
Ask HN: What could disrupt email? - parvatzar
As the defacto standard for business and corporate communication?
======
chuhnk
You're thinking about it the wrong way. First ask yourself what's wrong with
email and why does it need to be disrupted? What problem are we actually
trying to solve by replacing email.

Email is a powerful tool for asynchronous communication and it's here to stay.
The way in which we interact with email may change over time as user
interfaces change. We've gone from desktop to mobile and soon there may be
some other dominant platform.

To answer my own question. In large corporations email is typically still used
to announce or notify at scale. So what we're really looking for is a way to
strip out this notification aspect. That's basically just an enterprise
version of twitter with an opt-in model for streams which allows you to keep
track of what everyone's doing in the organisation without having your inbox
spammed. Notice I'm not talking about the collaborative use of email since
that's already being solved by tools like Asana, Slack and Atlassian.

~~~
djKianoosh
does Slack have an on premise option? because I think many corporate customers
would definitely pay for it, despite all the cloud/saas hype. there are still
orgs out there that dont want their comms outside their premises.

~~~
zdw
It's called IRC/Jabber + whatever web/GUI/CLI UI is desired. Many companies
deploy it internally.

~~~
majewsky
Having used team chats based on Jabber, IRC, Slack (in that chronological
order), there is a huge difference. Jabber and IRC have always been pure
chats, whereas Slack is the first chat platform where people actually use
integrations and bots to a large extent. (Also, Jabber/IRC doesn't have
/remind, my personal killer feature about Slack.)

------
therealmarv
Nothing. Everybody tried.

I would only optimize it for business users. Shorten the text (maybe force
that even with AI or limitations, keep it async, chat is too sync). If you
follow this rules Emails get a lot more productive. I like the simple
adobtable approach of Emails in the "GitLab handbook"
[https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/](https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/)

~~~
scrollaway
I wouldn't say nothing. Discord and Slack are making a serious dent into one
of the primary use cases of email. Facebook has also entirely replaced email
in f&f communication. Twitter+Facebook have mostly replaced product
newsletters. It's also slowly-but-surely being phased out in identity
confirmation, by oauth2 (which is a really, really sad thing given the
proprietary lockin of oauth2).

Nothing will replace email altogether any time soon but if you offer a better
tool for one of the many, many use cases it has, people will switch. Email
became the default means of communication because it was the only way to
communicate; it's not anymore.

What's really unfortunate is that everything I have listed is proprietary.
We're putting our communication channels (both as users and as companies) in
the hands of private companies that could shut us down at any moment.

------
bharani_m
Does email need disruption? I have not faced any problem with emails as a form
of business communication.

I have used Slack but it doesn't come anywhere close to emails in terms of
ease of use, especially for people in non-technical fields.

------
xtiansimon
I use email every day for work in communication with clients and co-workers. I
can't think of anything about email's principal concept which needs disruption
(ie. asynchronous communication). I certainly can't think of any value which
could be made above that which email provides and at such little cost. I think
I can safely say our privately owned company uses email because it satisfies
all our requirements: messages are fast, works with all manner of media we
need, everybody's (clients, co-workers, vendors) has an email account, and
client software is batteries included. I could go on.

That said, I think improvements could be done on the software side.
Integration with applications in meaningful task-related ways (some apps I use
have contact list, but the app can't infer what should go into my email's body
given the context of the windows I have open). For me I could imagine OS level
innovations improving my _writing_ experience.

------
snarf21
I don't think it can be killed. I do think you can make an email++, but agree
with the other comment that it would have to only be for business. I think the
thing that is missing is more structure and management capabilities. The only
problem is how do you have it be interoperable with an email clients that
don't have your new thing. One thing you have to start with is what are the
things that really really suck with email, imo: inability to opt-out of
threads, no ability to say what type of email it is (INFO, REQUEST, PITCH,
COMPLETE, etc.), no ability say that a response/work is required and by whom
and by what date, hard to not lose the important facts of the email after 25
replies, etc....

