

E-mail is the Universal Platform - skevvis
http://blog.contactually.com/2012/01/e-mail-is-the-universal-platform/

======
blueplastic
E-mail is so broken fundamentally, that it's not even funny. I'm surprised
more people aren't trying to replace it.

E-mail's based on the idea that it is free to message me and bother me and
take a few precious seconds of my stream of consciousness.

If it's free to email people, then of course spammers will flood email
channels with their deals and scams.

Ideally, I want a communications platform where only my 200 or so friends, co-
workers and friends of friends can message me for free. Anybody else who wants
to contact me has to send the message with a $1 bitcoin (interrupting my
stream of conciousness price would be custom set by me, so lil' wayne would
probably set his price at $75).

If the message from a stranger I got was in fact a cool dude I met at a party
last weekend following up on that cat picture, then I'd click "reply and
return" to give him back that bitcoin. If I see that the message is from a
prince, I'd just ignore it and go buy some gum or something with his precious
$1.

The current horrible e-mail architecture feeds giants like gmail, microsoft,
yahoo b/c everyone is going to get tons of junkmail and people around 1999 had
to start moving to cloud based providers who did free spam detection to parse
through people's emails (Outlook Express sucked at spam cleaning). Problem is
the web giants are snorting in everyone's private communications. It's as if
the US Postal Service offered to deliver all mail for free, but in exchange
opened everything and read it and if they thought this is something you
shouldn't read or if this is marketing propaganda, so they won't deliver it to
the recipient. I think pretty much everyone would think that's a crappyly
architected postal service, but I guess with email we shouldn't be thinking
about those kinds of things. Let's just figure out some new technical protocol
instead, after IMAP and POP and SMTP will be replaced by SPDY or RESTful HTTP
right? Yeah, let's build that instead.

True, e-mail is a universal platform, but it sucks.

~~~
hammock
I understand your dislike of spam, but what's the rationale behind building in
the filtration into the architecture? That's merely a constraint on what email
already offers, not an evolution.

Right now spam filtration is decentralized (as it should be), and there's
NOTHING stopping an email provider like Gmail or Hotmail or [fill in your new
startup] from CHARGING senders a fee to actually deliver mail to your personal
inbox.

If you think your charge-per-message makes sense, then build your own email
server that intercepts incoming messages and makes sure they've been paid for
before distributing them to you (or your customers). No one is stopping you.

~~~
hammock
By the way, if there WAS a centralized spam filtration somewhere, as you seem
to be proposing, there would still be "a giant" snooping everyone's mail. Or
did you not realize that.

~~~
jonmrodriguez
hammock, blueplastic didn't say to centralize spam filtration. He said to make
messages cost money, thus making spamming unprofitable. This is totally
different from the machine-learned-model-reads-all-my-mail situation that we
have now AND totally different from a centralized Big Brother antispam agency.

~~~
blueplastic
Thanks, Jon. That's exactly what I meant.

------
bane
I'm almost convinced at this point if somebody simply built a facebook like
interface, and used email as the messaging protocol, but didn't display it
like an email, more like a FB conversation (as opposed to a threaded or gmail-
like conversation view), that it would be used. There's not really much that's
offered by alternate messaging solutions that email can't do if it existing in
the right sort of framework:

1) Person-to-person? Check

2) Person-to-group? Check

3) Group-to-group? Check

4) Group-to-person? Check

5) Multimedia? Check

6) Fancy formatting? Check

7) Attached files? Check

8) Near real-time? Check (most of the time)

9) Deliver Fault tolerant? Check

10) Federated/distributed? Check

Why everybody seems to want to reinvent email is beyond me. About the only
thing that FB or G+ offer is the storage of a server-side contact list so I
don't have to remember their email address and the use of a white-list for
sender/receivers so I don't get spam. Offer the same with email and a decent
web interface and you've basically recreated any "modern" social network,
except it'll be built on a time-tested, robust protocol that's already
ubiquitous across the internet and already has billions of users.

