
Email Is Still the Best Thing on the Internet - plg
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/08/why-email-will-never-die/375973/
======
jabelk
Wholeheartedly agree with the article. I have absolute control of my inbox
with filters, labels, and signing up for newsletters and/or updates on various
subjects. There is no way a centralized end-to-end service is going to eclipse
email for me, unless they radically change their business models.

The value proposition is just really bad in all the services I've seen so far.

"Oh, you want me to sign up for your service so that I can look at the content
you think I should see alongside the ads you're making money off of? And what
exactly is in it for me?"

Something I would pay for: a rolodex social network. No centralized feed. No
useless info. Your profile is 2-3 sentences and your current city (with some
sort of maps integration for when you travel, to see who's near you). Two
buttons, one to request to view resume, and another to request to view email.
That's it. With the idea being, you use the site to enable you to keep up with
people. You add people you know or have worked with to your network, and you
can easily get their current email and catch up when you're in the same city.
Simple, no obnoxious ads, no slimy tactics to increase time on the site.

Probably will never come to pass, but I can dream...

~~~
timjahn
"Something I would pay for: a rolodex social network. No centralized feed. No
useless info. Your profile is 2-3 sentences and your current city (with some
sort of maps integration for when you travel, to see who's near you). Two
buttons, one to request to view resume, and another to request to view email.
That's it. With the idea being, you use the site to enable you to keep up with
people. You add people you know or have worked with to your network, and you
can easily get their current email and catch up when you're in the same city.
Simple, no obnoxious ads, no slimy tactics to increase time on the site."

I really want this too. I need some sort of simple contact rolodex that simply
shows who I know, why I know them, and why they're important (where do they
work, how do I know them, who are they connected to, etc.). Just a simple UI,
something that I would use most of the time simply to search.

~~~
lotharbot
"why I know them" is a crucial feature missing from many services (along with
"what name or alias I know them under").

I have hundreds of contacts from church, school, work, video games, etc.

~~~
Pxtl
Sounds like google's circles. The problem is that most folks treat their Gmail
account as their "real" account and don't give it out willy-nilly. Also, that
the circles thing is one-way - I can use circles to control how I see others,
but can't use them to control how they see me.

~~~
wdewind
> Also, that the circles thing is one-way - I can use circles to control how I
> see others, but can't use them to control how they see me.

No, if you share something to a circle someone isn't in they wont see it, so
they do let you control how others see you. Not a huge G+ fan, but I was a fan
of circles.

~~~
Pxtl
I mean having a fully different profile and name, not just different posts.

------
inopinatus
As this article alludes to: the heart of email's longevity, the thing that
prevents it being closed by a single entity, is being a classical IETF
protocol: federated, decentralized, open and interoperable.

The first two of those properties arise from being based on the DNS for SMTP
endpoint discovery.

This is why every protocol needs to specify that it uses the DNS, and how.

And that is why I get so worried that the draft HTTP/2 editors so steadfastly
refuses to do so.

~~~
walterbell
It would be useful to draw a dependency graph of IETF and W3C protocols that
characterizes each one on their degree of divergence from classical IETF
values. Identify the point(s) in time where history took a wrong turn, revert
to that point, fork and start over with new protocols. It can't be any less
disruptive than new protocols which have a non-classical values.

Are there modern use cases for NNTP? Could UUCP be used for sneakernet or
bluetooth intermittent mesh applications? What's the verdict on WebDAV, CalDAV
and CardDAV as neutral protocols for sharing data, contacts & calendar?

~~~
inopinatus
Yes - I have used NNTP as an eventually-reliable pub/sub message bus in an
unstable mesh environment. The specific use being transport of per-device
usage/billing & monitoring data.

The implied Gossip algorithm of the server-to-server subprotocol was well
suited to the intermittent availability of links in that particular network.
Messages (articles) were PGP verified. NNTP is channelized by design, and
servers like Diablo have built-in expiry management. It's also easy to monitor
with a lightweight news reader.

This was only a few years ago. I was pleased with it, at the time - simple to
build from readily available parts.