Quite frankly I can think of a bunch of other things as well. I don't have
time right now but I would look at adding structured data at the top of the
email that you can parse but shows up nicely as text in other clients, for
example (assuming html email, just off the top....)

<div style="color:white;"> <div id="type">REQUEST</div> <div
id="response">No</div> <div id="duedate">14Feb2016</div> <div
id="assignee">bob@example.com</div> <div id="keypoint-1">We don't have a good
backup procedure</div> <div id="keypoint-2">We've never tested our
backups</div> <div id="keypoint-3">We've never built a clone network from our
backup</div> </div>

You can now parse/search/filter based on this data. You can manage tasks right
in email and have a button to say "done" that sends an email back to the
originator that they know it is done. There are a lot of other things too but
I need to go do work now :(. I'll monitor this thread if you want to discuss
further. (/sigh, I wish HN had integrated private messages)

------
byoung2
Email is tough to kill because it's not a company or a product, it's a
decentralized set of standards. Email sucks in a lot of ways, but it's simple,
works everywhere, and it's baked into a lot of places (confirmation emails,
password reset emails, alert emails, etc). There are better technologies out
there like messaging and slack, but they're controlled by companies and not
open/decentralized, and while they have integrations, they aren't baked into a
lot of places (e.g. no Amazon confirmation slack messages or bank alerts
through FB messenger).

Imagine trying to kill XML because JSON is better...nearly impossible. Email
may slowly die over time, but I don't think it's likely you can kill it
outright.

~~~
skermes
Yes, the fact that you can send email to people who aren't using your email
system is the main thing that's keeping chat services stuck as part of a
company's communication tools and not being the entire (or almost entire)
thing.

I actually wrote the easy 50% of email back compatibility for a chat app once
- it wasn't as hairy as I expected it was going to be. Everyone has a unique
username (or at least username+org pair) so use that to generate an email
address for them. Similarly, generate an email address for every group/room.
When you receive an email for one of those addresses, use the from headers to
find/create a new pseudo-user and dump the body of the email in as a chat
message. When someone writes in chat that has a pseudo-user as one of the
people watching that chat, send them an email with that text and throw in a
few previous messages as a fake reply chain for context.

There are a lot of hairy details about thread management and making sure you
don't send pseudo-users too many emails and dealing with all the messed up
headers that different platforms send you and trying to only extract the
actual message and not the signature/replies from an email and attachments so
on that I only worked on a little before the whole thing was shuttered. But it
was really cool. Email users tended not to notice that anything was different
(they're used to email looking weird from various services) and chat users got
to stay in chat that was a little awkward instead of having to switch to a
different tool entirely to talk to people outside the organisation. (And, if
all the different chat services started doing it, you'd get really janky chat
federation for free!) And it lets you get a lot of stuff that gets made as
Slack integrations for free, too. Why bother setting up a bot to post to chat
when a Jenkins build fails when you can just give Jenkins your dev chat's
email address and let it send emails?

------
michaelbuckbee
There's a fairly well known graphic of all the companies that have taken
chunks of Craigslist and to varying degrees supplanted them:

[http://static3.businessinsider.com/image/4dd4d1cf4bd7c8c90f0...](http://static3.businessinsider.com/image/4dd4d1cf4bd7c8c90f000000-1200-924/craigslist%20andrew%20parker.png)

Email is being disrupted similarly.

Slack/Chat -> Intra-team communications. But also sales inquiries (those
ubiquitous: 'We're here to help!' toaster style popups on every company site)
and status notifications (for instance StatusPage was bought by Atlassian in
large part to merge into HipChat).

Internal Social -> Many people are familiar with Yammer (which is FB for
within a company), but other services like Salesforce, etc have versions of
this internally. You could also consider services like Jive in this.

External Social -> I've run some fairly substantial mailing lists and social
accounts. For something like a non emergency information sender ("Weekly
GoLang Tips!") it's about evenly split with people signing up for the
newsletter vs signing up on Twitter.

------
nitai
I don't think there is an issue with email per se. It's more that there hasn't
been much "evolution" in its use.

Though, Google and other companies have definitely tried to make email
"better".

After an elaborate phase of talking to hundreds of companies, I've created a
platform that has the approach of "collaborative email". It's providing an
additional layer to email that helps companies to keep track of all those
customer emails (you can check it out at
[http://helpmonks.com](http://helpmonks.com)).

In any case, I think in adding additional service around email is where the
real disruption lies.

------
plasticdroid
One of my coworkers was fantasizing the other day about starting a company
where they don't send any internal emails. His plan involved prioritizing
face-to-face communication, dedicated Slack channels, and a suite of tools
that made it easier to index, and search across Slack. It was an interesting
thought experiment, but it broke down in a lot of areas, and I think our
conclusions were:

1) It would only have a chance of working in a small organization with a
single team, or few teams that communicate regularly and effectively.

2) It's one thing to favor other channels of communication, but outright
banning of email didn't have a lot of benefits other than forcing people to
favor said alternate channels.

