
All you need is e-mail, e-mail. E-mail is all you need. - thebdmethod
http://monkeymace.com/post/23937902775/all-you-need-is-e-mail-e-mail-e-mail-is-all-you-need
======
drostie
Email has a lot of warts besides its obvious graces, especially when you look
at the back-end of how emails are actually stored and transferred and
authenticated. So I think we as programmers are naturally drawn to the idea of
developing the email-killer. The central problem with the dreamers seems to be
that they're not dreaming deeply enough.

Email is a communications multitool which leverages the whole human
subconscious to effect its various uses: a human is supposed to know whether
this is a "your boss demands that you do this" email or a "your friend wants
you to look at her cute cat" email or "your uncle is ranting about fluoride in
the water again" email. Most email killers do not and cannot eliminate this
mental overhead. Graham only says "other people should be able to add to my
todo list" -- he's not killing email, he's considering an email-aware todo
list. That's very common. Skype is not an email killer precisely because it
doesn't dream big enough: it is a realtime messaging protocol which hit it big
because it worked with video. Trello is not an email killer precisely because
it's for organizing groups. RSS is not an email killer because it only solves
the limited problem of keeping aware of new content.

Email does all of these tasks -- poorly, but it does them. If you want to
really kill email, you need to offer the core functionality effortlessly.
Email II would understand "circles" of friends automatically, so that there is
only an "inbox" for those people who are contacting you for the very first
time. Like syndication, Email II would host the content on the publisher's web
server to be downloaded whenever the client wants -- this has spam-deterrent
effects, since the network doesn't take responsibility for the content. It
would hopefully allow us to unify mailing lists. We can protect privacy with
automatic cryptography; "chris::example.com" can stand for a public key which
is stored on the example.com machines. The email killer needs to be good at
segmenting messages so that we can say "This is the text of my invitation to a
wedding, but it also comes with a standard-appointment-form where I describe
where and when it is, so that it can be rapidly added to your 'upcoming dates'
in the relevant social circle." (Since this must merge with dates and todo-
lists, presumably example.com contains its own list of stuff which
chris::example.com has stored for his own use.)

And I want to at this point admit defeat: because I think even _those_ ideas
are _not daring enough_. The email killer is probably going to have to do even
more than all of that, and my own imagination becomes limited.

~~~
joe_the_user
Indeed, that email has everything inside is as much its strength as its
weakness. It is as unlikely to go away as it is unlikely to remain unfiltered
and unchanged.

Where the "killing" begins and the extension begins is basically fuzzy.

You could create an "Email II" that had present day email as its transmission
layer or which had some other transmission layer as it's base. There's a wide
area of innovation still available here.

~~~
taliesinb
This. It's email clients that are broken, not email.

For example, the most imaginative thing we can do with long email threads
appears to be to flatten them and render them as a list.

Not to mention filtering and categorizing: in gmail, you can't even check in a
filter if someone is in your contacts -- your _gmail contacts_ \-- let alone
whether they fall into a particular contact group.

~~~
joe_the_user
I feel like that's weirdly true and false.

Yes, email clients are "broken". It is "easy to see" that fixing them is the
key to really useful communication.

The weird thing is that any time you get one of these "broken" mediums, its
users nonetheless become adapted to it. Even the stupidest original behavior
becomes a part of a common, even socially, understood medium and changing it
thus becomes harder.

An old girlfriend of mine was not terribly computer literate but understood
the trick of clicking on an email link in Internet Explorer, having an outlook
express window come up and then copying the resulting email-address to her
webmail account to send an email. Once she learned this trick, she was far
less concerned about the round-about-clunkiness involved in the whole process
than I would be. It was just "how computers worked" and a simpler process she
didn't know would quite possibly confuse her. She probably wouldn't even know
that Outlook Express was an email client itself, for example.

~~~
taliesinb
That's true. But I think this argues that GMail and Outlook will remain
stagnant, not that _email_ will stagnant.