~~~
walterbell
Thanks for that encouraging data point.

We need a neutral, replicable client-side data store with standardized
interfaces for automated analysis/filtering/reading. This could be an offline
archive of docs, web browser history or online/cloud bookmarks, along with
_private_ annotations about content and authors (e.g. killfiles, quality
ratings).

If the datastore is open (standard & source), there could be healthy
competition among proprietary apps to use the datastore, but not control it.
NNTP could predictively replicate (via home wifi) a subset of this cache to
mobile based on personal calendar, reducing public network usage.

What's good about this approach is that it would surpass the usability of
mobile apps + public cloud, thanks to the private cache reducing the impact of
public network latency. With neverending hijinks on net neutrality and web
standards, it may be worth exploring NNTP pub/sub between home server/laptop
and mobile devices.

~~~
rakoo
So basically, CouchDB + PouchdB/TouchDB/Cloudant ? I'd love to see something
really emerge in this domain (CouchDB is already mature).

~~~
janl
We are ways off, but my personal goal for [http://hood.ie](http://hood.ie) is
to be able to allow people to build gmail/gdocs competitors without having to
do any heavy lifting. We could use your help, though :)

------
specialp
The main power for me in email is that I actually own it. I have my own
domain. While I use Slack, Google Hangouts, Hipchat and a bunch of other
services, none of them replace email. It is standardized and despite social
media/chat services living and dying over time I have had my domain and email
for 15 years now. I can't think of many other services I can say that about.

It is also a good medium for non urgent communication that paper mail used to
serve. The problem people see with email is actually not a problem at all with
email, it is with how it is sometimes abused. My boss sometimes sends me an
email and then prods me via Slack if I did not read it in 5 minutes. That is
what these chat/message services are replacing... The short term action
required requests that were formerly served with a phone call.

------
blueskin_
What I find interesting about people who say email is bad is they they almost
all have some vested interest in another communication method, especially
something proprietary...

Email will outlive everyone commenting here because it works. I run my own
server so I know the NSA don't have direct access to content (although I
always take note of any inbound messages that are flagged as not having used
TLS, or where the other address is gmail etc.), I can make disposable
addresses, addresses specific to websites (to identify sites that sell/leak
your address), I can run my own spamfiltering that doesn't invade my privacy,
I can DKIM sign my messages and have a provable way that only I sent the
message, I can use PGP for any private information, I have a set of filters to
classify email so I don't even need to spend that much time dealing with it,
and I can access it from anywhere I can get an SSH client. No service does
that.

------
jeffreyrogers
I don't understand the point about college students viewing email as stale.
I'm in college and email is used more than ever. I used to get tens of emails
a day from various student groups (now they get sent to spam), and it is
pretty much the easiest/fastest way for groups to communicate with each other.

Sure, email isn't "sexy" anymore, but that doesn't mean people of my
generation don't appreciate it.

~~~
rmrfrmrf
From the spammer's perspective, e-mail is stale because you're sending
everything to the spam folder rather than clicking, sharing, and buying.

~~~
jeffreyrogers
Other people use it though and do click through. I just make a conscious
effort to remove clutter from my life.

------
nchuhoai
This brings up a point I think about a lot:

Is email our last success in popularizing an open and federated standard?

Maybe you can count OAuth, but IMO i have low confidence that we'll in the
near future be able to collaborate on an open protocol so that many benefits
of email such as control without vendor lock-in can be enjoyed.

We have too many entrenched interests by the main players. I have been working
briefly on improving the exchange of trust/reputation data online, but it
seemd for us that there was no alternative to a proprietary system if you wish
to see widespread adoption.

EDIT: I guess Bitcoin has good potential.

~~~
marcosdumay
> Is email our last success in popularizing an open and federated standard?

Isn't the Web younger?

