
Why The Greatest Online Tool, Email, Still Needs Disruption - mathouc
http://blog.frontapp.com/why-the-greatest-online-tool-email-still-needs-disruption/
======
bluetidepro
Solid article. I do hope to see more people enter the client side of the Email
world because personally, I think that is what is slacking. There needs to be
better Email clients that are more divorce than JUST supporting Gmail or JUST
being on your mobile device. I don't think that Email, in general, is broken.
I would rather just see better clients out there to make it more usable. More
usable by handling attachments better, or sorting, etc. I still have yet to
find a good Email client that works well with various Email account types (
_Gmail, Exchange, etc._ ) on different device types ( _Desktop or Mobile_ ).
Airmail [1] is probably the closest, but even that has tons of flaws. My
example, if you are using a fork ( _Email client_ ) to eat cereal, you don't
blame cereal ( _Email_ ) for not working correctly.

[1] [http://airmailapp.com/](http://airmailapp.com/)

~~~
mathouc
Thanks & totally agree: E-mail is neither broken or bad and we need to
construct better email clients. Airmail is really good for your individual
addresses. Here at Front we try to create the first collaborative email client
for companies.

~~~
krakensden
> collaborative email client for companies

I read that and thought "what does that even mean? Yet-another-busted-calendar
thing?"

Turns out it's actually multiplayer inboxes. Neat! Are you going to release an
API so the diehard Emacs users et al can work with everyone else?

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spindritf
As if a sticky, following you around top bar wasn't enough, they also have a
bottom bar? It's like reading from a driver's seat of a tank.

Where has this terrible trend originated?

~~~
dbpatterson
I know funny comments are frowned upon, and comments about funny comments are
even more frowned upon, but this made me laugh - perhaps because it is such a
ridiculous but apt description. Bravo!

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saraid216
Can we stop using "disruption" as a stand-in for "improvement"?

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normloman
Email's great. Your company just sucks.

I've seen it before. The boss doesn't want to defer responsibility. So they
have everything go through their approval. Suddenly, you're CCing the boss on
every thing you send, leaving behind a train of emails to cover your ass.
Soon, other bosses demand the same treatment, and before you know it,
everyone's inbox is cluttered with FWDs, and Reply-Alls, making sure nobody is
left out of the loop.

Your company should have an email policy.

The one UI improvement I can see: make the reply all button hard to find, so
morons don't accidentally click it.

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vonnik
Anyone who's trying to think of new ways to disrupt email should take a look
at this:
[http://visualidiot.com/articles/mailappapp](http://visualidiot.com/articles/mailappapp)

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onedev
Please can we retire the word "disruption"

~~~
normloman
We just need to disrupt the term disruption with a new word. The march of
progress continues!

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hpaavola
Email is not just IMAP and SMTP. It's much much more (even thought technically
speaking the following doesn't have anything to do with email).

Pretty much the only way to invite someone to a meeting at work is to send
invite over email. To figure out the place for your meeting, you use "email"
client for that. Because you have not sent emails previously to all
participants, you use "email" client to figure out the email address of those
persons. And the recipients use their "email" client to update their calendar
so they remember to come to the meeting.

So to disrupt email, you need to disrupt calendaring and address books and
what ever it is called when you search your co-workers email address by their
partial name or some wacky username.

It's a mess and a huge beast.

~~~
keithg
The reason email usage is so ubiquitous is because everyone has an email
address, and the protocols are well-known and universal.

How else would you propose inviting people to a meeting? Put a paper memo in
their mailbox asking for a written reply? Call everyone individually on the
phone? Walk around the office and gather everyone together?

If you're thinking about the meeting problem, do you propose a
meeting/calendar app/client or protocol that is separate from email? Then the
problem becomes saturating your user community with your new client. What do
you do if someone doesn't use your new meeting/calendar app/client?

I think what you are describing is a problem with meeting/calendars not email.

~~~
hpaavola
Because meetings and finding those email addresses are done through email
clients, you need to take those into account if you try to write new email
client.

Because there isn't any other way to send those invites, figure out the
meeting room and the recipients, you need to support those use cases also.
Otherwise people will not user your client because then they would have to
keep using the old one also.

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skermes
I don't get the logic that starts with "Technology is moving fast but email
doesn't change" and leads to the solution being papering over email's faults
with some slick UI. It's like the whole city's water pressure is failing and
everyone is complaining about faucet design instead of that we're using two
thousand year old aqueducts. We need more out of online communication than
email can give us at a really fundamental level. Suffice to say, my thoughts
on this are longer than an HN comment: [http://structur.al/articles/after-
email/](http://structur.al/articles/after-email/)

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abruzzi
This is like watching an old movie late at night on some VHF station (remember
those?) We like the story, but the ending doesn't change.

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cissou
Good points, though the article doesn't talk about attachments, which are a
terrible pain... It's seeing quite a lot of disruption, with the likes of We
Transfer or infinit.io, but now that Google Drive covers this for me I haven't
used those services as much.

~~~
bluedino
What makes attachments a pain?

~~~
xux
Because you have to upload them, wait for them to upload, limited by size,
zero control over files once they're sent, etc.

------
donpdonp
An exciting email client project is in development at
[http://mailpile.is/](http://mailpile.is/) \- a self hosted open-source gmail
work-alike. (live demo on the site)

------
pbreit
I'd like to see the UI be more IM-like.

Edit: Guess I can try to explain. Email messages have become much shorter and
back-and-forths are frequent (and not always best solved with a call). IM has
almost no spam so the idea would be to strike a better balance between only
hearing from people you know against the need for "cold emailing". Google's
new tabs sort of address this. IM still suffers from fragmentation so there'd
be a benefit from using the universal email protocols (so long as unwanted
messages could be contained).

