
Ask HN: What will be the future for email? - anacleto
Email is probably one of the the oldest (and most used) services of all time. Email killed the Fax and Letter Writing in general. Today, it is the de facto communication tool for businesses.<p>In recent years were born hundreds of services that have tried to make email less painful.<p>In your opinion what will be the future for email?
======
coned88
> In recent years were born hundreds of services that have tried to make email
> less painful.

Most if not all of those services were proprietary and tied to the success of
one company. Only the Darkmail alliance to the best of my knowledge is
actually putting out a new open protocol not tied to their bottom line. Not
sure if they have actually put out an RFC yet.

It's like people saying Slack will one day will replace IRC or XMPP. It will
never happen. It may if slack started as it's own protocol with a simple RFC
and the company was an implementation of said open protocol. Offering a paid
option with the option to also do it by yourself for free.

The future of email will start with a new open standard and RFC everybody has
access to. It will offer benefits not facilitated by current technologies and
will be easily adopted when such happens. Until this happens though there is
no reason to replace email. Companies are not going dive into one company and
create some massive monopoly who will then hold them hostage.

~~~
chimeracoder
> It's like people saying Slack will one day will replace IRC or XMPP. It will
> never happen.

XMPP has already been "replaced" by Google Hangouts, Facebook Chat, and
WhatsApp, which are all proprietary extensions of XMPP. Very few of my friends
use a chat service which allows XMPP federation. Facebook chat doesn't even
allow you to use a third-party XMPP client anymore.

"Embrace, extend, extinguish" is still very much alive.

~~~
e12e
I use fb chat with chat secure on android. Xmpp seems to work fine?

~~~
fragmede
How? According to
[https://developers.facebook.com/docs/chat](https://developers.facebook.com/docs/chat)
XMPP access was disabled at the end of April.

~~~
e12e
Oh. Well, then I _used_ to use XMPP with fb chat :-/

(I'm not sure when they killed it - chat secure doesn't appear to log in now,
and the last message I received via fb was apparently on May 4th).

~~~
e12e
Hm. It's back - Just got a fb message via xmpp.

------
chimeracoder
> In recent years were born hundreds of services that have tried to make email
> less painful.

I actually haven't seen many services that try to make email less painful.
Most services I've seen have tried to _kill_ email, and almost always by
replacing it with a walled-garden, closed protocol.

So far, email has resisted this, and I really hope it survives. Email is a
truly federated, truly open protocol, and distributed open protocols are by
far the best way to encourage an open exchange of ideas.

~~~
dwg
There have been a fair number of attempts to kill email, but I'd say there
have been many more products aimed at _enhancing_ it. Popular examples are
gmail and spam filters. Neither of them are native "email" concepts and did
not exist until email became tremendously popular, and both made e-mail
considerably less paintful when they were introduced.

For many more products that enhance email (and a few that try to kill it),
check out this list:

Email Apps - Things that make email less paintful":
[http://www.producthunt.com/e/email-apps](http://www.producthunt.com/e/email-
apps)

~~~
e12e
I'm not sure how gmail makes email "less painful"? I'm not even sure it makes
_webmail_ less painful.

~~~
yen223
Really?

With Gmail, you set up an account, then you start sending email. It doesn't
get easier than that.