------
kijin
> Why build a new messaging product when the basic functionality of email
> combined _with a little effort from the user_ can achieve the same result?

Well, to begin with, users don't want to expend even a little bit of effort.
Isn't that why everyone is trying to minimize friction in the sign-up process?

I agree that e-mail, as a protocol, is a powerful tool that is often
misunderstood. But we really need _e-mail clients_ that allow us to keep track
of a large number of threads without getting lost of feeling swamped. Gmail
tries to do this to some extent, but it's far from perfect.

~~~
joe_the_user
You'd be surprised at the effort that users will and won't engage in.

I know plenty of utterly non-technical users who have strong opinions about
what are the uses of an email list versus the uses of a web forum versus the
uses of a Facebook group page.

Which means, to me, that on the one hand, these folks would be interested in a
new messaging approach if it was strongly distinguished from the functionality
of email and on the other hand, these users quite likely wouldn't bother with
something that seem too much like email. Essential, it seems like average
people are up for multiple communications mediums but treat each medium as
kind of a given, not something that's going to evolve.

I'd be interested in ways of dealing with this.

~~~
kijin
> _average people are up for multiple communications mediums but treat each
> medium as kind of a given, not something that's going to evolve._

People have been thinking like that for a long time about a lot of things.
They have strong opinions about when to use a car vs. truck vs. minivan, or
when to take the bus vs. the subway. They also have strong opinions about the
purpose of each room in their home and each piece of furniture in their
office. This is OK because most of these things don't change very often, and
when they do (e.g. a new subway route or a major renovation), the change is
obvious. Today's technology, on the other hand, changes very quickly and in
subtle ways. It's hard to catch up with all of that, so the inertia becomes
more noticeable. I shared a Dropbox folder with my father a while ago, but he
still sends me large files as email attachments.

------
ajdecon
I've wondered a lot about why e-mail isn't used more as a backend for
different services. But as far as I can tell, messaging products proliferate
because their creators want to create profitable products rather than
distributed protocols.

E-mail is a pretty good group of protocols for distributing arbitrary messages
between different locations on the Internet. It's easy to imagine how all
sorts of messaging and social network products could be implemented as a
specialized e-mail client with a good user experience. Their forms might be
slightly different than they have now, but they'd serve approximately the same
consumer purpose.

For example, you could build a social networking "client" with e-mail as a
backend. Status updates, photos, etc. would be distributed to all your
contacts via email, and the client would produce a "timeline" based on the
data in its mailbox, without ever showing the user the original messages.

But you give up a lot of control that way, and it's harder to monetize. What
developers want (and users too, to be honest) is a centralized service that
they can control, mine data with, and sell products or show ads. A distributed
protocol, while in some ways more powerful (and less dependent on a fallible
central authority!), doesn't achieve the real business aims.

~~~
superuser2
Email is decentralized to _us_. We have the very specific skils, attitudes,
and patience required to buy a domain name, rent a VPS or dedicated server and
configure SSH public keys, Postfix/Courier, DNS, SPF, DKIM, and keep it up to
date and patched, audit it to make sure it stays secure, and detect/respond to
intrusions. And even then, unless you are going to roll your own emergency
power, multiple redundant HVAC, and fire supression, as well as shell out
hundreds of dollars a month for significant upload bandwidth to your house or
apartment, _your data and encryption keys are still in the physical possession
of a corporate datacenter._

Email is most certainly not decentralized to anyone outside the IT world. They
can, with extreme difficulty, move between providers, but they are still
dependent on a provider.

Email decreases the volume of users that mediocre players can own (Google does
email better than anyone else, so it gets a significant share of the market)
but users are still going to be owned by someone.

~~~
unimpressive
>unless you are going to roll your own emergency power, multiple redundant
HVAC, and fire supression, as well as shell out hundreds of dollars a month
for significant upload bandwidth to your house or apartment, your data and
encryption keys are still in the physical possession of a corporate
datacenter.

