work we're already using Gsuite like the rest of the world, and then for some reasons the director board decided to move _everything_ company communication to FB's Workplace. And when pandemic hits, everybody have to actively watch for announcements/notices on Workplace, because it's the only place that they send out messages. So why not just send notices to all@company.com email address and everybody got it instantly if the message is too important? They post it on Workplace and mark it Important, then FB sends a brief emails to everybody teasing half of the post. Again, why not just use email?
Email is the only protocol that has widespread adoption in probably every programming language. Clients are ubiquitous. Filtering allows you to receive many mails without getting out of hand.
I'm not one for using emails for everything. Sometimes the UI / UX just doesn't go great with things like synced up messaging and besides, email leaks metadata all over.
Having said that, for extremely casual messages where I'm not worried about metadata (talking to my parents, a relationship that is already apparent), I would not mind chatting over something like DeltaChat (which is on-and-off working on trying to do XMPP Conversations-style multiple account sign on in one single app) over the alternative of a group text or FB Messenger message. Metadata exists either way, might as well be on an email system I will retain long-term-access to it. The likes of Signal force you to either manually screenshot messages or copy/paste them message by message, there is no bulk unencrypted backup for mundane things like serendipitous conversations about dinner plans for funny family stories. But since DeltaChat is still somewhat locked in to a single account (preventing me from using say work and personal), I'm doing the no-change-choice and continuing to tolerate Signal.
I get really peeved when social networks don't support email notifications for posts/updates, as opposed to just replies: I'd rather manage people's posts in an inbox, where I can pick through at my leisure than in an algorithmic feed. I used to stress about seeing all the updates since the last time I was on a given site.
Before you go using Email for everything, check to make sure your audience can actually get your email and that it's not going to spam.
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10 years ago, I briefly worked for an for a small business that built wordpress plugins. They had an internal message board for communication and, unknown to me, they also used email. It took me six weeks to find out that I had missed hundreds of internal emails, many of which were directed at me. This was due in part to lack of on boarding and mismanagement by my boss (who was also managed the email system).
Now you may ask, why weren't you reading your email, did you not check it? You see, I checked my email religiously, couple of times an hour. But here is what happened.
This company used gmail for domains. And one thing that gmail does is it hides the spam label (or doesn't put a number next to spam). I had assumed, that since I had a brand new email address and that label was either missing or didn't have a counter next to it. I wasn't getting any spam. I was getting some internal email, so I didn't think much of it.
What I didn't know at the time was the internal email addresses were on the same domain as the marketing emails. They did a lot of unsolicited marketing, as such gmail automatically marked their domain as spam. Nearly every single email from the company was going into my spam folder.
Worse nobody said said anything about me missing these emails (including those from the owner/CEO and the CFO). Maybe they said something to my boss, but as he wasn't happy I had been assigned to his group he probably "forgot" to mention it to me. Anyway, I am sure missing several hundred emails was one of the reasons I wasn't retained passed my probationary period.
The big takeaways:
1. Don't do marketing from the same domain as internal email
2. Use a different domain for internal email
3. Always check the spam folder.
4. If you consistently don't hear from someone through email, ask them if they are receiving your email.
I've been hacking on a project to make email a little more asynchronous as I took use it for everything. I love email, but the constant inbound pings make it a direct line to me/my time. In that sense, email is broken and I'm hoping to help change that and allow people to focus more effectively. Paced Email * is a service that buffers emails and send them to you in one go at a time of your choosing either daily, weekly or monthly. The aliases can be created on the fly too e.g. johndoe.hackernews@daily.paced.email.
We decided to start shoto as newsletter instead doing an app because of some of the reason mentioned on the site. Everyone has an email account to begin with and they check their emails daily. I personally love email.
There is a more modern alternative* to Email:
Matrix
It improves significantly in security (easy E2EE) and usability (and of course functionality) while still keeping advantages like decentralization.
How the protocol is used is up to you and the Matrix client (which atm is mostly chat, but I am sure one could give you a more email-like client).
*ignoring the ubiquitous presence of email, which is kind of the main selling point - Matrix is still in the tens of millions
Is Matrix really that widely used? I'm a fan—I want to set up my own server one of these days when I get the time—but I get the feeling that it's still kinda niche. Who's using it? This is exciting!
I went to the post about answers to common objections but I was surprised that I did not find one of the bigger ones. Email is a pretty big disaster for communication that needs to stay secret, even encrypted mail. (https://latacora.micro.blog/2020/02/19/stop-using-encrypted....)
Like most people, I use both. Email however has better tooling IMO around high volumes. IM starts becoming a problem once you reach volumes of ~2K messages per day.
As soon as you have few hundred channels or groups in non business oriented messengers like whatsapp, missing critical/important messages cannot be avoided. Skipping certain lists/groups, training your spam filter etc is at least available when you use email.
If it were not for Google and Microsoft effectively gatekeeping SMTP I'd support the OP's proposition but it's been years since I gave-up running Postfix + Dovecot on Linux VM's simply due to the mindless thuggery of Outlook/Hotmail and Gmail. Google has effectively become the unelected dictator of the internet.
Today was the first time I asked my son (10yo) to email me something. His response was "yuk". I think that's the new generation's attitude towards email - old and dated, and that unless they need it for work, would prefer other means of communication.
I don’t want to dismiss the author’s point. But here is a related point:
Choosing what tool to communicate is a social decision, not a personal one. You can’t prove the tool X is more effective way to communicate by just using it yourself.
Agree with your point, and email does succeed here just because it's ubiquitous. You don't need to check do you what whatsapp? Telegram? Oh I don't use this or that because of privacy, etc.
Email give you a FREEDOM to use anything you want with it because it was developed at times when data farming wasn't the main goal for big tech.
