
Ask HN: How do we solve the email problem? - cmacole
We all know email needs to change. It&#x27;s so horribly inefficient, but how could we go about solving this problem? Slack is great for teams, but what about everyone else?
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Gustomaximus
While I think the short/medium term solution is training people on how to use
email as much as the software improvements itself, id love to see some smaller
time saving features added like;

\- A 'do you need to reply all' pop-up when people do a short thanks message.
Kinda like the check for attachments.

\- A 'drop me from this thread' button so the next reply-all person see a note
that these people have been removed. Then they can add them back if needed.

\- More personal statistics on email to chart how many you are getting and
time spent etc. Seeing this might encourage people to be more efficient.

\- Improve threading of emails to more like SMS. Outlook and Gmail ate both
horrible on this. Opera M2 used to have quite good threading so perhaps the
new Vivaldi team will improve this when they re-make the mail client.

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joeclark77
Years and years ago there was some talk of having a "postage stamp-like" fee
to send and receive e-mails. Enforced by the recipient's server, I guess. That
way spam and low-quality memo-writing would be discouraged. Instead of
monetary points it could be karma points or something. This didn't go anywhere
10 years ago, but maybe the time is ripe for it now. People are a lot more
comfortable with micropayments and there's a lot better infrastructure for the
necessary communication/negotiation between sender's and recipients' email.

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Tomte
Ex falso quodlibet.

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georgeott
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_explosion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_explosion)

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dreamdu5t
What's wrong with email?

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cmacole
And what startups are currently working on this problem?