You don't need significant upload bandwidth for email. Or download bandwidth
either. (Unless you're expecting constant DDOS attacks.) Or emergency
services. The HVAC might be a good idea.

You could have made your point a lot better by just saying that 99.9% of users
will _never_ set up a home server to do email. Which is the truth.

~~~
josephkern
You probably should be expecting consistant DDOS attacks, or at least
aggressive scanning.

OP failed to mention setting up DKIM and SPF as well.

------
chaddyar
+1

E-mail is incredibly underutilized as a technology.

One could make an argument the majority of instagram's (of course not the
filters) functionality could be handled by e-mail, but the "perceived need" to
use apps on the smartphone that you purchased for a large percentage of your
monthly income but the experience of using the app is difficult to discount.

Another point worth considering is that much of the functionality associated
with Path is available in Facebook if you want to play around with settings,
but for some reason Path still seems relevant.

~~~
erikpukinskis
It'd take a long time to type in those 20 email addresses every time you snap
a photo on your vacation.

~~~
unimpressive
Any decent email client should do autocomplete.

Even if that's not the case, this is something the client should handle.

~~~
prostoalex
And then you remember you forgot the 21st one, and your choices are either to
email the original 20 plus the added address, or email the 21st one
separately, thus creating a one-off thread.

------
mbesto
I've thought about writing this post so many times.

E-mail is not broken, but we'll continually try to convince ourselves that our
inabilities to be collaborative and communicate properly is because we're not
given the right medium to do so. This is bullshit. People who are terrible at
communication will continue to be terrible at communication regardless of what
tool they use.

The hammer isn't broken, the carpenter is. Fix the carpenter.

EDIT: I should add - I see many tools that try to replace e-mail aren't
largely trying to fix the problems with communication, but rather they are
trying to assign accountability. This is great for bosses (or "controllers"),
but not necessarily great for everyone. I've simplified this too much and
could go into way more detail if I had the time.

~~~
thebdmethod
I agree with you here.

My point of writing this post was the illustrate that in the pursuit of
ultimate convenience we sometimes loose sight of the importance doing
committing to new behaviors or overcoming our own laziness.

And technology should not enable laziness, or replace effort, but rather
elevate and extend and magnify existing effort.

~~~
jtheory
It's a very good point, and reminds of the "Confessions of a Recovering
Lifehacker" post: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4012852>

It's worth doing some approximate cost/gain math now & again.... E.g., my core
goal is to better communicate about important things with family/friends. To
that end I have... spent about 30 hours of my spare time this month
_implementing a solution to save me 30 seconds per email_ , and about 1 hour
actually writing 5 actual emails. QED.

Side note: in your message here (and twice in the blog post), you're using the
verb "loose" (means "set free") when you mean "lose" (means "fail to retain").

~~~
monkeymace
I like the formula you invoke here.

Looking back, if I spent the same amount of time messaging and communicating
with people that I spent building an app to facilitating future communication
I would be much better off, thought more thoughts, and grown closer to more
people.

(Also, thanks for keeping me honest with the "loose" typos, they've been
corrected.

------
pre
Email is awesome, certainly. But if everyone actually started a mass-email to
all their friends about every little topic they post to a Facebook status
update, I'd call 'em pretty damned rude abusing my email inbox like that and
my email client would need even better filters than it already has to fight
the commercial spam.

Experiments to find things better than email will mostly fail, but I think we
still need more experiments. There must be something better than all that spam
for a start.

~~~
mbrock
You point to the #1 biggest wonderful feature of email.

Sending email is an act that incurs responsibility. WHY are we sending all
this shit around? Email makes it clear. I have made a decision that you should
spend your time reading and understanding this text. If that's rude, tell me
and I'll stop.

This article strikes a chord because email is about communication instead of
endless "sharing," broadcasting, forwarding, signalling.