That's why in most cases we just ask for email address.
Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can. - jwz's Law of Software Envelopment
or.... use the appropriate medium/channel/whatever for what ever it is you're doing.
My family has a group whatsapp chat. It's mostly for sending pics of my nieces and nephews and random conversations. Email would be terrible for that.
Ditto, the literally decade old skype chat I've with friends.
You can cook a meal with a campfire. If you put enough effort into it, you might even get a better result than cooking in a kitchen. But I am not going to light a campfire every night.
To put this into context and understand where the puck even is, my daughter (18 y old, freshman in college), last sent me an email in 2017. Before that, one in 2016, and one in 2015
> Using email as a reminder and productivity task list
I am using emails as a reminder tool for a long time and it’s very efficient as the first thing I do in the morning is to check my inbox. I have even built an app to email myself in one tap or with Siri : https://boomerang-app.io
It's funny this came up today, since I have a 1 hour section of my workday blocked of for my bi-annual email filter refactoring.
Email is by far the most broken software experience of my life. I've been thinking that for a while.
Now by broken, I don't mean the software doesn't work as intended. I mean that the software can't let me manage things the way I want.
The alternatives (eg MS Teams) by very much not perfect, but at least get me closer than I can with an email client.
Here are some specific things I find suck:
1. There isn't any that indicates why I'm receiving this email. Sometimes that's not obvious. Could it be I'm BCCed? Or maybe I'm on a mailing list, that's on a mailing list, that's on a mailing list? Or maybe it's both!
1a. If I receive an email due to being BCCed, my email filters won't work at all.
1b. In the case of a mailing list containing a mailing list, I have to manually create separate rules for both the parent and child lists and keep them in sync.
2. Email filters scale poorly. Hence why I end up needing to refactor them twice a year. This analogy is a bit of a stretch but: email filters are like programming where everything must be in a giant switch statement, but you are also allowed if statements and goto for extra control flow. It's not a perfect analogy, it breaks as you look more closely at the details, but I think both result in similar problems cropping up.
3. You are stuck choosing between highly limited server rules that affect all clients, or client only rules that only change things for the current client. I want to be able to look at my email from my desktop client, my phone, or a web browser and see the same thing in all 3 places. So I am stuck with the crippled server rules.
4. Smart folders come close to being able to replace the majority of my email rules, but not quite. The implementations I've played with are all missing something. I do think they'd be an improvement in the cases they are applicable.
5. Emails don't contain any hints at what kind of email they are. I believe they could, via headers, but they don't. An email is an email is an email. Well, every client I've used has special handling for meeting invites. I think this should be expanded. I find in practical use there are a few "types" or "kinds" of emails. Things like a broadcast vs a question vs a meeting invite vs a request for volunteers vs etc. Having a bunch of different types of messages baked in with different defaults for each, would likely remove half the email rules I have.
6. Marked as read and notifications are too simple. But here I at least understand that addressing the issue gets complex very quickly[0]. Maybe being able to snooze an email would help me here, but I've never used a client with snooze. Do these clients with snooze generally let you see the queue of snoozed items and process them early if you'd like to?
7. I can't block people. Creating a rule that auto-deletes emails is not quite the same as blocking.
Besides these technical ones, there are a few cultural ones as well.
1. Email has a culture of BCCing people "to be polite". As mentioned in 1a above, my rules don't work on these emails, so they end up being less polite in practice.
2. Email has a culture of including everyone who might be relevant just in case. Mostly this just drives the signal to noise ratio down. It is end of business hours for me now, and I've received 175 emails so far today. I maybe needed to read 15 of those.
3. Since email rules exist, people will default to blaming the receiver for not having a rule. If I spam @everyone or @here in MS Teams or Slack people blame me for spamming. In email land, I find people will first get mad at the receivers for not liking the spam I am sending them. Bizarre!
4. A portion of the email world takes a hardline stance on email by asynchronous communication. Sometimes you need a synchronous conversation. Sometimes you have something that is urgent. Yes, I'm aware flow exists and can be quite brittle for some people. It is sometimes worth breaking it.
That was quite cathartic to write. Email has been the least pleasant piece of my software life for years now. With work, I just have to deal with it as best as I can (you'll notice most complaints above are work centric). But outside of work I definitely try to minimize my usage.
I love email, it's great for long letters and so. That said, I have trouble (further) adopting and especially recommending a fundamentally insecure and flawed medium like email in 2021 when clearly technically superior channels of communication exist. Signal, Matrix etc are not 1:1 replacements for email at all, but when it comes down to it, they are simpler and more secure.
If you go back to the beginning of email you’ll see it was the simplest invention possible. you@domain.com was just your user account on an actual Unix computer. Mail messages were appended to a text file in a folder for each user. Somebody could get your IP address/email if they had your machine in their host file, but at that time you didn’t have to worry about spam, viruses, or eavesdropping. You didn’t even need POP or IMAP, since messages were sent directly to the machine that you had access to. This is still possible, but nobody has a static IP or hosts their own mail server.
Yes. Even beyond that, my understanding is that the fundamental issues with email are that:
a. It is used as the basis for setting up a lot of accounts, but there is no clear way to establish identity with an email account.
b. SMTP is very dated, and the large amounts of metadata (if not the entire body of every mail as well) that goes through it is doomed to be in plaintext forever
c. Encryption is far from standard, PGP is very clunky and has problems of its own, and just doesn't have adoption. It works, somewhat, but it's not really good enough.
I skimmed a couple articles on the blog and my biggest problem with it is that the author is making a social rather than technological argument (which are all anyways nonsensical).
"Liked a movie? Don't call or IM your friend about it, email them a long form review instead."
"Leave all your group texts and instead send your friends a weekly email summary of your life."
Do you just hate having friends in general?