It's easy to take for granted the sheer number of things Gmail and similar
services take care for you. I've recently set up my own email server for fun.
Now _that_ was painful. The number of settings I had to twiddle with is
definitely way too much for the average user.

~~~
e12e
How is that any different from Hotmail or Yahoo? (Web)mail as a service is
about as old as http, smtp and imap. Hotmail even was a cool startup runnning
on all FreeBSD before MS bought them up...

I don't think it makes sense to compare X as a service, to implementing X as a
service. Of course it is a bit of a hassle to set up email. But it's not
_really_ that hard: the hardest part is probably setting up SSL certs. Now, if
you want to complicate things with spf/dkim, anti-virus and greylisting --
things do get a little complicated.

Personally I think spf is strange band-aid, and luckily I get bye quite well
with just greylisting against spam (most spam I get is actually to a throw-
away address that got leaked in the Adobe/Macromedia hack: yay site-specific
email address!).

This here, is an example of what I mean:

[https://scaron.info/technology/debian-mail-postfix-
dovecot.h...](https://scaron.info/technology/debian-mail-postfix-dovecot.html)

It's not exactly rocket science[1] for someone that is able to set up a secure
server with password login disabled and only regular-user login via ssh keys
-- which I consider the minimum for any internet-facing system unless you have
a very special use-case, and a really good plan.

Now, if you can't set up a server -- you can't set up a server. I'm not saying
we shouldn't make it easer -- eg:

[https://blog.sandstorm.io/news/2014-07-07-mailpile.html](https://blog.sandstorm.io/news/2014-07-07-mailpile.html)

or:

[https://blog.sandstorm.io/news/2014-08-11-roundcube.html](https://blog.sandstorm.io/news/2014-08-11-roundcube.html)

(Note, these both rely on sandstorm.io handling incomming smtp, as far as I
can tell. At least for now. Not sure if allowing stmp/imap in/out of a
sandstorm.io-container is likely to be implemented -- but then again setting
up a sandstorm cluster/cloud isn't likely to be as easy as _using_ sandstorm
to run apps... such is the nature of things).

[1] [https://scaron.info/technology/debian-mail-postfix-
dovecot.h...](https://scaron.info/technology/debian-mail-postfix-dovecot.html)

[ed: re: email and sandstorm.io -- I was both right and wrong it seems. When
running sandstorm.io it is possible to set it up to send mail (requires a
working smtp-server), and receive mail (requires some twiddling and ability to
set up a (sub)domain with proper MX records, or a traditional smtp server set
up to forward email into sandstorm.io. For more info see:
[https://github.com/sandstorm-
io/sandstorm/wiki/Configuring-y...](https://github.com/sandstorm-
io/sandstorm/wiki/Configuring-your-server-for-email) ]

~~~
dwg
To some Gmail may not been very different from Hotmail or Yahoo Mail, and
email predates those products as well. All three were invented with hopes of
attracting users by brining a better experience to email. That was precisely
the point of my comment—that there have been a large number of products that
have been introduced to enhance email.

A few of these products have been very widely adopted. Some others have been
adopted but to a lesser degrees. Some (e.g. spam filtering, which used to be
completely independent of mail clients/services) have become so universal that
they are now shipped as features of the clients themselves.

Sometimes products are so successful that it's hard to remember what it was
like before they came out. While every person has preferences for this or that
service, there is a reason why so many people now use gmail instead of what
they used previously, which was often their ISP provided address and a desktop
client. _Good_ clients are just one such example.

------
terryjsmith
I've thought about this on and off for a few years and have one thought:
e-mail will find a way out of the inbox. It is now an almost ubiquitous way to
deliver something to a contact, especially on mobile.

I know this is fuzzy, but I imagine Facebook notifications being sent via
e-mail and if Facebook is "installed" either on the device or via opening the
browser, opening the e-mail would deliver you to Facebook, or just display as
a regular e-mail otherwise. Taking this one step further: if I deliver you a
to-do list item, it would open in my default to-do list app making e-mail more
of a platform or launcher than anything else.

If you ever figure out how that would work, let me know. I've tried and
haven't been able to connect all of the dots connecting those sending the
e-mail and those receiving the e-mail as a platform, how it interoperates and
where to start. I'd use the hell out of this though.

~~~
phkahler
>> I know this is fuzzy, but I imagine Facebook notifications being sent via
e-mail

A while back I envisioned an open-source Facebook app. Updates would be sent
through email. The email client would recognize such a message and forward it
to the app. Decentralized Facebook with direct communication would be great
for users. I envisioned much more than just that, but you get the idea. By
using email, things can be non-realtime, distributed, and private. There are
already protocols for encrypting email, so not even your ISP could monitor
your stuff.

~~~
venti
Wow, I had the very same idea. But everyone I told the idea basically said:
"email is a horrible protocol stack, you don't want to build anything on top
of it" or just something like "email is dead". I still think it is good idea.

~~~
phkahler
Like many things, it's a fantastic idea for people and a poor idea for
business. The main advantage is that it keeps business out exactly opposite of
how facebook invites it in and ruins everything.

email is a fan-fucking-tastic protocol stack BTW. It's detractors all want to
do something the user doesn't want or need.

~~~
sethjgore
"fan-fucking-tastic protocol". I agree completely. it's time for our systems
to centralize email as a first-class citizen and treat it as among the main
ways to interact with the system.

Ping me at sethjgore@gmail.com if you agree. I'm organizing something and I
want to have people who think email is still underused onboard.

------
eldude
It would likely have the following traits:

1\. Decentralization 2\. Realtime 3\. Spam protection 4\. Contextual

1\. Decentralization typically generates wide adoption, once it's able to
overcome the barrier of entry to wide adoption. An excellent example of this
would be JavaScript. It thrives largely because nobody owns it, and
contributing to its success it's often used as a means to stave off the
advantages of competing platforms.

