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E-mail is the Universal Platform

blog.contactually.com

1–10 of 60 posts

Re: E-mail is the Universal Platform

#8
post #4

Meanwhile, in the real world, delivery is not reliable.

Many years ago, working a support desk at an ISP, I fielded calls from angry seniors who wanted to know why their dozens of email forwards were not getting delivered to their friends, who desperately needed to know about the Microsoft/AOL cash reward giveaway. Suffering through the message logs, I would find typo'd email addresses, blacklisting message, or whatever the cause of the day was. I'd then have to explain that email and the internet was "best effort", and there was no guarantee of delivery, even if you did manage to type the email address correctly.

Interesting now, how most people wave off email delivery as flaky, or accept that spam filters will eat the 5% of incorrectly classified mail.

Are social networks more or less reliable? Have we all become numb to the best efforts of the web? I'm not sure. I think it is interesting though. I wonder if those seniors still call up these days?

Re: E-mail is the Universal Platform

#9
Sooner or later, email will either die or get better. The problem with email for most of its life was that there was little competition. Certainly SMTP has never had a serious rival. IMAP came to challenge POP, and won: this made email better. And Exchange has certainly set a standard that IMAP and webmail providers have had to meet.

But it's not much compared to the seething shark tank that the web has been for the last twenty years. Sooner or later I think a RESTful HTTP or SPDY API will replace IMAP, and (for client-server comms at least) SMTP.

I think ccLoop is a side-issue, because they were addressing the problem of mailing list management. Contactually's approach seems to be wrong-headed to me, making the user send and receive more emails! But really it's more of a CRM system than a step forward for email, so perhaps it's solving a problem I don't have.

At comms.io, we're writing an email client. The idea is to work with IMAP, take on the lessons of Gmail, but modernize the experience, make it lightweight and transparent. If you've seen the Gmail interface lately, what I mean by lightweight is the opposite of that. Anyone who's interested in helping out, do get in touch.

Re: E-mail is the Universal Platform

#10
post #6

http://www.quora.com/Why-did-ccLoop-fail ? This is an interesting read.

@sankalpk - I've seen that before, and it's a great post-mortem. I can see why it's hard for a collaboration company that's not solving a strong pain point. We look at the relationships that are live and die via e-mail, and are building a solution for that.
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