
Ask HN: Are you powerful? Will you quit email? - toepitt
In his 2012 essay, PG suggested email will be replaced and the way to do it is through powerful people. Since they&#x27;re all at the mercy of email too, they&#x27;d be the first to switch.<p>Now it&#x27;s 2017 and I don&#x27;t see powerful people leaving email.<p>I want to understand why. If you&#x27;re powerful and are reading this, what&#x27;s stopping you from quitting email?
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nickpsecurity
I've met quite a few and heard from even more IT guys that worked for them. I
can at least add a few data points I've seen.

First is reason nothing goes away at most big companies: if it ain't broke,
don't fix it. It's something they understand, they're often lay people who
might not want to learn something else, they might have tons of stuff built on
top of it (tech or processes), tons of important information stored in old
emails (it's archive medium, too), and they'll get emails from other people
anyway. So, why not keep using what you've been using.

A few others I hear occasionally on top of that big set. One that I like is
that it's asynchronous. They can put emails off easier without it seeming like
they're ignoring people. Managing it is fast and easy vs some web apps for
communication. The security might be perceived as better esp with security
software they likely have for email & data breaches they see on other things
that aren't intranets or Gmail. It's decentralized, vendor-neutral protocol
which existed for ages (stability). Bosses in smaller firms even use it
straight-up as free alternative to paid chat or archive tools if it's Gmail.
Just to avoid paying anyone past the ISP which is also cheap or someone's Wifi
haha.

So, there's a few I've heard that tell me email ain't going anywhere.

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savethefuture
I'm not switching from email until my company, government, any website I use,
friends, family, and everyone else in the world stops using email. Email is so
core to the internet, name one major website that does not require an email,
name a company that dont have email. Email lets you receive a letter and view
it whenever you'd like, and without losing it, unlike messaging apps, it
allows for archiving of information and quickly lets you search. I see no
reason to switch from email.

------
AnimalMuppet
Paul Graham said that email was horrible, and it shouldn't be hard to come up
with something better. But he didn't actually put forward a concrete proposal.

So: What would be better? Given that the world currently runs on email, what
would be enough better that it would be worth it to switch? I don't know. I
don't think Paul Graham knew then, or knows now. And I think that the reason
people haven't switched is that, so far, there isn't an alternative that's
enough better. And the reason there isn't one is because, contrary to Paul
Graham's expectation, creating something better is actually pretty hard.

~~~
clusmore
>So: What would be better? Given that the world currently runs on email, what
would be enough better that it would be worth it to switch? I don't know.

This is something I've thought about quite a bit recently. For one, I
absolutely hate the fact that when I give out my email address, the receiver
can give my address to a third party. The third party has full capability to
contact me, I can never know who gave up my email address, and I can never
revoke the capability. At a minimum, an email replacement would need to
address this.

You're right, replacing email would be really hard. There are a few things I'd
like to see that could at least improve the current situation.

1\. Push companies/organisations that request your email address to provide
you in advance with the sender address they will use in the future to contact
you, so that if we wanted to we could maintain a whitelist of accepted
addresses to prevent all unsolicited mail.

2\. Come up with a service that makes it easy to manage throw-away addresses
that redirect to the same inbox so that I can essentially revoke the address
that I hand out to somebody.

~~~
stephenr
> when I give out my email address, the receiver can give my address to a
> third party

Use sub-addressing [1]

So, if you signup on example.com, and your email is "foo@bar.com" you give
them "foo+example-com@bar.com" or whatever format works for your mailbox
provider/software.

If you wanted to go one step further, a filter could be configured to look at
the sub-address component, and compare it with the sender's domain and mark it
as spam if there isn't a match.

1\. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email_address#Sub-
addressing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email_address#Sub-addressing)

~~~
clusmore
This can work for online services during signup. I haven't yet seen this, but
I wouldn't be surprised if some services were smart enough to drop the sub-
address before on-selling your email.

In face-to-face exchanges (for me recently, this came up a lot while giving
out my address to real estate agents), anything involving '+' causes a huge
amount of confusion and they start asking questions. I'd much rather a
"normal" looking address, where I'm perfectly happy for normal to be say
base64 with '.', '_' and '-' and as the three special characters (at least
people will think its valid).

~~~
stephenr
\+ doesn't have to be the separator. Gmail supports a '.' for example, and if
you run the mail server yourself, its just limited by what characters the
software you run supports.

If you have your own domain, you can of course also do shifty-bobs-
realestate@mydomain.com and have it go to a catch-all style mailbox.

------
19eightyfour
What people don't realize is that the invisible "lock in" cost of email is all
the existing infrastructure. More specifically, it represents the cost of
_moving away from_ that infrastructure. SMTP, POP, IMAP, all the servers and
protocols, not to mention all the software integrations ( for all kinds of
apps and OSes ) with email.

Unlike something like FB, or Google, that grew up building out their
defensible data assets and infrastructure from a for-profit perspective, email
infrastructure has been baked into the internet since before the web ever
existed.

It's not the whole picture, but try replicating the functionality of email
with "something better" without replicating the whole infrastructural
advantage it has? Good luck.

------
twobyfour
Hell no.

Email is the least-intrusive way for me to be contacted by people outside my
organization. Some of them I do want to hear from and will be happy to
transfer to a more synchronous or intrusive communication channel. Most I
don't. Email is the best medium I have for screening those contacts.

Then there are marketing messages and announcements from platforms I use. I
like having those pushed to me in such a way that I can easily ignore all but
the 3% that are actually of interest.

And notifications. Yes, if a server is on fire, I want SMS or slack. But if
someone's added a new ticket to our issue tracker or needs a pull request
reviewed? Email is very effective for going through such notifications one at
a time at one's leisure and dealing with each in succession.

Finally, there are the occasions where I want to share a big chunk of text
with a bunch of people who may or may not be using the same platforms for
other communications. It might be an announcement. It might be a list of
questions for a vendor. Whatever it is. Email is very effective for that.

Now, what do you propose we replace all of those use cases with?

~~~
toepitt
I propose the same thingMr. Paul Graham proposed.

There are better ways to screen contacts outside the organization than being
interrupted. Same for marketing messages and announcements. It's important to
give different people different abilities, and sort tasks by importance or
deadline.

A big chunk of text sent to people is practically spam.

~~~
twobyfour
And what tools would you recommend using instead of email at this juncture? I
have yet to see anything that's a viable alternative for the use cases I
mentioned, let alone a preferable one.

And no, a big chunk of text is not anything like spam if it's part of a
conversation, nor as an announcement to one's own team or to other parties who
have requested it. Length of communication is not correlated with value or
desirability.

------
codingcowboy
I would think that websites would have to stop using email as a means of
identifying humans before email is done away with. What are the alternatives
for self identification on the internet today?

------
wayn3
present me with a better alternative and I will abandon email. Gmail is a
pretty good app tbh.

