
E-mail didn't really evolve since Gmail. Why is it so hard to innovate? - chezmo
http://blog.frontapp.com/why-is-it-so-hard-to-innovate-in-the-e-mail-space
======
onli
I don't think the premise is right. From the beginning to now, Gmail evolved
quite a bit. For one, they used their analytical knowledge to prioritize
emails, which I found to be very helpful. Two, they started filtering
newsletters and advertisements automatically. Third, the UI got revamped quite
a bit. Add to that all the basics Gmail does right (spamfiltering,
tag+-syntax, …), and you see why it is hard to compete.

That said, I don't use gmail anymore because I don't want my emails to be
directly in the hands of the NSA.

But let's focus on their list for a bit. Because innovating a sector is not a
goal. Having a goal and therefore innovating, that is a goal. So, does the
list they formulated hold up? I don't think so:

 _better interfaces_ : Better than gmail? Good luck. Besides, even old-style
programs like claws-mail, sylpheed and thunderbird have really good
interfaces, for their purpose.

 _better email management_ : Gmail does that. And one has to be really careful
with that: It is not something every user need, sure not something every user
wants, especially if it even once sorts something the wrong way.

 _better workflow integration_ : Emails are not tasks. They don't need task
management in general. Emails are a communication medium, and sometimes, they
contain or become tasks. but that is not a general requirement for users.

 _better attachment handling_ : What does that mean besides searching for
attachments, maybe including their title, and browsing through the photos?
Like attachments.me tried to do. But all of that is not innovation…

 _better social integration_ : The action one might want to do, like
tweetbacks, should be linked in the email. Isn't that already the case? Blogs
do that (ok, serendipity does, don't know about the others).

 _better prioritisation and analytic_ : To general. Besides, Gmail tries that
already.

So, hmpf. Though I want to add that their general product idea (shared inboxes
for taskmanagement) doesn't look bad, for a very specific usecase.

~~~
enobrev
I agree with you almost entirely. Although I do have one specific minor off-
topic feature I'd love to have in email that I haven't seen anywhere.

I want the ability to "like" an email, and have the sender know that I "liked"
it. I don't want to write "yes, I agree", or even worse, a terse response of
"like" as I feel that's a waste of my time, the sender's time, an unnecessary
"+1" in their inbox.

I just want a way to say "I read your email and it sounds good to me" without
having to actually write anything. Just click the "heart" or whatever symbol,
and the sender is notified next time they open their email client with the
heart showing next to the thread. Would work out nicely for lists and group
emails as well.

I suppose there are clunky workarounds that would allow such a thing dependent
upon client implementation, but it's just not that significant of a thing.

As for shared inboxen for task management, I'd recommend Asana (with whom I've
no affiliation, besides being a happy customer).

~~~
p4bl0
What about an UI which mimic a social network in the Facebook style but which
uses email as backend? It would be decentralized for free, and entirely
interoperable with people using plain email (those who uses this UI would see
that you liked there message, others would see a reply that says "I liked your
email", for instance). Comments would be responses to email (using the In-
reply-to header). The interface could easily creates groups of contact or post
to all of them (equivalent to posting on your "wall"), etc. The action of
"friending" someone on this UI could optionally be mutual GPG key signing
behind the scene which would enable encryption of messages between friends.

I think there is a lot to do with this idea.

~~~
arethuza
I have wondered if you could build a federated social network (or something
that is more like an inter-social-network) with email as the underlying
transport. You'd need to layer a _lot_ of top of this, of course, but it would
be kind of fun.

------
kijin
The #1 difficulty with email startups is that they have to invent a market
that doesn't exist and doesn't want to exist.

Few people even know that they can access Gmail anywhere other than at
mail.google.com or via the Gmail app. Ditto for hotmail/outlook.com and pretty
much every other freemail service out there. And of course ad-supported
freemail providers have no incentive to let their users access email with a
third-party app.

The distinction between an email service and an email app is so murky in the
minds of most people, that Mozilla added a dialog box to Thunderbird where
they offer to create a new email account for the user. Seriously, a lot of
people were wondering why Thunderbird didn't come with its own email address!
Instead of trying to dispel this myth, Mozilla just let people keep believing
it.

~~~
mattmanser
You're ignoring enterprise, there is a huge industry around business email
hosting which more often than not uses an email client (and more often than
not that client is outlook or the iphone mail app).

Google Apps was certainly taking a huge chunk out of enterprise, but I don't
know if that's still happening now that you have to pay for it from employee
#1.

Outlook usage is so embedded and big enough that Google built a sync app, but
moderately funnily, the 'how to integrate google apps with Outlook' video on
this page is missing, not sure if that's a reflection of how few people use
it?

[https://support.google.com/a/answer/33322?hl=en](https://support.google.com/a/answer/33322?hl=en)

------
aleem
Here is an idea for something that has been in my head for some time.

All that would be required to jumpstart the innovation process is a developer-
friendly API and standardised events for extending email:

    
    
      onReceive(headers, body);
      onOpen(...);
      onTagged(...);
      ...
    

That would allow developers to do creative things with email. It may even give
way to niceties such as:

    
    
      npm install email-itinerary-parser
    

These events could be standardised across the board. A plugin ecosystem would
allow emails to operate much like blogging platforms do today. You could have
a self-hosted email platform with a plugin dashboard where you would pick and
choose your plugins. The UI would be the hard part but is a tractable problem
given the state of client-side MVC libraries that didn't exist until a few
years ago.

A service like Akismet would provide SPAM filtering and other services could
be built around it. The trust factor would be an issue but it might be even
possible to send these services only extrapolated data instead of the entire
contents of the email.

It would even be possible to build atypical interfaces around your email. You
could for example build a blogs UI that shows all emails sent to
myname+blogs@mydomain.com. The blogs Controller could automatically reply to
that email with the published status.