I'm awash in a sea of tweets and notifications but when I see a familiar name
as the sender of an actual goddamn email, then I feel reality existing again.

I have a friend who can't stop dreaming about hypothetical advances in social
networking that will let us do all kinds of wonderful things, but it'll never
be good enough, convenient enough — no technology will ever do the real work
of social caring, no shiny app will ever let humans communicate in a way
that's easy and non-messy.

There's some kind of consumerism-type ideology around social networks and apps
that works like that of beauty magazines and television. TV is boring so
Facebook is the new Friends.

It's all so happy, creative, wonderful. There should be a social network that
says "fuck you" to all the cutesy glitter on the top of the Maslow pyramid —
that's only about, say, "sharing" expressions of the dull lethargy that comes
from exhausting oneself with work or work-seeking in a crisis economy.

Sorry for ranting, but this deeply-rooted nausea w/r/t the social web is
something that doesn't come out clearly for me all the time, and when it does
I feel like I should channel it to get some affect going, because everything
is so tediously pastel and we need to change shit up.

~~~
mdm_
Hi. Long-time lurker here; I just created an HN account to reply to you. Your
post expresses some of the things I've been feeling about social media that I
haven't been able to express very well myself (I had to look up "Maslow
pyramid"). The sort of unease and nausea, the whole thing just feels somehow
creepy and wrong.

I deactivated my Facebook account long ago because of this feeling. I think
what it boils down to is that I don't think I should know so much stuff about
my friends, family, co-workers, etc without having obtained that knowledge by
directly interacting with them in meaningful ways over long periods of time.
The Facebook model _appears_ to let me know people better, but it's in a
shallow, passive way and encourages me to conceptualize people as caricatures,
assembled from a handful of their most obvious or outstanding personality
traits. I realize this stuff has been around for a long time, but FB turbo-
charges it, and I feel like it's an extremely poor way to "know" people.

The really messed up part is that while the effects Facebook seems to have are
often anti-social (think of how many times you've been out with someone and
they're too busy checking status updates on their phone to carry on a real,
actual conversation), people are labelled anti-social for not participating.

~~~
unimpressive
>The really messed up part is that while the effects Facebook seems to have
are often anti-social (think of how many times you've been out with someone
and they're too busy checking status updates on their phone to carry on a
real, actual conversation), people are labelled anti-social for not
participating.

Your certainly not the first person to point this out. [0]

[0]: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_%28novel%29>

~~~
jasomill
_When our life ceases to be inward and private, conversation degenerates into
mere gossip. We rarely meet a man who can tell us any news which he has not
read in a newspaper, or been told by his neighbor; and, for the most part, the
only difference between us and our fellow is, that he has seen the newspaper,
or been out to tea, and we have not. In proportion as our inward life fails,
we go more constantly and desperately to the post-office. You may depend on
it, that the poor fellow who walks away with the greatest number of letters,
proud of his extensive correspondence, has not heard from himself this long
while._

 _I do not know but it is too much to read one newspaper a week. I have tried
it recently, and for so long it seems to me that I have not dwelt in my native
region. The sun, the clouds, the snow, the trees say not so much to me. You
cannot serve two masters. It requires more than a day's devotion to know and
to possess the wealth of a day._

(Henry David Thoreau, _Life Without Principle_ [1], 1854)

[1] <http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Life_Without_Principle>

------
Aftershock21
In social networks, companies are not trying to fix email or group
communication because its broken. They are trying to produce users for their
specific applications. If they use Email as a substrate for communication,
they have no user. They end up being just a software vendor.

------
unimpressive
It helps to remember that the first social networks (See: Usenet) were built
out of email.

EDIT: All email needs is the ability to display information like the web can.
Properly formatted and threaded.