~~~
nchuhoai
You are right,
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email)
quotes 1982,
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Wide_Web](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Wide_Web)
1989

Either way, my point still stands that besides the rapid development of the
"internet", we have yet to see another standard emerge (besides OAuth and
Bitcoin)

~~~
daigoba66
SOAP? It was almost a good idea.

~~~
lmm
It was a great idea, badly implemented. I feel confident that we'll rediscover
SOAP, or something like it - it's still pretty much the best option for RPC in
typed languages, which are coming back into fashion. (Maybe Thrift is better,
but it's morally the same thing IMO).

------
footpath
_Email was one 's passport and identity. Before Facebook became a true
alternative for verifying one's identity on the web, the email address was how
one accomplished serious things on the Internet. Want to verify a bank
account? Email. Amazon? Email. Forums? Email. Even Facebook in the early days?
Email._

Looking at Facebook's sign up page right now, and it seems that email is still
required for registering a new account.

The thing is, almost every Internet service still requires an email address to
sign up, and that ranges from mobile games to ecommerce shops. Some services
provide the alternatives of allowing users to sign up via
Facebook/Twitter/Google+; but in order for the users to get a
Facebook/Twitter/Google+ account, they'll still need to sign up using an email
address. Besides, almost all services that allow social network sign-in gives
their users the option to sign up with email as well.

The services that do not allow email signups are few and far between -- like
Medium.com, for example, but as said before, in order to get a Facebook or
Twitter account, the user would still need an email address. Even mobile only
apps like Whatsapp still appear to require an email address to sign up for
their online support site.

~~~
mythealias
Last I checked Gmail allowed me to create an account without providing an
email address or phone number.

~~~
fragmede
When was this?

Currently, you need to provide a code that is texted to a mobile phone for
some level of proof of identity.

~~~
spindritf
I have registered an account last week or so without any codes beyond captcha.
It surprised me, too, because for quite a while you needed a mobile.

Maybe the requirement is based on some heuristics? IP address, country, other
info provided by the user, and so on?

------
jokoon
and this, gentlemen, is why you should create actual protocols, not
applications.

applications die, protocols stay.

if your software solution use the web protocol, you're already limited by it.
that's why I hate 99% of the internet techs.

~~~
lukeholder
tell that to app.net

~~~
coldpie
I got a free account and spent an evening or two trying to figure out what
app.net was supposed to be, and I gave up. I get the feeling it was supposed
to be something more than the ghost town Twitter-clone it appears to be, but I
couldn't figure it out. Email's purpose, on the other hand, is pretty obvious.

------
dools
I still use pine :)

I use gmail so that I get good operation cross device but it's heavily
filtered so I only see a fraction of total email on my phone, but I can search
everything.

I then pop everything off using fetchmail and process all emails down to zero
once or twice a day using pine (either in Terminal or irssi connectbot on my
xperia).

This suits me not only from a day to day perspective but also because if gmail
locks me out for some reason I can easily route around it and still have a
full

backup of my email history.

~~~
keithpeter
Thanks very much for this post. I'm doing a full pop3 download of around 3
years of mostly email newsletters from my gmail account now.

In order to enable pop3 though, I had to change a default gmail security
setting. Have you had any issues at all since leaving pop enabled?

Using Kmail, I'm having to fetch each month's worth of email at a time. Can't
find a setting anywhere so assume that is a Google thing.

------
byoung2
_Want to verify a bank account? Email. Amazon? Email. Forums? Email. Even
Facebook in the early days? Email._

This is a big part of why email continues to thrive. So many services have
email baked in (e.g. a new WordPress install sends you an email). There are
some services that let you choose between email and SMS, like plane
reservations and banking alerts, but 95% of the time, any notification will
come through email.

Given that, there is no way you could eliminate email without cutting off all
those services in the process. Any new protocol to replace email would have to
be a drop-in replacement for anything that currently sends out email or at
least coexist peacefully alongside it.

You would think that if anyone could accomplish that it would be Facebook or
Twitter, but I haven't seen any integration like that so far (e.g. get your
plane reservation update or Amazon shipping confirmation by Twitter DM or
Facebook message).