~~~
andruby
I work at a company with about 25 employees, some of which are remote. All
communication happens on Slack, Basecamp and Github. We also have Friday
afternoon drinks to catch up in real life. It works well. Can't remember when
I last received an internal email.

External communication does still happen over email, that won't change any
time soon I think.

------
paulsutter
You can replace certain use cases of email, but you wont replace all the use
cases at once.

For business opportunities might be around workflow and decisionmaking.

Slack dramatically reduced my email volume by replacing a use case that email
handled badly, for example.

A consumer analogy, Facebook replaced a bunch of email use cases. I still have
a friend who sends out email updates with photos while traveling, for example.

SMS and messaging apps, of course.

Someone could do a map like this list of companies that replaced specific use
cases of Craigslist

[https://www.cbinsights.com/blog/craigslist-
unbundling/](https://www.cbinsights.com/blog/craigslist-unbundling/)

~~~
frik
Facebook messages are lock-in. Back when I used it a lot, you could connect
via XMPP client. But there is now no way to get your own messages out of their
eco-system that I am aware off. It's like switching a dumb-cellphone to
another cellphone, you loose all your old SMS (if the aren't stored on the SIM
card and there is no PC link cable+software). Open standards like IRC, email,
XMPP prevent something like this to happen.

------
nnn1234
I completely second byoung2's comment. When we say email , the thing we refer
to would be free email services for personal use or inbox hell at work. The
same question without Gmail,Yahoo mail and other is easier to answer.

SMTP might be here to stay, but a low cost protocol independent messaging
protocol with an Identity layer can and will come along.

Why does no official comm happen on email? No ID validation. Maybe PKI can
help. Solution will either be use case by usecase or platform change like FB
or chat

------
deckar01
An email client that aggressively advocates for and implements new protocol
features. Browsers accelerated web standards and stole market share by doing
this.

I would like to see an email client with an edit button for messages. I have
already thought a lot about this feature [0]. Feel free to comment on the
issue.

[0] [https://github.com/deckar01/amend-
mail/issues/1](https://github.com/deckar01/amend-mail/issues/1)

------
frik
What's wrong with email? It works fine for decades. SMTP, (POP3) and IMAP are
fine protocols.

Please disrupt chat instead, with a proper protocol. A new non-XML based XMPP
version maybe? Anyway the big players need to support it. Now we have all
these proproitary chat apps (FB/WhatsApp, WeChat, SnapChat, Skype, Hangout,
etc.) that are incompatible closed eco-systems. Maybe we should just disrupt
chat by using the email protocols and infrastructure ;)

------
marczellm
Please don't "disrupt" the last open standard alive in online communication.

------
kijin
Better email.

An email can contain multiple arbitrary payloads. It's almost like HTTP,
except it's asynchronous. We already have the infrastructure to deliver
messages from anyone to anyone. Why keep trying to destroy it when we could
take advantage of the existing infrastructure instead? I don't see anyone
rallying to disrupt HTTP. Why all the obsession with disrupting email?

We could use different Content-Types to embed all sorts of structured
information in an email, and standardize the hell out of it. A schedule for an
event. An item to go on your TODO list. A link to click for confirmation. If
you can express it in JSON, you can attach it to an email. And the resulting
messages will be 100% backward compatible with old email clients, just like
newer versions of HTTP.

There are endless possibilities for email as long as you don't try to get
everyone on your own proprietary platform. Otherwise you will be just another
messaging service that has nothing to do with email, and email users will
happily ignore you. Don't fall into that pitfall. You need to make your
solution an essential part of people's email workflow, rather than trying to
steer people toward a different workflow.