~~~
vannevar
So are some of the later ones. Twitter built a multi-billion dollar business
by duplicating the functionality of email and listserv in a proprietary
service.

~~~
MichaelGG
Listserv had an SMS-oriented design? It automatically made every user their
own independent channel that other users could choose to subscribe to?

I don't use Twitter, but saying it's just email/listserv is rather silly.
Also, it's only a mutli-billion dollar business by investment; it doesn't
generate even 1bn in revenue.

~~~
vannevar
Email-to-SMS gateways have been around a long time. And sure, an email
provider could set up a service that automatically gives every email account
their own listserv. I'd agree that Twitter's valuation is arguable, but the
investor consensus is that it's a multi-billion dollar business, whatever the
revenue is.

------
jasonjei
I know all the people pushing for social networks will disagree, but I think
email can be fixed, just like static web pages have been fixed to do
asynchronous JavaScript to provide dynamic web experiences.

I think the problem is the cure is much worse than the disease. The cures of
using social network tools is often an enclosed, controlled network such as
Twitter or Facebook, which puts control of the network in the hands of few.

Instead of trying to replace email, I think we should "fix" it rather than
trying to replace it. Some advocate using Web/REST/HTTP to replace email; I
think email isn't that doomed.

Remember, the popularity of email is because anybody can start an email
service. Nobody can just use Facebook or Twitter; you have to have the
approval of an inner circle authority. Imagine if every Web site required MPAA
or RIAA control, and they prevented even non-infringing material online using
SOPA!

~~~
slowpoke
> _just like static web pages have been fixed to do asynchronous JavaScript to
> provide dynamic web experiences_

If by that you are trying to imply that email needs more awful HTML junk and
other "features", stop. Now. That would finally destroy email, not fix it.

------
mrhonza
I couldn't agree more. I deal with a large number of older people on a daily
basis as part of my volunteer work. Getting these folk to use the Internet in
any way is painful. For example, I send out these PDF reports once a week.
It's the same template every time but for accounting purposes, it has to be
done. I wrote a Python script to generate those for me and I stick them up on
a simple website on S3. The script them emails everyone to let them know the
report is available and that they can download it. It includes a link to the
report and to the website with all the other reports. These guys absolutely
cannot open a browser and view the PDF in the browser. If it's not an
attachment to the email, they don't know what to do.

TLDR --- Email is great. It's so simple that even non-techies get it.

~~~
cdcarter
Lately my industry has hit a new trend that I've fallen in love. Basically,
each night all the departments on a live performance receive performance
reports, reports listing what went well and what went wrong in the
performance, as well as start times, run times, audience size, etc...

In the olden days, these were posted or hand distributed. Then over time they
moved to being emailed out as PDF attachments, still formatted to perfect
beauty as the old printed copies. Now more and more, the attachment is forgone
and the data is just typed directly into the body of the email. Sure it
doesn't have the glitz of a pristine PDF with the production font and header,
but with one glance I can see the numbers I want to see from my iPhone.

I find it funny that it took us until mobile devices to get to the point where
we are using email as intended, instead of as a vector for attaching PDFs.

~~~
jasomill
Not to mention pointless Word documents, "templates" that include background
images and difficult-to-read colors and fonts, signatures with embedded
artwork, screensful of pointless legalese, and top-posted histories of
conversations almost, if not entirely unrelated to the present message.

In other words, it's not at all clear to me how _additional_ features would
help decrease email's signal-to-noise problems when users themselves _choose
to create the noise_.

------
shawnee_
_All I was doing was avoiding doing the work, the real effort of producing the
content that actually mattered. I was hiding from honest sharing with the
conviction that the tools were not good enough yet._

This is a great insight. Building the platform is sometimes only half the
battle -- getting users to produce the content that makes the product
interesting , valuable (and eventually profitable) seems like the challenge
these days. Because the further entrenched people become to the platform that
houses their "content", the more loyal they become. Facebook is the most
obvious example, and a lot of Facebook communications read like watered-down
email OK for public consumption.

------
chmike
Mail is broken in many ways. Because there is no authentication and thus
forged from addresses, error messages can't be returned. Relays are allowed to
modify mails which invalidates hashes and signatures. Attached and included
documents are encoded in base64. ...

The main usage problem is abuse of this communication channel. While our email
addresses should be public so that anyone in the world may contact us, we are
forced to use hidden emails to protect ourselves. This Is the reason of the
success of messaging system limited to friends. There is much less abuse.

The problem was known with fax, and will happen with phones if the phone call
price drops to zero.

------
taliesinb
This reminds me of something most new communication media seem _not_ to
realize: no matter how fancy your new thing is, not everyone will want to try
it initially, so for God's sake make it _bridge_ to email. Otherwise it will
become a ghetto.

I don't think the Wave people understood this; if they had, Wave might have
turned out differently.

Asana, on the other hand, made a big deal out of this.

