

Email Will Never Die - The Man Who Invented It Reveals Why - mtgx
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/email-will-never-die-the-man-who-invented-it-reveals-why.php

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Mvandenbergh
The reason that "email" will never die is that the limitations of the human
mind compel user interface designers to employ the principle of least surprise
and to extend existing metaphors slowly. In practice, many people are using
"email" which runs on internal Exchange systems and is accessed using Outlook
or web applications. When I send an email via Gmail on my "phone" (Which is as
much a camera that can make calls as it is a telephone that can take pictures
- the only reason we use one metaphor and not the other is path dependence) to
someone else using Gmail, I am "sending them an email" without using the
protocols that the original implementers of email had in mind.

It's the same reason that we can call a web site a "page" or a "document"
despite the fact that a modern web site is actually several programs running
insider your browser (flash, custom JS, HTML rendering) working together with
programs running on a number of different servers. That's nothing like a paper
document, but we use the metaphor because it's been extended a little bit at a
time.

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wtvanhest
Email can only be replaced by another system which does not require you to be
on any particular network (decentralized).

Email doesn't die because gmail can send to hotmail and to every other domain.

The entrepreneurs trying to replace it will focus their effort on one
exclusive platform which they know they could monetize if they hit a tipping
point. Unfortunately, the very motivation to profit is what creates the
biggest problem.

The only true solution to email is a decentralized system, that many other
companies could utilize. Unfortunately, once you have a system which is easy
to create competitors you get instant commoditization. Once you have that, the
economics of the idea suck which means that VC, and other investment money
will never chase that system. In other words, a decentralized system is
worthless from the idea stage due to the expectation of commoditization.

That is why email is “unlikely” to be replaced.

~~~
thebigshane
That sounds nice and I hope you are right. But I can certainly see a scenario
where one of these walled-gardens gets big enough to where most people
communicate using this platform and email ends up being like usenet or irc.
Email can never be disabled (right?) so we'll still be able to use it
technically, but it could cease to be practical for everyday business and
personal correspondence.

~~~
jmathai
We're already there. I can get a faster response from 75% of my friends by
sending them a message on Facebook or Twitter.

It really sucks because you're so limited to what program you use. Especially
Facebook and soon Twitter too.

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ArekDymalski
Oh, so V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai did not invent email? ;)

~~~
sebg
V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai: "As a high school student in 1978, he developed an
electronic mail system, which he called "EMAIL".

Ray Tomlinson: "In the fall of 1971, Tomlinson sent the first network email".

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Maascamp
I've been saying for a while that the only problem with email is one of
management. As the volume of incoming emails increases we need better tools to
avoid a similar increase in the amount of time we spend checking it.

To that end (shameless plug) some friends and I have been building Lightermail
to solve this problem for us. We're getting close to opening the service up to
a wider pool of private beta users and would love to have some HN users and
their feedback in the mix. If interested head over to
<https://lightermail.com> and we'll be sure to get back to you in the next
couple weeks with an invite code.

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webwanderings
How long did it take for the traditional post office to die? It didn't die
even after the arrival of FedEx or DHLs.

Email is a basic and all inclusive communication method. People later on have
added and tagged along their businesses to ride on the same method. Those who
are facebooking, tweetering, chatting, texting, etc, are still communicating
on the same basic principle which binds the email.

However, headlines like "email will never die" or "email is dead" are as
stupid as they can be.

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bornhuetter
I suspect that the people who have been calling the death of email have never
worked in enterprise.

~~~
lmm
Email died in the enterprise a decade or two ago; enterprises run on
Exchange/Outlook now.

~~~
jedberg
I'm not sure if you're trying to be ironic or you really don't know that
Exchange is just a (mostly) RFC compliant SMTP server and a (mostly) RFC
compliant IMAP server rolled into one.

~~~
lmm
My point was that Exchange is not compliant enough to be usable from a non-
Outlook email client. At my current job I run a windows VM just to run Outlook
in it; at my previous^2 job I had a second physical machine for the same thing
(though I eventually put mysql on it).

~~~
jedberg
> My point was that Exchange is not compliant enough to be usable from a non-
> Outlook email client.

Well, you kind of have a point there. I use Apple mail and iCal against our
corporate Exchange, but when I have to schedule a meeting, I either have to
log into the Windows terminal server or use the outlook web interface to do it
reliably.

It would be nice if there were an RFC for calendaring protocols, even if that
RFC was just codifying Exchange.

~~~
mattmanser
There is, isn't there?

<http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2445.txt>

Google seems to attach an ics to all the cal events it sends out.

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saurik
That is only a mechanism for encapsulating an event and giving it to someone
else: it doesn't really help any of the actual use cases people have for the
kinds of group calendar management that everyone is used to having from
Exchange.

The more related standard that could have done this is ICAP, but that spec
never happened and died as a draft back in 1998, long enough ago that the
acronym got reused in 2003 by RFC 3507 for something unrelated to calendar
access.

<http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-oleary-icap-04>

Right now, it seems like all of the effort is behind CalDAV (which is based on
WebDAV), which actually has some published RFCs behind it (dating back through
2007) and multiple clients (including Apple's iCal and Google Calendar).

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CalDAV>

~~~
mattmanser
I see, thanks for the info!

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akg
I believe GMail already does the chat <-> email conversation quite seamlessly

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webwanderings
I thought the inventor of Email was this guy:
<http://www.inventorofemail.com/>

~~~
abruzzi
Reading that, it seems like there is no one inventor of email, but a bunch of
different solutions, perhaps leading to the 1981 RFC for SMTP by Jonathan B.
Postel, which I would guess is the beginning of the actual current email
implementation:

<http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc788>