------
coldcode
What if someone designed a new email protocol/etc from scratch without any
reference to the existing one. Could it be made better? Can you even define
what better is?

~~~
huntaub
Actually, that's exactly what we are trying to do with AirDispatch [1].

We started out intending to "fix" email with a better protocol, and ended up
creating something much greater.

The core problems that we tried to solve (to help define "better") were:

\- Security: encrypting and authenticating your messages

\- Control: the sender hosts the message, so they can edit or delete them
before the receiver sees them

\- Flexibility: all messages are, in fact, just key-value stores, so any type
of data can be sent on the protocol (whether it's Mail, IMs, Vines,
Instagrams, or whatever the flavor of the week social network is)

I think it's a great product, and we are going to start the developer release
of the client (Melange [2]) tomorrow.

[1] [http://airdispat.ch](http://airdispat.ch)

[2] [http://github.com/melange-app/melange](http://github.com/melange-
app/melange)

~~~
inopinatus
Much as it pains me to mention DJB; that sounds very similar to the Internet
Mail 2000 model. [http://cr.yp.to/im2000.html](http://cr.yp.to/im2000.html)

~~~
huntaub
Good catch! We actually completely developed AirDispatch without realizing
that it had many of the same tenants as IM2000.

I haven't seen any IM2000 implementations, so I'd love to check it out if you
know of any.

Do you not like IM2000, or have other feelings towards it? I'd love to hear
your feedback.

~~~
jfb
Any reticence to mention it is likely due to the fact that djb is a bit of a
polarizing personality.

~~~
huntaub
I figured it had to do with something like that. However, do you or inopinatus
have any thoughts on the system as a whole?

~~~
inopinatus
I think it is an interesting idea that has yet to gain traction, let alone
interoperable implementations, possibly due to the cantankerous origins. May
have difficulty penetrating the enterprise, where control of policy trumps
most other considerations. And as with any multi-sided business model, it
requires a community segment with unmet needs to provide initial critical
mass. I suggest trying to make the protocol less binary and more like a
classical line-oriented exchange, it'll improve uptake amongst implementers.
And I wish you well; every effort to reinvent email deserves a red hot go.

------
AnonJ
I can never imagine how would a university/its various student organizations
get their messages through to students, without email. I went on a full-year
exchange to Chile, where the email service simply is useless and
everybody(including university officials) seems to rely on Facebook, which to
me was simply crazy. Why would something like FB be used for any serious
business? How would they suppose that everybody has a FB account and likes to
use it? That was a truly horrible experience, especially for a Social Network
avoider like me.

------
erikb
People who think that email can die are the people who don't understand
technology. Email is simply sending text from one user to another. There is
nothing more simple than that. Therefore it probably won't die as long as we
use text interfaces to our machines. What cute interfaces you put on top or
machine learning features, that's all up to the marketing department. But all
cool social networks and chat Apps can't do better than simply sending text.

------
3pt14159
Email will always be around, but I must say that "Email killers" are really
going to be successful.

For example, I don't remember the last time my team sent an internal email
that wasn't a forward from a client. We use Slack. Exclusively. We organize
projects around it, sales efforts, everything. It has the async nature of
email, the separation of topics like email, and the search power of email. It
also means that none of us ever feel like we're out of the loop.

~~~
Aqueous
Unfortunately, the "nobody owns" feature of EMail is something Slack lacks and
probably always will. Email is a federated, decentralized protocol of
distributed mail servers that anybody can set up. Any email server can
participate with any other email server. That's something that Slack will
never have (it does interface with XMPP and IRC, but the service itself is
centralized.)

It is hard to overstate how critical this fact is to Email's future. If you
look at most of the canonical Internet protocols (SMTP, HTTP, DNS, XMPP, IRC,
even BitCoin) - they have this fundamental feature in common. Even though
they're part of the application layer of the Internet, they've become
fundamental protocols that other technologies rely on. They are part of the
infrastructure of the Internet.

I say this is someone who just started using Slack and loves it. I still can't
see it replacing email, though.