In general, things could move in a progressive direction much faster in the
hands of the developer community.

------
hobbes
Email didn't evolve with Gmail. Only the UI evolved.

It could be suggested that Wave was a revolution rather than an evolution, and
that was its greatest weakness. I'm sad that it's gone.

~~~
agerlic
Not completely gone, it still exists as Apache incubator project :
[http://incubator.apache.org/wave/](http://incubator.apache.org/wave/)

~~~
hobbes
True. But for it to succeed and be widely adopted, it really needs an
organization that is able to host it for the masses.

------
chalgo
Yet another case of a blog where I click the logo at the top and I don't get
taken to the product, I get taken to the blog index. Infuriating!

~~~
l_perrin
It's fixed, sorry for the infuriation :)

------
qwerta
Interactive email Web UI is around since 1997 when Microsoft introduced
Outlook Web Access. GMail is not really that special.

I think largest email innovation is right now happening at KDE with
integration of KMail into rest of the desktop.

~~~
1stop
I love it when the Microsoft apologists come out :)

Outlook Web Access... yeah that changed the world, gmail was but a shadow in
its glory.

~~~
qwerta
I use Linux since 2002 and actually hate M$.

But yes, it introduced Ajax and changed the world. Gmail was revolutionary
because it offered 1GB when 10MB was the norm. Not because of UI.

~~~
1stop
Microsoft introduced a proprietary technology only IE5 could use and changed
the world?

Google implemented in both a maps app (completely new UI, and WAY more novel
use of Ajax than outlook) and a mail app a standard that worked across all
browsers (also something missing in outlook).

Google showed us that you can use a new piece of tech across all browsers.
Microsoft showed us you could do something in IE, and only IE.

Your statement is equivalent to saying "ActiveX changed the world". You maybe
right, but no one cared about the change, and the change was probably
negative.

~~~
quesera
> completely new UI, and WAY more novel use of Ajax than outlook

As to novelty: XMLHttpRequest was _invented_ by Microsoft _for_ Outlook Web
Access. "Ajax" was invented by Jesse James Garret as a new name for
XMLHttpRequest.

I remember the first time I saw someone use OWA on IE, thinking: HTF does that
work? Then I remembered he was using IE and chalked it up to proprietary
browser extensions, which was correct. Proprietary but useful enough that the
other browsers eventually had to duplicate the feature, with different syntax.

That duplication is what made Google Maps (and later, Gmail) possible.

So, yes. Microsoft gets credit for this one. Not for the generosity of their
hearts, but for doing it and making it work and dragging the rest of the world
along behind them. That had been the tradition with browser tech since the
beginning, with positive and negative effects. This was a positive one.

Definitely not a Microsoft apologist here. And XHR could have been better. But
no one else cooked it up, so, they get some credit.

~~~
1stop
This is like saying we should thank Sun for Java Applets, because they gave us
web sockets, 3d graphics, etc in the browser. They dragged the whole industry
into the future!

The could do what ajax does before microsoft "invented" XMLHttpRequest...

Or we could admit, that coming up with proprietary crap on the web doesn't
mean much, the hard part is making it work for everyone.

------
saurik
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7313277](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7313277)

------
enscr
This thread is one discussion where I hardly see any coherence or modality in
opinions (not that it's bad). To me, this indicates that email innovation has
a lot of latent potential. For example, email could have evolved to encompass
messaging as a first class citizen rather than an add-on widget.

------
Delmania
I see this as similar to Blueray, a solution searching for a problem. The vast
majority of people don't have a significant problem with the current
implementation of email, and those that do develop workflows. It's like a
toaster, it works fine as it.

------
glassapps
The next step in the evolution should be end to end encryption that is (yet)
impossible to crack

------
jsTea
Email in its existence is a medium of communication and there can be
innovation in the the modes of communication but the service in its own
concept is difficult to be changed. Its same as saying to innovate on letter
writing.

------
parax
The innovation was Google Wave. And it was pretty much ignored.

~~~
sigsergv
Because it's based on extremely complex ideas. Multi-dimensional emails are
great but they are really hard.

------
Aoyagi
Since Gmail? What new did Gmail bring to email users exactly?

~~~
mathouc
Gmail introduced conversation threading, gigabyte storage, speed, powerful
search, and lots more no?

~~~
jol
for me: what is that "a lot more"? I just want to learn something new (btw,
labels/tags are not really new, just redesigned imap folders)

~~~
omh
Tags have an important difference from folders in that messages can have
multiple tags and you don't think of messages as being _in_ a folder.

Personally I find this quite useful and it definitely improved the way I use
email.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Opera Mail had tags quite early on, not sure if it was before Gmail though.

------
drcongo
I've been testing Front and it's very promising.

------
pgl
Why do we always _need_ to innovate?

------
PsychoBilly
" Why is it so hard to innovate? " Hmmm ... because mail just works since 20+
years And most of us just need grep command you IOS fanboy

~~~
tim333
I was going to say much the same that it works fine already. Although thinking
about it there have been real improvements like being able to send 2GB files
with gmail which was darn hard 20 years ago. And presently if I compose a
reply with gmail it does it in a stupid little pop up window while if I fire
up Outlook it takes like 5 minutes to come to life. So maybe it's not all
perfect yet.

Actually what still bugs me is that I use email as my default record of all
conversations I've had since 94 or so but I have not found a way for it to
include SMS messages. Facebook you can forward to email but not SMS as far as
I know. I want to be able to say to the program show me all the conversations
with Bob last year and see everything, SMS, WhatsApp etc included. So come on
startup dudes, build away! I daresay much of the problem is the likes of Apple
being precious about letting you download the SMSs, but anyway.