~~~
unimpressive
Making something bridge to email doesn't seem _terribly_ difficult. SMTP is;
as the name would imply, simple. (At least it seems simple.)

~~~
taliesinb
To be a true bridge you need to be bidirectional: to do that you'd need IMAP,
not SMTP. IMAP is a bit of a stateful mess of a protocol, unfortunately.

------
TimPC
E-mail has a culture around it that doesn't work for many tasks. It's called
"inbox zero". Basically for most e-mail users they attempt to clear out their
inbox to zero new messages every time they go to e-mail. This means if you
want to do things that require thought over a period of time you'll almost
always have someone using e-mail the wrong way for the task.

~~~
monkeymace
I gave up on keeping on tidy inbox long ago. I have 16,794 unread emails in my
Gmail account. I feel like keeping my email organized would easily become a
full time job.

------
thebdmethod
I am curious about anyone currently trying to build a communication tool, and
their argument for why it is a better solution than email.

~~~
pfraze
I started linkjs[1] so I could create an extensible inbox/social app that
supports multiple services and interfaces. The idea is to build tool
environments around communication, much like the environments we already have
around processing (e.g. the unix shell).

Email will be one of the services the comm environment integrates, so it's
more of an extension than a replacement.

1\. <https://github.com/pfraze/linkjs>

------
rythie
The problem is that email is so broken, you could sort of fix it, but people
have been trying for years and it's easier to start again. For example we
still have these problems:

\- No proof that people are who they say they are, we have PGP/GPG but no one
uses it.

\- Related to the above, I can't control who can send me email, people use
different email addresses and any address can be faked anyway.

\- No accepted way to post short messages, people still post long email with
big disclaimers and/or adverts at the bottom

\- Poor email client support for sending/receiving large numbers of pictures,
with thumbnails and full versions

\- Lack of any real semantic support tags, share a single link, geo
information etc.

\- No way to public display of your timeline (i.e. twitter)

\- No obvious way to have all contact's photos against emails [seems to be
coming in now somehow, not sure how really]

\- Inability to remove content you accidentally sent

\- User expectations that email works in a certain way and doesn't need to
change.

~~~
cdcarter
Of these issues, I only see #1 and #4 as real. Some of them perhaps you could
elaborate on? What do you mean by #3? I send short messages all the time. I
just write a short message and hit send. Why would you even want #6? Email is
designed as a private mechanism, this seems to go against the very reason I
use email...

~~~
rythie
Most people don't do #3 and without tools either limiting (twitter) or coaxing
you (facebook) you get big run on messages, which you don't want to read.

You want #6 because many people are trying to share you thoughts with
everyone, and the post is titled "All you need is e-mail, e-mail. E-mail is
all you need."

~~~
Zak
I may be in the minority, but I don't understand why most people on twitter
wish to consume most tweets. Outside of a synchronous or semi-synchronous
(e.g. IRC) conversation, It's pretty hard to say anything worth saying in 140
characters. I hate twitter and I hate tl;dr as a meme. HN as a community tends
to encourage longer posts for the same reason; they're more likely to be
interesting.