~~~
zmmmmm
> XMPP, IRC

I actually think these guys are interesting exceptions. Yes, they are still
around, but they've largely been eclipsed by proprietary solutions. Why? Why
did Twitter storm to success XMPP was ostensibly the same thing but with all
of these good qualities (open, federated, decentralised, etc.). Still to this
day messaging is a battleground for new entrants touting completely opaque
solutions. It seems like there's something more to success than just being
open, federated and decentralised.

~~~
Aqueous
XMPP is one of those things that billions of people use without knowing it.
Facebook Chat and GChat for a long time (and maybe still now) were actually
just branded XMPP solutions - Facebook (annoyingly) shut off federation,
keeping in the spirit of their walled garden approach, but GChat still
interoperates with other XMPP servers if I'm not mistaken.

Edit: GTalk shut off federation for XMPP extensions like multi-user chat and
Jingle (Voice-Over-IP).

As for IRC - yes it has been largely eclipsed by proprietary solutions. I
chalk this up to the lack of a compelling, truly simple web front-end for it.
For instance, Slack seems to imitate a lot of the feature of IRC - it would be
easy enough for it to just _be_ IRC underneath, and maybe it is. But as far as
I know nobody ever wrote a true web client for IRC that was compelling enough
for the mainstream.

~~~
mahyarm
Internally it's not xmpp, but instead an xmpp facing compatibility layer.

------
bane
I'm pretty firm in my belief that one of the great marketing moves of the 21st
century is convincing people that email is not a social network. It's almost
on par with making people believe that diamonds are romantic and a necessary
part of the marriage ritual.

I think this has been helped by the general lack of innovation in the email
space. From pretty basic mail, we ended up with a few (very surprisingly few)
email clients and very little advancement on the original theme outside of
html formatting and huge inboxes.

Lots of people dump on Microsoft, but one of the huge upsides of exchange is
the tight integration of mail and calendar. From a conversation you can
immediately schedule actions. Invites are even sent out over SMTP if I'm not
mistaken. Getting a calendar to integrate well with gmail was one of the major
accomplishments of web-based email, yet it seems like repeating this anywhere
else is an accomplishment comparable to discovering cold fusion.

There's also been pitifully little work done in improving the experience of
managing email and calendar servers. Managing spam is still a tremendous
problem and all this adds up to most places, if they aren't using Exchange,
just buying corporate Outlook.com or gmail accounts for their employees.

The problem of course is that for any serious advancement to really work,
everybody (both client and server) have to move to support the advancement.

But one lesson to be learned from Facebook and G+ is that email _can_ be
replaced by an easier to use and friendlier system. There's a possibility of
disruption, but it's obviously not in anybody's particular interest to keep
reinventing email+otherstuff in this kind of highly centralized way. If
Facebook goes down, there goes a huge chunk of the global communication
system. At least with email I can be pretty sure my message is going to arrive
at the destination at some point.

Another lesson to be learned is that social networks like Facebook are
actually just a combination and integration of two (or three) common things
that used to be all over the web: a personal website and email. You get a
profile (which does a good enough approximation of the personal homepages of
the web 1.0 days but actually a bit more like ) and people can message you
(and more recently IM you). Basically a global presence you don't have to put
much effort into to manage and a way to contact you. More importantly Facebook
offers you various levels of control over who can see your presence and who
can message you. Spam is _almost_ unknown in Facebook's version of email.