 _edit_ I guess what I'm saying is that it's the application layer (server and
client side) in the email equation that needs most of the rework, not the
protocol layers.

~~~
chetan51
I agree with most of what you said, except that the real-time aspect is not
real-time enough. If email were actually real-time, then it could completely
replace instant messaging as well. Right now it's lacking.

~~~
bane
True, which is probably why google put im right next to the message viewer in
gmail. I know of many ocassions where a flurry of emails turned into an im
session.

I think gmail's "conversations" are really the first try at what I'm talking
about, a new front end on email, but I don't think they work well enough
personally. And they haven't really expanded well on the concept recently.

~~~
chetan51
Google Wave was really what I thought the ideal marriage between email and IM.
Why did it fail again?

~~~
noahth
1) incredibly poor rollout strategy (imo) 2) what problem did it _actually
solve_ again?

forgive any appearance of snark; i just wanted to be concise, and i don't
think that "the ideal marriage between email and IM" is something that people
were - or are - desperately crying out to have.

------
rvkennedy
Sooner or later, email will either die or get better. The problem with email
for most of its life was that there was little competition. Certainly SMTP has
never had a serious rival. IMAP came to challenge POP, and won: this made
email better. And Exchange has certainly set a standard that IMAP and webmail
providers have had to meet.

But it's not much compared to the seething shark tank that the web has been
for the last twenty years. Sooner or later I think a RESTful HTTP or SPDY API
will replace IMAP, and (for client-server comms at least) SMTP.

I think ccLoop is a side-issue, because they were addressing the problem of
mailing list management. Contactually's approach seems to be wrong-headed to
me, making the user send and receive _more_ emails! But really it's more of a
CRM system than a step forward for email, so perhaps it's solving a problem I
don't have.

At comms.io, we're writing an email client. The idea is to work with IMAP,
take on the lessons of Gmail, but modernize the experience, make it
lightweight and transparent. If you've seen the Gmail interface lately, what I
mean by lightweight is _the opposite of that_. Anyone who's interested in
helping out, do get in touch.

~~~
there
_Sooner or later I think a RESTful HTTP or SPDY API will replace IMAP, and
(for client-server comms at least) SMTP._

"replace" is a strong word. IMAP (version 4 that most things use these days)
has not replaced POP3, but is a much-improved alternative that is well
supported on the server-side and client-side. the reason it was able to gain
such popularity was that the spec (RFC 2060) came out in 1996. how many
different POP3 clients were even around back then? (according to wikipedia,
outlook express 1.0 came out in 1996.) a lot of people at that time were
probably still reading mbox files in pine through a telnet session or never
e-mailed anyone outside of AOL.

 _The problem with email for most of its life was that there was little
competition._

and now e-mail is so prevalent that making changes to the core protocols like
SMTP, POP3, and IMAP is nearly impossible. we've been living with SMTP since
1982.

every provider that supports IMAP still has to support POP3: google, yahoo,
AOL, MSN, and probably every university and ISP. SPDY will never completely
replace HTTP, so sites using it will always have to run both servers in
parallel, just like IPv6 will have to run alongside IPv4 for many years to
come.

for a new protocol to replace SMTP or even augment it, it would have to be
designed, refined, turned into an RFC, then probably debated some more, and
then support would have to be added to all of the major MTAs like sendmail,
postfix, qmail, and exchange, along with many firewalls, spam filters, and
other in-between devices. clients need to support it, so that's outlook
express, thunderbird, iphone, android, blackberry, and every other little
device and program that speaks it. getting the manufacturers or maintainers to
implement support for new things is hard enough, but actually getting all of
their customers to switch or upgrade is an even bigger problem (see IE6,
DNSSEC, etc.).

maybe it's the rate of change in things like HTML and CSS over the past few
years that gives the false impression of being so easy to do.

~~~
rvkennedy
_"replace" is a strong word_

exactly the word I intended to use: but "sooner or later" can be a long time
coming. I know POP still exists, hell, _gopher_ still exists but I'd say it's
been replaced in all practical terms.