~~~
qznc
The problem is the usual with a federated protocol: adding a feature requires
you to extend all the clients, which does not happen. See for example PGP.

~~~
kijin
The features are completely opt-in. If you don't want to link your email to
your schedules or TODO list, you don't need to do anything. The same
information should be present in a human-readable format in the body of the
email anyway. (YAML might be better than JSON for this purpose.)

------
deckiedan
I've just been setting up a new web server this last week, a shared host for a
few friends and family, personal websites, a couple of side projects, etc.

The bit which drives me the most crazy is setting up email on it. All the
sites need to be able to send occasional notification emails (WordPress, so
password resets, etc). I hoped dragonfly mail daemon would be enough,. But we
also need virtual host forwarding - if you email some addresses at one of the
hosts, it should forward on to the right persons Gmail, or whatever. So we
ended up with postfix. Which is reasonable easy - a hell of a lot easier to
configure than sendmail or exim, but even still... I wish __so __much for a
mail daemon with all the correct options for SRS, DKIM, SPF, SSL, TLS,
greylisting, etc. Turned on by default, and yaml /toml configuration... I'm at
the point of reading golang and python SMTP code and wanting to write one.
Something like caddy for email.

Email is complex, there are so many edge cases and options. It's insane.
Reading documentation is awful, as all daemon docs assume you know what all
the acronyms mean, and that you understand all the various RFCs.

------
rorykoehler
Nothing... I would like to see better interfaces for email. I am looking for 2
things. Conversational layouts so long message chains can be easier to read
and review (this is difficult as not everyone in a cc'd email chain gets each
email). A better way to manage multiple accounts from one inbox.

------
kbos87
We're all likely to have some sort of a communication stream in our
professional lives that needs regular attention from us for the foreseeable
future. Right now, it's email.

I feel like most people who "dislike email" dislike it as a proxy for their
unhappiness with their working environment and how the people around them
communicate.

Email could probably do a better job of compensating for the poor
communication habits of those we work with. In my experience, Slack
exacerbates those bad habits. But with email, I don't think the medium is
necessarily the problem. It's an asynchronous stream of stuff that needs our
attention or that we want to have our attention. The protocol is reliable and
nearly universal.

------
slipmagic
Email itself, as with how Google is with Gmail and Inbox,which has reminders
and interactive messages (Trello, Slack, etc.), the ability to use Google
Drive for large attachments, and send money to friends.

If Gmail had a publishing platform, sort of like MailChimp, in which partners
from large sites could use to gather analytics and craft messages with
embedded content beyond the limits of typical messages. You could:

\- reset your password with a click of a button and have it generated and
stored by Google.

\- chop up lengthy newsletters to contain only the content that you need.

\- Convert threads with other Gmail users into chats, with threaded messaging.

This could reduce traffic to their site, though, making it less sticky. And it
would work ideally in Chrome, unfortunately.

------
csharpminor
I think that Slack would argue that they are disrupting email. We have many
fewer internal emails at work now - most are directed at clients.

Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, etc. Are strong contenders for replacing email
to friends.

Not trying to avoid your question, but I think the future of email isn't a
better protocol or SMTP client enhancement, it's apps that provide a better
way of communicating a given task.

As it turns out, the major feature of email (being able to message anyone) is
also a huge drawback (communications inundated with spam).

------
synicalx
Email is fine, don't disrupt it. Make it better instead.

Blackberry got it mostly right with Hub - get all your emails, messages,
whatevers into one place and let you work out how you want to organise it all.
Something like that but a bit smarter (like Gmail's auto sorting of
promotions, updates etc).

If I could have one pane of glass to look at for my emails, slack/skype, text
messages, social media (business related of course) - I'd happily pay money
for that.

------
richardboegli
1) Better email clients

This would help people manage their email better.

Outlook and exchange are getting better, but still lacking.

Gmail has it's threads which work most of the time. Both have proprietary
tagging which is not IMAP compatible, which is why Thunderbird suffers.

If Thunderbird could handle Exchange and Gmail proprietary nuances it'd be
perfect.

2) Better email etiquette

The easier your email is to read and comprehend the more likely it'll get
responded to.

Fix / improve these two then this need to "disrupt email" would fade.