So when I see distributed social network efforts like Diaspora, and all this
talk of authentication and protocols and whatnot I wonder why we're not really
using and extending the distributed infrastructure we already have. Even if we
improve it in some way that makes it no longer work with the old email
network, it won't be the first time a better internet service replaced a
previous one (WWW replaced gopher for example) -- there's no reason two
competing distributed messaging services can't run in parallel.

~~~
superuser2
I'm convinced that Facebook took over messaging because it has one killer
feature the 90s didn't: real names.

Contact points on Facebook are discoverable by real name based on the social
graph, which is kind of a first in the history of communication. If someone
mentions a John Doe in conversation, I can get in contact with the correct
John Doe with a very high probability of success and no effort.

The PSTN, email, AIM, ICQ, MSN, etc. didn't offer that. They _could_ have, but
their communities developed with different norms. Facebook managed to get
people to use their actual identities. That's a remarkable feat - not even
Google could replicate it. But it's what made Facebook so useful and so
addictive - it's about the actual lives of people I actually know.

Facebook does contain an analogue of "Web 1.0" personal webpages, but the
action on Facebook is centered on the News Feed, which was sort of a new class
of thing. Few people actually have profile information filled out; going to
someone's Facebook page is just a way of filtering the News Feed to only
content related to that person.

The real "Web 1.0" equivalent to Facebook would have been an RSS reader for
all your friends' blogs. But for people to be comfortable blogging, they had
to be able to (feel like they were) in control of their audience. Though
Blogger, Wordpress, etc. supported user authentication, it would have been
incredibly onerous compared to centralized identity. Which is more or less
what Facebook became.

A truly open, distributed Facebook based on the "Web 1.0" would probably have
looked something like an RSS reader that could authenticate to each friend's
blog with OpenID. But it still would have lacked the ability to discover and
search for people by real name that makes Facebook so useful.

~~~
prostoalex
And yet Snapchat took over messaging by reverting back to arbitrary usernames,
AOL styles.

~~~
superuser2
Snapchat bootstraps its social graph on top of the already-existing social
graph of "people who have each other's cell phone numbers." Actually learning
and typing in people's Snapchat usernames is possible but not common.

Exchanging phone numbers is already integrated into the social fabric of our
society as a step in escalating a friendship or asking for / receiving the
opportunity to date someone. It's a somewhat intimate act, and appropriate for
a communication mechanism that's basically only used between people who are
already friends.

Snapchat doesn't have the ability to discover acquaintances / friends-of-
friends nearly as easily as Facebook does.

I also wouldn't say it "took over messaging." People don't really have actual
conversations on Snapchat, they send photos of themselves making weird faces
or Twitter-style status updates. New class of thing.

------
AndrewKemendo
I think the main thing keeping email as the baseline for communication on the
internet is it's cost. There has been no other service that can provide such a
varied yet simple medium of communication - text, images, video attachments
with history and an audit-able trail - for free.

The closest that anyone has come have been the big social providers with
messaging applications which mimic email in many respects. Even then, they are
copying the email model with a branded version - not replacing it.

It will take an entirely new and different protocol that simplifies
communication with the same or better capability scope to displace email.

------
sytelus
Slack is obviously not killing emails as they are advertising through lot of
PR. They have 150K active users so far. However one thing that they are
correctly going after is fantastic search abilities for our own data that
would include all emails, chat, attachments etc. My feeling is that eventually
_communication client_ that excels in search would indeed surface to the top.
This _client_ would then drive communication standards of the future,
including emails. So in essence, problem is not integration of desperate
sources of communication, but ability to search them efficiently.

------
LeicaLatte
Webmail was the first and continues to be the most successful implementation
of cloud. Ever.

I don't see cloud designs of now working on top of standards like email does.
No wonder data tends to get stuck in silos these days.

------
tatterdemalion
Email and WWW provide everything proprietary services are providing people
now, but with less flash. The problem is that so many people are moving to
these proprietary services that it becomes very difficult to organize and
communicate people without making that move. I needed to coordinate with
multiple people, and one of them emailed me that we should start a group chat
on Facebook; why not just cc them?

------
eyeareque
I tend to disagree. To me the WWW is the best thing on the internet.

But I do use the heck out of email ever since I quit all social networks a
couple of years ago.

------
tomphoolery
I somewhat disagree with the background data this article cites as reasons for
why everyone wants email dead. I do not believe people like Slack, Asana, et.
al. are trying to kill email, rather, I believe they are trying to offer
services that help to reduce email's dominance over communications.

One thing that email does not provide for anyone is choice. The barrier to
entry is running your own IMAP, SMTP, and possibly spam blocker servers, which
almost no one wants to or even knows how to do anymore. It's also somewhat
inefficient for conversations, just like regular snail mail is inefficient for
conversations. You mail letters, not one-line replies.

So I tend to think of IMs, chat rooms, and other methods of communication on
the Internet as simply compliments to email, not replacements for it. Nothing
will replace it, because nothing needs to. It's email.

(sidenote: I'm pretty sure one big reason everyone uses email is because they
were given an email account, and didn't have to search out the technology. You
don't see people clamoring about the reduced use of Usenet in comparison to
forums nowadays. Same can be said for texting, I personally got a phone one
day and someone sent me a text message, that's how I started texting. Probably
never would have thought getting text messages sent to a phone that I can just
talk on would have been a useful enough communications platform to seek out
and possibly pay for.)