2\. Realtime meaning push, just because it's a modern technological
expectation. Email frequently is realtime, except IMAP/POP.

3\. GMail et.al have gotten pretty good here. Future solutions would need to
be as good, ideally with some built-in mechanism for unsubscribe as well.

4\. Contextual messaging would be the defining feature. It's a broad term that
simply means some manner of object graph between messages that would natively
support arbitrary organization of messages (flat, nesting, topic stream,
overlapping (for edits), etc...).

~~~
snitko
5\. Encryption as part of the core protocol, always on.

~~~
hasenj
Is it possible (in principle) to have an email-like-service with end-to-end
encryption so that no one other than the sender and receiver can decipher
messages?

~~~
chrisper
Yes. Why not? You just have to encrypt the message before sending it and
decrypt it after you received it.

[https://github.com/google/end-to-end](https://github.com/google/end-to-end)

I think the actual challenge is to do it with senders/receivers you do not
know. I do not have enough secuirty experience to be able to answer how you
can encrypt something on one end but decrypt it on the other hand without
knowing the key? I guess something like HTTPS would work.

~~~
ekianjo
> I do not have enough secuirty experience to be able to answer how you can
> encrypt something on one end but decrypt it on the other hand without
> knowing the key?

You distribute public keys. That's what people do for PGP nowadays, and you
have repositories of public keys you can access.

------
Gustomaximus
I think the problem is not so much email, but teaching people how to use email
correctly. My company recently sent the entire office on a full day Outlook
course. Going in everyone was thinking how this was such a waste of a day.
Going out everyone was so greatful.

I personally though I was fairly proficient, what is this course going to
teach me. I was placed in the more advanced group and really learnt a bunch.
Techniques to optimise workload and reduce the impact of high email counts. I
learn a bunch about the tasks feature, something I'd never given time to and
now couldn't live without. And really liked the effect around the office to
reduce the email spammers and get them using more effective lines of
communication, or just shut up.

Given how used email is, I'm amazed more companies don't train people on this
and general communication process. It's well worth the investment.

~~~
kyrra
My problem with outlook is that many of the advanced features are only on
their windows client. The OS X client is missing so many nice bits, it can
almost be better to use the web client.

------
aikah
As long as these "hundred of services" are incompatible with each others,
emails will still be useful. Can I call a skype contact from what's app or
viber or app X W or Z ? no ? so don't expect me to install app X W or Z or
even skype, i'll stick with emails. Sure there jabber and Co, but all these
hip apps seem to reject any form of open protocols. The web is successful,
emails are successful because both are based on open standards.

~~~
z3t4
E-mail is also decentralized! This means anyone can join the network without a
sign-up process or approval from an authority. But I see e-mail heading in a
troublesome direction regarding this.

Maybe for a new messaging protocol, there need to be a computational cost, or
blockchain for sending messages, to prevent fraud and spam.

------
boopcx
What a strange question. Email is decentralized, has opt-in encryption, and is
usable by anyone with access to the Internet. It might be frustrating to
receive a lot of it, but I don't know what 90% of the people who use email
would want to "improve". It seems to be a fairly solved problem as a protocol
- the improvements are probably just to whatever client you use to access it.

~~~
dropit_sphere
I suspect that email is fine, but at present is fallong victim to an
"engagement bubble." As newsletters proliferate, they will become less
effective.

------
applecore
E-mail predates the Internet. It's been around for decades and will be around
for many decades more.

------
aerialcombat
Only thing annoying about emails is the long address. Other than that, how
much simpler can it get? I don't see email addresses getting any shorter than
they already are. They are somewhat easy to remember (a lot more so than a
phone number) and they are somewhat descriptive. I don't see the form of email
getting replaced by any other form. I do think there could be some underlying
technical changes though.

~~~
k__
Well, the address length depends on your domain.

I have an email address with 8 symbols.

------
stevewilhelm
I am not sure it will come to pass, but I would like to see the following
features:

1\. Email user and domain certification. For example, when I receive an email
from john.doe@acme.com, there would be Email Certificate Authorities that
would ensure the email was from John Doe and he works for Acme Inc. Or that
johnnieD@jdoe.org is again John Doe and that jdoe.org is his personal domain.

2\. Email archival services. These services would collect, store, and index
email including all attachments. Would like legislation that would require all
commercial Email providers to submit all of an individual's email to the
archival service of the individual's choice.