~~~
camus2
> 1) Better email clients

This, it's all about the UI/UX. Though I found Windows 10 default client quite
nice for non professional use.

------
bogomipz
From time to time I hear about some startup that is going to "disrupt email."
In my opinion email is something that works very well for asynchronous
communication. What is their to disrupt?

If your expectation is real time/synchronous then email is simply the wrong
choice of tool. That doesn't mean its lacking or needs to be "disrupted."

------
dcwca
The thing that will kill email is its lack of encryption. I'm surprised to see
on here that nobody is talking about encryption, but it's very important. Most
companies are not using it, and the email encryption options available are far
too clunky to be used effectively. Key negotiation needs to be built into the
protocol, ala Signal.

------
randlet
I love email. My only problem with email is that it's too difficult to
reliably run your own server with a Gmail quality interface. I have Fastmail
for email on my own domain and it is quite nice but the more experience I get
the less I want companies involved in being the gatekeepers to my critical and
personal information.

~~~
Mailtemi
Hi, your opinion is what we tried to achieve. Gmail UI experience with each
IMAP service.

Although I didn't mention what email client you are using, we will be glad to
give us suggestion what Gmail feature from you are most needed?

Disclaimer: I'm Mailtemi (email) app, developer.

------
mshenfield
We have viable replacements - our habits just haven't caught up to the tools.

Corporate e-mail assigns each employ a revocable identity, groups employees
into roles, and allows people to have private and public conversations. Tools
like Slack have become ubiquitous at software companies, and they provide the
_exact_ same functionality, with a foundation on realtime communication that I
believe is more productive. We still use e-mail for corporate announcements
and engagement when we really don't have to, and I think we'll stop as we get
better at it.

e-mail is just one piece of the corporate communication story though -
document creation and storage are another "standard" feature. Slack's "Plus"
plan is $12.50/user/month [0]. Premium G-Suite and Microsoft's Office 365 are
$10/user/month and $12.50/user/month [1] [2]. You can tell just be the price
tags and features that these companies are competing for shares of the same
corporate communication pie.

Slack right now is a player partly because the can backfill their shortcomings
here by integrating with G-Suite tools. You can see Slack trying to backfill
with Posts, Slack Calls, and I'd bet they're working on other high leverage
features (they have a lot of catch-up to do) to stay competitive as the core
of their platform faces competition from the likes of Microsoft Teams and open
source alternatives [3].

On thing e-mail is better at is person to person contact outside the context
of any organization. e-mail succeeds because I need one piece of information
to contact you (a public address), and I can be contacted by one public
address as well, no matter the tribe (gmail, outlook, etc.). Maybe a global
chatroom with name-spaced public address would be a decent alternative?

[0] [https://slack.com/pricing](https://slack.com/pricing) [1]
[https://gsuite.google.com/intl/en_us/pricing.html](https://gsuite.google.com/intl/en_us/pricing.html)
[2] [https://products.office.com/en-us/compare-all-microsoft-
offi...](https://products.office.com/en-us/compare-all-microsoft-office-
products?tab=2) [3] [http://venturebeat.com/2015/11/27/5-open-source-
alternatives...](http://venturebeat.com/2015/11/27/5-open-source-alternatives-
to-slack/)

------
nunez
Honestly, I think Slack is doing a great job of eliminating massive email
chains that should really be in a group chat. As for casual, slower
communication, I don't think it's going anywhere. We still use paper mail
after all.

------
kapauldo
Two things, 1) auto detect marketing email and remove or get it out of the
way, 2) make replying a taskable thing. Those are my 2 major problems, too
much junk mail and not having time right now to reply.

------
_nalply
Something like HTTP2 for email and then companies using email as a low-level