~~~
leni536
_> You mail letters, not one-line replies._

What stops you to send a one-line reply in email?

------
gjvc
I'll rise to the bait.

[http://incubator.apache.org/wave/](http://incubator.apache.org/wave/) (first
from Google, now Apache) was/is a brave try. The main problem with email is
the lack of consistent formatting rules which means that it's difficult to
keep track of structure.

But hey, it's a massive success. Worse sometimes really is better.

------
nickhalfasleep
Email is still inherently a conversation with a person or people, and that is
why it has value.

------
Fastidious
I agree. I think there is more that can be done to enhance it, and make it a
more enjoyable tool. Email clients --and I am not talking about third party
services a la Mailbox, who rely yet in another server-- are still very
primitive.

~~~
7952
I feel that gmail has held back development of good desktop clients (which is
what we really need). My laptop has an almost empty 1TB hard drive yet I need
to wait to download an image attachment every time I want to view it. Email
should be built around abundant storage, not a dependency on bandwidth.

~~~
thebokehwokeh2
> Email should be built around abundant storage, not a dependency on
> bandwidth.

I'm sorry but this doesn't make sense to me. To cache all images you've ever
received is sort of antithetical to the whole 'decentralized' nature of email,
and the internet in a nutshell. The 'inconvenience' of having to re-download
far surpasses the need to store every single trivial little thing on your mail
client's cache. A few seconds is worth way more to me than taking up tens of
gigs of images on my HD that I will never see again.

~~~
7952
I disagree. A modern device is almost entirely composed of files downloaded
from the internet. The binary for your web browser is just a local cache of an
entity that exists in the cloud. You need a local cache because bandwidth and
latency are too high to retrieve a new copy every single time you run the
program unless you need an update. It seems a pity to not use storage to cache
when it is available. Especially considering that to most people bandwidth is
much more expensive than storage.

------
shmerl
An interesting post on this subject by Aaron Seigo:

[http://aseigo.blogspot.com/2014/07/one-singular-sensation-
yo...](http://aseigo.blogspot.com/2014/07/one-singular-sensation-your-
email.html)

~~~
tatterdemalion
This article is good but it makes some comments that don't seem true to me.

> It's a globally addressable system that does not require any centralized
> system, which means it works everywhere and for everyone no matter what
> choice in service provider the individual user (or their organization)
> makes.

Isn't it the case that nearly all email is routed using DNS? Certainly all of
mine is. While there are certainly arguments against centralized addressing
systems, the advantage that email has isn't that its addressing system is
uncentralized: it's that its addressing system is more libre than proprietary
systems.

>These "open social networks" don't pass messages to the end user. They pass
messages to servers which the user then consults.

