Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

This is the mail system

dewith.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 80 posts

Re: This is the mail system

#51

Post by quanticle »

fredoliveira wrote: post #13
jhferris3 wrote: post #2

Yes, the email system could be better. But for something that was designed decades ago it works surprisingly well. Should somebody try to do some smart parsing of failure notifications to make them more readable? Sure, I don't see why not. But don't pitch the baby out with the bathwater here. The underlying system is not that bad.

It is that bad. Email works and gets stuff done, yes, but at the expense of your time, server time, storage, network throughput. It is used for much more than it should, and is long past its expiration date. Sadly, we've all come to depend so much on email and how it works today that changing it would be like suddenly having to breathe underwater. It'll take a load of time to get used to whatever comes next.

Okay, email works at the expense of my time, server time, storage and network throughput. So what's your brilliant e-mail replacement? Heck, pg himself has talked about these very same issues and has noted that YCombinator would jump at funding any startup that came up with a credible replacement to e-mail.

E-mail is like democracy. It's the worst messaging system, except for all the others.

Re: This is the mail system

#52

Post by jodrellblank »

anigbrowl wrote: post #8

What annoys me about SMTP is that it's poorly implemented. Have you tried sending a message to the postmaster at any large firm in recent years? Chances are nobody even reads that. I clicked on the link to submit a tip to my local news station last week; later I got a reply telling me that those mailboxes didn't exist. The largest broadcast media organization in the Bay Area can't even operate its own wesbite properl…

Reminds me of the time I filled in a form on Microsoft.com and submitted it, I think it got sent to an internal nonexistant address, was autoforwarded, and then bounced to my email, containing the content of my original message and a reassurance to the internal person that their email address wouldn't be revealed to the outside world. It was.

Re: This is the mail system

#53

Post by draebek »

dsr_ wrote: post #14

Hi. This is the qmail-send program at yahoo.com. I'm afraid I wasn't able to deliver your message to the following addresses. This is a permanent error; I've given up. Sorry it didn't work out. : 72.1.169.10 does not like recipient. Remote host said: 550 : Recipient address rejected: undeliverable address: unknown user: "[list name]" Giving up on 72.1.169.10. That's a pretty good error message. Most people glaze over…

Years ago one of the VPs at a client of mine demanded that I change the wording of Qmail bounce messages because he found them snarky and offensive.

(I didn't change it.)

Re: This is the mail system

#56

Post by Shank »

Part of this would have to do with the fact that mail servers are never really updated with new "features."

- Sendmail was first released in 1983 initially. - Postfix was released in 1997 initially.

Though both are getting maintenance updates, and new processing features, none have improved the actual error path system. Maybe someone should write a better MTA?

Re: This is the mail system

#57

Post by Niten »

orthecreedence wrote: post #34

I completely disagree 100%. I think the mail system is exceptionally well-functioning. It's a massively-scalable, decentralized, asynchronous messaging system that supports large file attachments. At this, it excels. There's not one big evil company controlling all messages and unless you're sending massive amounts of emails every day, your messages almost always end up exactly where they're supposed to. I'd challeng…

Exactly. It would be no small matter to come up with an alternative system that has the simplicity, flexibility (including flexibility of archival), and most of all the freedom of email – and have it work anywhere near as well in practice as email does already.

(Google Wave showed promise... but it also introduced a ton of new complexity, and given the pattern of messages "living" on the sender's server, it wasn't clear how archival should actually work.)

It seems most people who advocate this notion that email is "broken" would rather us all use some centralized, proprietary system akin to Facebook messaging. This would be an unimaginable step backward for reasons that I hope do not require elaboration.

Re: This is the mail system

#58

Post by Niten »

jsprinkles wrote: post #9
jhferris3 wrote: post #2

Yes, the email system could be better. But for something that was designed decades ago it works surprisingly well. Should somebody try to do some smart parsing of failure notifications to make them more readable? Sure, I don't see why not. But don't pitch the baby out with the bathwater here. The underlying system is not that bad.

Actually, the underlying system is absolutely putrid, a sentiment that pg agrees with based on his latest talk at PyCon. Mail is, unequivocally, the worst part of my daily existence and you are kidding yourself if you're calling it "not that bad". Using pg's words, mail is a to-do list that anybody can put shit on, and I don't have any control over who puts things on it. We live in an era of technology that can do e-…

> mail is a to-do list that anybody can put shit on, and I don't have any control over who puts things on it.

If that's your complaint, then your beef isn't with email in particular, but with the mailbox paradigm in general. But I for one find that paradigm useful, and I respectfully disagree.

Re: This is the mail system

#59

Post by autarch »

jrockway wrote: post #25
jhferris3 wrote: post #2

Yes, the email system could be better. But for something that was designed decades ago it works surprisingly well. Should somebody try to do some smart parsing of failure notifications to make them more readable? Sure, I don't see why not. But don't pitch the baby out with the bathwater here. The underlying system is not that bad.

The underlying problem is that SMTP only has a few error codes, and so there is no way the MUA can understand (in a standard way) why the MTA rejected the message. HTTP ended up having richer errors, and so clients can provide nice messages if they feel like it. (IE does this for 404s and 500s, though it's not a nice message and it seems to upset most web developers.)

And an HTTP server can return a custom body for most errors, so the server can provide even more info if it wants.

Re: This is the mail system

#60

Post by JoshTriplett »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #24
dsr_ wrote: post #14

Hi. This is the qmail-send program at yahoo.com. I'm afraid I wasn't able to deliver your message to the following addresses. This is a permanent error; I've given up. Sorry it didn't work out. : 72.1.169.10 does not like recipient. Remote host said: 550 : Recipient address rejected: undeliverable address: unknown user: "[list name]" Giving up on 72.1.169.10. That's a pretty good error message. Most people glaze over…

> Recipient address rejected: undeliverable address: unknown user // Hmm, it's okay. It's a person masquerading as a computer masquerading as a person. This doesn't really help IMO. Why can't it be "Hi, this is the Yahoo! email support team. You sent a message to someone but when we tried to pass it on the email address didn't work so we can't send the email for you. Here's some things to try ... technical details an…

> Hi, this is the Yahoo! email support

Immediate deletion as a phishing scam before reading further.

Post reply on HN