back-end for communication needs. Imagine FB posts backed by email. Chat
backed by email. And so on. Pipe dream.

------
sdfjkl
The removal of corporate bullshit signatures and legal disclaimers that are
10x the size of the actual email content.

Oh, and secure end-to-end encryption that is simple to set up and use safely.

------
ommunist
Email has its problems, but it is one of the cornerstones of authentication
messages exchange. Are you going to shake this one?

------
funkju
Another question is what technologies can be disrupted by being more like
email? (Distributed, open standard, etc)

Social Media comes to mind.

------
tim333
I don't know about disrupt but I sometimes message new business contacts on
linkedin. It gets kind of annoying after a bit though.

------
cowmix
“Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which
cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.”

-JWZ

------
sametmax
Idea 1 ========

A client that threat email as a chat message.

You enter your email and your password. You get chat timelines like in
whatsapps/viber/kik/wechat/text message. You can just write and send (no
topic, no inbox, etc).

This way you can use a reliable ID and messaging system to write messages as
easily as text messages. But with none of the jailed env like whatsapps.

You can have reliable encryption with PGP. Share media with attachment (but
with a simple UI). And it works with your regular email address, no need to
create a new account. It works with anybody (every body has an email address).
It works even with people not using the app.

To ensure it works with everybody, when you give your credentials it creates a
special IMAP inbox with just the mails from this "disposable" emails to not
pollute your real inboxes.

Idea 2 =======

Internal email address for a community

You create an email address, and only members of this community can get them,
or write to each others. You can then give permissions to external services to
write to you after approval. Non approved senders emails are rejected
silently.

This system would be great for the government, where any citizen would have an
official email address for life to communicate with the state. But you can't
spam it. you can't write to your friends with it. If an actor negociate with
the state (such as utilities providers), they can send your bills there. But
no ads or they get their permission revoked.

Basically like an real life official inbox, but global, with only important
content and virtual.

Of course you'll need to enforce 2-factor authentication on at the very
minimum.

Idea 3 ======

Email integrated in a Planning + Note system. Right now we integrate notes and
todo into email. I think the problem is backward. Emails are input you turn
into TODO, notes and appointments in your calendards.

What I usually want is to be able to have a link to an email that works
offline, which open my email client to this particular email. I used
thunderlink addon for that because that's the only way to do it, but it sucks.

This link I would be able to paste into my workflow. Apps could use it to
integrate a preview of the mail and attachments in the app, cache the mail,
ask for notifications about the conversation, get callbacks for events (email
deleted, marked as, moved to...) or tell the email client to archive the mail
and prevent deletions.

This should work offline (I want to be able to get organized in the plane) and
online (APIs => webhooks => cluster of integrated services).

------
hashkb
What can we use email to disrupt?

------
charlesism
Probably a social electric car with AI, and a voice interface. The driver's
seat will be a standing a desk, and the dashboard will use flat design. Data
storage will be handled with Blockchain, and devops will keep everything
running smoothly using Github and Docker and React.

~~~
synicalx
Gotta get VR in there as well, maybe a dashboard headset? DashRift? DashRift
2.0?

------
hellofunk
Google Wave is definitely going to change how we do email and instant
messaging and also document collaboration.

Oh, whoops, for a second I thought it was last decade.

------
supersan
Possibly email addresses that won't accept more than 200 plain text chars, so
real people get to the point quickly and spam becomes easier to determine.

