

Ask HN: Is it time we replaced E-Mail, SMS, Twitter etc? - alexchamberlain

Is it time we replaced E-Mail with something better?<p>A better system would include (as standard rather than - proprietary - extensions):
- Authentication (of sender)
- Authorisation (of whom can send to me - whitelist)
- Encryption
- Safe (against viruses)
- Guaranteed (to arrive/has been read)
- Real Time
- Ubiquitous (same view on every machine)
- Open (Completely)
- N-User (Communications between multiple users)
- Efficient (Persistent connections/bidirectional protocols?)<p>Any thoughts? How many times has this been asked recently? Is there a genuine effort on this anywhere?
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mooism2
Usually the "something better than e-mail" turns out to be worse than e-mail
in some important respect.

For example, if senders have to be whitelisted by the recipient, then shops
can't send confirmation e-mails.

~~~
alexchamberlain
I thought about this... There should be a way of adding to the whitelist
efficiently.

ie "Hacker News is trying to communicate with you; do you want to add them to
your whitelist? Your ISP has authenticated them using..." Replace ISP by trust
ring or any other third party you trust. (You may not trust your ISP of
course...)