 _every provider that supports IMAP still has to support POP3_

In what sense - do you mean practically, or in some technical way?

 _for a new protocol to replace SMTP or even augment it, it would have to be
designed, refined..._

Right, but I restricted this to client-server. Any protocol you like can
replace SMTP for client-server, simply by taking messages from the client,
then sending them on via SMTP. This is how Courier provides mail sending via
IMAP connections.

 _maybe it's the rate of change in things like HTML and CSS over the past few
years that gives the false impression of being so easy to do._

It's not easy, and it won't be quick. But I like many slow, difficult things,
I expect it to happen at some point. In fact there's already a draft RFC to
for RESTful HTTP mail retrieval: <http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-dusseault-
httpmail-00>

~~~
rvkennedy
Wow, someone _really_ doesn't like draft RFCs!

------
jwieringa
I love my inbox and I don't know what I would do without it. I use it as my
primary interface to as many applications as possible.

E-mail forever!

~~~
ajankovic
What kind of email service do you feel is lacking at the moment? What would
you like to do over the email that you can't right now?

------
sankalpk
<http://www.quora.com/Why-did-ccLoop-fail>?

This is an interesting read.

~~~
skevvis
@sankalpk - I've seen that before, and it's a great post-mortem. I can see why
it's hard for a collaboration company that's not solving a strong pain point.
We look at the relationships that are live and die via e-mail, and are
building a solution for that.

------
Tawheed
Email is not going to die. It will evolve. Just like how websites and browsers
have evolved over the past 10 years.

~~~
sliverstorm
+1. I swear email has been "Going to die" for at least as long as it has been
The Year of Linux on the Desktop.

------
blueplastic
So, why would I trust you with 5 years of all my sent and received emails?
Should I take your word for it that you'll just save the email addresses and
the sent/received timestamp for each?

~~~
skevvis
@blueplastic - we do regular security audits and will soon engage with a firm
to provide that guarantee as well. In the interim, what would you like to see
to alleviate that?

~~~
blueplastic
I do appreciate the reply. The only way I'd feel safe is if you never got or
saw my emails. Instead of me sending 5 years of my emails to you, I'd rather
you send me 2,000 lines of code to analyze my email locally and locally tell
me who I need to follow up with. If your analyzation code came to me, I
wouldn't even mind if it did NLP and deeply datamined the emails to tell me
who I may have missed following up with.

Ideally, I'd like to see unsecure e-mail replaced by crypto communication
systems based on OTR and people locally storing their emails on Raspberry Pis,
but that's dangerous stuff and I probably shouldn't have even said that.

Thing is, I'm sure you're nice guys and gals right now, but when you're
billionaires and have 500 million people's digital data, evil you will turn.

By the way, good presentation at SVNewTech last night.

------
strait
Meanwhile, in the real world, delivery is not reliable.

~~~
spydum
Many years ago, working a support desk at an ISP, I fielded calls from angry
seniors who wanted to know why their dozens of email forwards were not getting
delivered to their friends, who desperately needed to know about the
Microsoft/AOL cash reward giveaway. Suffering through the message logs, I
would find typo'd email addresses, blacklisting message, or whatever the cause
of the day was. I'd then have to explain that email and the internet was "best
effort", and there was no guarantee of delivery, even if you did manage to
type the email address correctly.

Interesting now, how most people wave off email delivery as flaky, or accept
that spam filters will eat the 5% of incorrectly classified mail.

Are social networks more or less reliable? Have we all become numb to the best
efforts of the web? I'm not sure. I think it is interesting though. I wonder
if those seniors still call up these days?

------
Argorak
Just as a funny observation: If email is the universal platform, why is the
"Call us"-link more prominent than the email contact? :)

------
webwanderings
"As Contactually is an professional "

Do people really have service oriented websites in open with such obvious
mistakes?

~~~
skevvis
Yes, but they fix them as soon as it's brought to their attention. Thanks!

------
moe
Those who don't understand Usenet are forever doomed to re-invent it...