How is this different from email? Most people don't have email addresses at a
domain assigned to their normal computer; the vast majority of email is
accessed over some internet protocol from a remote server, whether its IMAP,
POP3, or HTTP. I've never used Diaspora, so maybe I just don't understand what
functionality its missing.

~~~
shmerl
There are some designs for decentralization of the DNS. The decentralized
nature of e-mail on the higher level still is valuable.

 _> the advantage that email has isn't that its addressing system is
uncentralized: it's that its addressing system is more libre than proprietary
systems._

I think that the biggest advantages of e-mail are its decentralization +
federation based on open protocols. These make e-mail extremely useful despite
all of its shortcomings. Consider for example IM services. They multiply like
mushrooms these days, yet most of them completely lack federation and
therefore are crippled if you look at them globally. You can't communicate
with users of other services at all (unless you register there as well which
defeats the purpose of decentralization). XMPP attempted to solve it, but
unlike e-mail most participants on the IM scene were too selfish to fix the
situation, including Google who deserted.

 _> How is this different from email? Most people don't have email addresses
at a domain assigned to their normal computer; the vast majority of email is
accessed over some internet protocol from a remote server, whether its IMAP,
POP3, or HTTP. I've never used Diaspora, so maybe I just don't understand what
functionality its missing._

I think his main point is, that in e-mail you can have real push mechanisms in
theory. I.e. you send a message and the other participant receives it through
the e-mail service. In social networks (even decentralized ones), the delivery
of such notifications is delegated to... e-mail. Which shows their intrinsic
deficiency. They aren't implementing the full scope of the communication
process. I.e. if you envision a better social network, it should be
decentralized but also take care of the delivery of the interactions in one
coherent experience in order not to rely on other external tools for that.

E-mail isn't fully decentralized most of the time, but it still can be (you
can run your own e-mail server). You can run your own Diaspora pod the same
way, but like above, it would still delegate notifications to another service.

~~~
tatterdemalion
I agree that federation is critical to email's value, but isn't that true of
Diaspora as well? Again, I've never used Diaspora, but why is it notifying you
through email? Everyone checks their Facebook without needing email
notifications.

------
mpg33
It's like a phone number or address.

------
nerdben
Nice article! We totally agree and don't believe in those "we need to replace
email with an app" approaches. For example, that's why we build our service
StandupMail ([http://standupmail.com](http://standupmail.com)) completly upon
emails.

------
redtrackker
It would probably only take one innovation in email, something that Gmail
could probably pull off, to make email lovable again.

I really think that if Google could help alleviate people's concerns with
email (volume, spam etc), people would be quite happy with email again :)

~~~
UweSchmidt
Maybe add a little bit of useful cryptography even. Spam is already fixed by
Google, and volume? How could Google fix that?

------
obilgic
what if we limit email to 140 characters and make it the ultimate
decentralized push notification system?

~~~
chippy
Elevator pitch: "It's like email but for messages"

------
kris_zhang
Email is important, WWW is all

------
oafitupa
Bitcoin is better IMO.

But I agree that email is a great thing. I hope someone creates a sick email
client that turns back the flow from Facebook to the email. I'm fine with
Thunderbird + Enigmail, but I don't see the average person using it any time
soon (or ever if unchanged).

------
mjt0229
That is, except for kittens.

------
sarahkennedy
Has anyone got an invite code for the new Email product Sortd.com?

~~~
JamesWinter
I got an invite code from a coworker as I couldn't wait any longer to get in!

I've been using it for two weeks now and I have to say it's a must have app
for all Gmail users ... It's has completely changed the way I work.

------
gailees
Facebook Messenger will eclipse email. Social network is the perfect spam
filter.

~~~
noir_lord
Doesn't solve the "This order is wrong I need to send email to
support@somerandomcompany.org" problem though.

~~~
pavel_lishin
I'm actually afraid that the internet is moving to this model, specifically
with Facebook. How many times have you seen an ad that, instead of a URL, asks
you to go to their Facebook page?

~~~
dragonwriter
> I'm actually afraid that the internet is moving to this model, specifically
> with Facebook. How many times have you seen an ad that, instead of a URL,
> asks you to go to their Facebook page?

No more often than I used to see the same thing with an AOL Keyword instead of
a URL. I don't think the internet is "moving to this model" so much as it is a
model which periodically emerges when a particular portal is dominant enough
with the commercially-relevant audience, and fades as the dominance of that
single portal.