It works better for sharing content, but I don't usually want to see all
content that a particular person wants to share. Other mechanisms work better
for getting a list of content to consume: RSS offers all the content from a
particular source, and sites like HN and reddit show recent content that a
particular community finds interesting.

The only thing I see twitter as _good_ for is disseminating facts to a large
audience when a non-internet-capable phone is the the only communication tool
available. It has served that function a number of times during war, natural
disasters and other breakdowns of civil infrastructure. Even so, I'd rather
consume someone else's aggregation of the facts rather than track down which
users to follow myself and unfollow them after the event is over. That's what
reporters (including bloggers) are for.

------
chadyj
This is a timely article for me as I am just about to launch a email startup
called Sendicate that adds tools to simplify and empower email-based
communication. Another way of looking at it is like a content publishing app
for email. For those interested here are some more thoughts on what I am
building <http://www.chadyj.com/tagged/sendicate>

Email certainly has some issues but it is also infinitely flexible and
powerful and drives a lot of our day to day interaction with the internet. I
am surprised that there is such a drive to re-invent email when a few
specialized tools that add value to email will solve many use cases without
re-inventing the wheel.

------
verganileonardo
Email is OK as a communication tool. But companies use it as a task/to-do list
and to work together on tasks.

Email is terrible to achieve this. You will end up with lots of emails and
multiple versions of the same documents...

That is why I wish someone fix email! :)

~~~
gklitt
I agree with this. The business context is really the one where email is most
broken.

Tools like Basecamp and Trello do a good job with project management, but they
aren't a 100% substitute for all the various functions of email. I sometimes
think that a hybrid between email and a forum/bulletin board would be the best
way to manage complex communication, instead of convoluted cc lists...

~~~
stan_rogers
You _do_ realise that you've just described Notes, right? If it were a new
product, without all the baggage of having to be backward-compatible to the
late paleolithic (R2 in '93) and with a UI consistent with everything else on
the host OS, folks'd be all over it.

------
waldr
I agree with a lot of the points here, Email in itself isn't broken. I've
spent the last 2 months studying users email habits, who sends what?, what do
they receive?, what are the conversations like?, how is the platform being
used? etc.. the conclusion is simple email is incredibly personal each single
users works in their own way.

The problem is where these habits collide, the way I receive an email from you
doesn't match how I'd construct and send an email, therefore whatever I
receive is going to cause me a problem.

------
arthurrr
I met a nice girl who went back to her home country and we exchanged email
addresses. But the emails we sent each other ended up in the spam folder. This
is unacceptable. Email is unreliable. As much as I hate Facebook, it actually
works for these situations. Email is ok as a secondary communications tool,
but I would never build anything that relies on it.

~~~
acuozzo
> This is unacceptable. Email is unreliable.

Isn't this a spam-filter problem? How does a bad spam-filter imply that
e-mail's unreliable?

Did you even __attempt__ to configure your spam-filter(s)?

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benblodgett
I think the broken part of email exists in business communication, in my
experience it's grossly overused. It becomes an endless todo list that
requires processing (eg, response, forward, assign, done, etc). This is
inefficient and distracts us from our primary functions.

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AznHisoka
Email, as well as IRC. Because email doesn't handle real-time spontaneous
casual online conversations.

Twitter is a poor way of doing it, and Facebook is just email + shallow
egotistical dopamine hacks.

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ChrisArchitect
yeah yeah,email is the original great killer app of the internet. But as far
as collaboration, it is full of problems and for the average user just causes
problems and confusion and makes people bend over backwards to try and keep
up. All the new developments are about taking it to a new level...beyond the
original idea. Meaning less silos, easier many-to-many and one-to-many etc...

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baby
I don't agree, even if Gmail brought a lot to emails (threads and antispam)
it's still a problem that, in my opinion, facebook message tackles.

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aufreak3
I guess the author forgot to add "... and oh yeah, blogs too" to the title.

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nazar
I can't help thinking about Google Wave :)

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coderdude
Email is not great. My biggest problem with email is that it's unreliable.
There have been so many times where I'd send an email and have it never even
reach its destination. I'm not talking about a legitimate message being marked
as spam and tucked away in some folder, but not even delivered and my email
server isn't notified of this shenanigans (I'm looking at you, mac.com and
gmail.com). This is I'm sure because some server down the chain messed up
somewhere.

How can you track this down? There is no way to even know if your email made
it to a person's inbox (like a kind of forced "received receipt" -- I don't
care if they read it yet).

