
Email Is Not Broken - thereyougo
https://kevq.uk/email-is-not-broken/
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Nasreddin_Hodja
> Spam is by far the biggest problem

It's not. The biggest problem is big email providers such like Gmail.

~~~
ysleepy
It is related.

You can't easily run your own mail server because the hurdles you have to
overcome to not land in gmails (outlook, etc.) spam folder - or even get
delivered at all. DKIM, SPOF, a good IP range.

Then your server itself will be exposed to spam and might make it a lot less
fun to use.

The big ones are not playing nice with smaller ones because of spam.

~~~
doublerabbit
I have a couple of dedicated servers in colocation and run my own email
server. It's taken more than two years of having all recipients clicking "not
spam" and applying to anti-blacklists, ensuring DKIM,SSL Et cetera to actually
obtain a decent success rate.

Google, Microsoft really are the destroyers of the internet.

~~~
nix23
That is so true, but for gmail/hotmail try that:

Gmail:

[https://support.google.com/mail/answer/81126?hl=en](https://support.google.com/mail/answer/81126?hl=en)

Hotmail (register as sender):

[https://sender.office.com/](https://sender.office.com/)

And a good spamtest:

[https://www.mail-tester.com/](https://www.mail-tester.com/)

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qwerty456127
There is a small number of things which, I believe, should be done to make
email great again:

1\. Deprecate the 7-bit stuff and make UTF-8 the default codepage.

2\. Give up the practice of overquoting (including full text of previous
messages into each message - clear message ID and relation tracking is
enough).

4\. Ban antivirus etc software signatures - misleading statements saying "the
message has been checked by an antivirus".

5\. Standardize the way inline pictures are attached.

6\. Stop prepending countless prefixes like Re:Fwd:RE: in the subject line

7\. Give up the practice of discouraging subject specification omission - this
leads to uninformative, irrelevant and misleading subject fields in many cases
when subject changes, is not clearly defined from the beginning or is hard to
describe concisely

8\. Standardize supported HTML&CSS subsets.

9\. Add support for MarkDown, AsciiDoc or some other lightweight markup.

10\. Disallow quoting an forwarding of decrypted versions of previously
encrypted content by default.

~~~
type0
> 4\. Ban antivirus etc software signatures - misleading statements saying
> "the message has been checked by an antivirus".

Many of those "antivirus companies" are selling usage data that they obtain
via pixel tracking. Explaining this to someone who uses such "antivirus" is
like explaining the difference between the web and the internet, those users
don't want to understand the difference.

~~~
qwerty456127
How to implement the changes I listed is a separate question. A sufficiently
influential organisation (like Google, Apple or a consortium of internet
service providers) interested to do this could succeed easily.

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catsarebetter
Email is an enormous market with probably thousands of use cases. I share his
perspective that email (for the most part) isn't broken FOR ME. B/c the way I
use email is pretty straightforward, it's basically another messaging platform
for my life. But I have a ton of friends that would kill for better email
clients b/c they have different use cases. And instead of killing, they are
paying for Superhuman, Hey, Front, etc. I always appreciate a different
perspective, that was an insightful read, thanks for sharing.

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kevsim
Wonder what the chances are that Hey eventually renames the Imbox. I don't
think it's going to be a cultural phenomenon and I think they'll probably get
tired of writing "Imbox (not a typo)".

~~~
yunruse
The direct proximity on a Qwerty and the non-obviousness of the pun makes it a
rather odd name of choice. Something more directly different like the “Inbag”
(because a “bag” is less personal and office-like than a “box”, I guess) would
have been a neater name, personally.

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hellofunk
I think it’s appropriate for a service that allows you to permanently block
senders, to make those senders know they couldn’t reach you. It’s just like if
someone calls you and you never answer the phone, they leave you a message.
They assume you got the message. But in this case, you don’t. I think there
are some things for what you’d like to be notified if someone could not
receive your email.

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marmot777
Email for interacting with clients (customers) has kind of replaced the phone
as the most important channel for businesses.