3\. Ability for email recipients to charge email senders an optional delivery
fee. This will allow individuals to profit from being the target of spam
email.

~~~
adambrenecki
#1 already exists in the form of S/MIME, which uses the same kind of
certificates as SSL and TLS do. Problem is, the certificates cost money (with
the exception of StartSSL's) and basically all webmail clients don't support
them.

(Aside: It does make sense why webmail clients don't support _sending_ S/MIME
email, but I'll never understand why they refuse to do something useful when
they receive a S/MIME signed email. If they did, that could pave the way for
something akin to what EV does for the Web, so that I could look for a green
bar that says "this email is signed eBay International AG" and know I'm not
being phished, for instance.)

------
cperciva
_In your opinion what will be the future for email?_

I don't think email is going away. In fact, I expect quite the opposite: Email
will expand as a platform for other not-exactly-realtime messaging.

For many years now we have had things like meeting invitations, electronic
airline boarding passes, and concert tickets sent via email; I think we will
see more things like this, and with a greater degree of integration so that
for people with suitably "intelligent" user-agents, these messages will be
automatically filtered out of the incoming email and processed separately --
much like we used to do with procmail, of course.

~~~
mmrasheed
I agree with you. Just because it is decades old technology doesn't
necessarily mean it has to be replaced with something. I have observed that
the familiarity and usage of email among teens is alarmingly low. Then again,
I don't see any better alternative to non-realtime, guaranteed delivery,
suitable for both formal and informal communication and can-handle-all
communication protocol like email. Perhaps todays teens will lead the way for
building the alternative to email.

------
vishaldpatel
At Sonar (sendsonar.com), we're seeing SMS take e-mail's place for
conversations. Of course, e-mail is great for longer-form information sharing.
But for conversations, SMS is often the right channel.

~~~
ekianjo
> we're seeing SMS take e-mail's place for conversations.

Even with the 140 characters limits?

~~~
vishaldpatel
Even with the limits. The back-and-forth is fairly quick, and longer messages
are just broken up into multiple messages. Like regular conversations though,
people tend to keep it short and sweet.

~~~
ekianjo
But SMS is not free, right ? How do you deal with the ongoing operator costs?

~~~
vishaldpatel
Not free, but fairly inexpensive. Most US mobile plans provide unlimited SMS
messaging to their customers, and many foreign ones provide free incoming
messages.

For business, the value of reliable delivery, timely and increased customer
engagement tends to far outweigh the costs.

~~~
ekianjo
> For business, the value of reliable delivery, timely and increased customer
> engagement tends to far outweigh the costs.

Aren't there cases when phone networks get massively congested and SMS are not
delivered until hours later? Such as New Year, Natural Catastrophes, etc... in
that sense Email delivery is superior because it's fully decentralized.

~~~
vishaldpatel
We did receive inquiries from companies about being able to deliver SMS
messages during recent natural disasters.

Turns out that people need to communicate during calamities and often prefer
text and so do services that are delivering services to these people.

------
nitai
Email is pretty much here to stay. It is more that users and organizations
need to "learn" how to manage emails better. Furthermore, email might not be
the main way of communication with your customers anymore, but still will be
one of the main pillars.

This is one of the reasons, why I started my 6th company called Helpmonks
([http://helpmonks.com](http://helpmonks.com)) in this space. It simply helps
organizations to collaborate on emails. My company is not the only one in this
space.

------
m1117
Hope people will stop send HTML-formatted emails.

~~~
krapp
Given that businesses can track when (and from what IP) recipients open those
emails through tracking images, that's not likely to ever happen.

Although, of course, you can always choose not to open html emails as html.

~~~
xai3luGi
That is a pretty serious bug in whatever email program allows tracking images
to work in email. Seems unlikely anyone would use such an email program. Which
email program are you talking about?

~~~
TYPE_FASTER
If your e-mail program sends a HTTP request for an image based on an "img" tag
in a HTML-formatted e-mail, it can get tracked based on the URL.

Many e-mail clients will not show images from e-mail addresses that are not in
your contacts list for this reason (for example, Thunderbird). They make the
user click a button to make the decision to proceed with the image download an
explicit action.

------
ShirsenduK
I hoped to have seen more services built on top of email, especially IM.
Products using email as a transport layer rather than the presentation layer
per se. But I guess, its inherently slow and tough to scale with its default
architecture, considering the overheads.

------
funkyboy
I feel the only "tool" to make email less painful is to teach people how to
use it.

------
contingencies
In the same way that fax and letter writing still exist, email will always
exist. We still don't have any other system for global personalized store-and-
forward that is remotely transparent (ie. bigcorp-independentish), much less
free.

------
sidcool
Probably a controversial opinion, but I feel Google Wave's model is going to
be the future of Email. Not sure how far in the future, my best estimates are
5 years at lease.

------
thejerz
Maybe this is the future.