~~~
trimbo
> There have been so many times where I'd send an email and have it never even
> reach its destination

This is easily explained if you were hosting your own Postfix or something.
There are a significant number of hoops that legitimate email senders must
jump through in order to ensure their email goes through properly. DKIM
signing, SPF records, rDNS, etc. These are some of the ways for gmail and
apple identify you as a legit sender as opposed to a spammer.

> I'm not talking about a legitimate message being marked as spam and tucked
> away in some folder, but not even delivered and my email server isn't
> notified of this shenanigans

In general, ISPs won't want to let spammers know they're are bulking email.
That's why you aren't told.

~~~
coderdude
I suspect that my host's email servers are at least partially to blame for
some of these issues. Like a bad egg or two signed up and screwed everyone
else over. From what I've gathered Amazon SES is a reliable alternative since
they apparently jump through the hoops for you. That might be where I'm
turning to for a solution.

It makes sense that they wouldn't notify you if they tanked your email because
they think it's "super spam" or something. It is frustrating though.
Especially since I'm talking about very low volume emails (not a newsletter or
anything). Do you know why some emails are silently dropped while others are
marked as junk and allowed to pass through?

~~~
trimbo
> From what I've gathered Amazon SES is a reliable alternative since they
> apparently jump through the hoops for you. That might be where I'm turning
> to for a solution.

Yes, definitely... at least for commercial sending. SendGrid, SES, Mailgun,
Mailchimp - there are a lot of solutions for outbound commercial / bulk and
they're reasonably priced and easy to use. They take care of all of the nuts
and bolts.

For personal email, I started seeing this change a long time ago and stopped
hosting my own at least ten years ago (around the time 1/2 of my DSL got
consumed by spam bandwidth). At this juncture, I keep all of my domains on
Gmail.

> Do you know why some emails are silently dropped while others are marked as
> junk and allowed to pass through?

Probably depends on spam score as to whether it gets bulk foldered or killed
immediately, and the ISP.

~~~
coderdude
Thanks for letting me pick your brain. Time to take a serious look at moving
things over to dedicated mail provider.

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drivebyacct2
NO. I want to scream. NO. I just began working at a company that uses
"distribution groups" (mailing lists) as a "social network". It's awful as
it's not threaded, it's not archived, it's not searchable. It's terrible.

~~~
TY
What if someone could create a new messaging system that

 _works like previous messaging systems such as email and Usenet, but instead
of sending a message along with its entire thread of previous messages, or
requiring all responses to be stored in each user's inbox for context, message
documents that contain complete threads of multimedia messages (blips) are
perpetually stored on a central server. These documents are shared with
collaborators who can be added or removed from the document at any point
during a document's existence._

And I could add much more to my wish list. If only someone, with lots of
brains and financial resources would come up with something like this and push
it to gain wide acceptance then we would forget about the horror that email is
very quickly...

For some more info: <http://bit.ly/1aAMNd>

~~~
nickbarnwell
Doesn't that more or less describe Google Wave?

~~~
seabee
The link exactly describes (for it is) Google Wave.

~~~
nickbarnwell
Well, that is embarrassing. Currently tethered to an EDGE connection and
didn't click for fear of a ginormous page on the other end. Serves me right!

