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

Email is not broken: It’s a framework, not an application

blog.killtheradio.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 146 posts

Re: Email is not broken: It’s a framework, not an application

#31

Post by oskarth »

tferris wrote: post #12

Couldn't upvote this more. I am fed up with posts telling me email is broken and a new disruptive tech will be the cure. Email is an open protocol, decentralized, providing optional security. Shortcomings—or rather call them additional requirements—can be solved with tools keeping email focussed on async text-based communication. Want to send large files? Dropbox. Want more automation? Improve the client side and/or…

Email was not designed to be used the way we use it now. ...my inbox is a todo list, and email is the way things get onto it. But it is a disastrously bad todo list. ...it seems unlikely that people in 100 years will still be living in the same email hell we do now. And if email is going to get replaced eventually, why not now? ...some of the most powerful people are all at the mercy of email too. [1]

Your posts reminds me of someone arguing to keep the oral tradition going instead of switching to writing.

I am not saying anyone has suggested anything close to the equivalent of writing, but there is definitely a fundamental problem with email that can't just be solved by a couple of perl scripts and rules. I would also assume one's career choice is a premise for making better tools and protocols - anything else seems kind of backwards. If the president was forced to work in a public market space, would you tell him to change career if he remarked on how he couldn't get anything done?

There is a difference in saying email should be killed forever and that it should be replaced by something else for certain usages, just as twitter and Facebook replaced portions of email. Incidentally though, such a replace could likely render email useless for many people.

1: http://paulgraham.com/ambitious.html

Re: Email is not broken: It’s a framework, not an application

#32

Post by cflee »

kelnos wrote: post #24
Animus7 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Email can be secured and authenticated with GPG and perhaps more people should consider doing this. Doesn't work unless you teach people about security, which is difficult. We have padlocks next to URLs but it's amazing how many people are still willing to send CC info over HTTP. > SPAM is often in the eye of the beholder. There's a lot of grey area, but when a particular string has a 99% unread/deleted rate, you c…

>> Email can be secured and authenticated with GPG and perhaps more people should consider doing this. > Doesn't work unless you teach people about security, which is difficult. Simple, transparent security is hard. But this is again a UI problem, not a failing of email. Think about this for a second: let's say Google decided that it was going to transparently PGP-sign all GMail users' emails. Now GMail knows that an…

Take a look at DMARC. [1] The webpage is horribly ugly, but essentially, it allows a domain to declare that all their outgoing mail are DKIM-signed and SPF-passed.

Paypal and eBay do this. Gmail filters out any DKIM-fail or SPF-fail mails purporting to be from @paypal.com and sends it to spam, with 100% accuracy. Gmail also puts the little 'key' icon next to the sender name, but that's not really important, the point is that any and all fraudulent emails are filtered out with unerring accuracy.

Thus, we don't need to use PGP or whatever, which needs to be handled at the client level. DKIM + DMARC is already here and working at the server level. You don't need to wait for your favourite email client to adopt DMARC.

Yes, if people send emails without going through that SMTP server etc etc.. that's a problem, but also solvable/solved.

[1] http://dmarc.org/

Re: Email is not broken: It’s a framework, not an application

#33

Post by qznc »

If you write pedantic rants, then get your terminology right. Email is a heavily overloaded term.

The protocol is SMTP,POP3, and IMAP. The data format is something defined through various RFCs and proprietary convenience. The use cases differ from corporate Outlook via Exchange server to people typing text into webforms.

Re: Email is not broken: It’s a framework, not an application

#34

Post by mattmanser »

This post seems a little off. I agree that the fundamental concept's not broken, but why link to the error message problem? He talks about technical shortcomings of email but then just launches into saying that it's not todos?

So what about the technical problems? The crappy security, the poor error messages, that the senders email gets dumped straight to spam without any notification? What about crappy email threading that requires people to send the entire post back in the reply? That if a normal person wants to send emails themselves it's a colossal undertaking that's better farmed out?

Say it's not a todo app, sure. But don't pretend that there's not any problems with it.

Re: Email is not broken: It’s a framework, not an application

#35

Post by 7952 »

Although I agree with the sentiment; I doubt that the solution is with ever more powerful email apps. The end result would mean turning Outlook into a web browser. This would be an atrocity and a technological dead end.

If email really is only a protocol; it would be better to have numerous single purpose apps that use it as a transport. This would be hugely useful in business where email is much less filtered than websites. If people lack the app in question, you could provide a text/html based alternative.

Re: Email is not broken: It’s a framework, not an application

#36

Post by zokier »

> You send a message and it either goes where it’s supposed to, or you get an error message back.

I wonder how large percentage of messages are dropped silently by services like GMail as a spam prevention measure. I bet it's non-zero.

> It’s simple.

How many email related RFCs are out there? And how many additional non-standardized common practices there are? How many pitfalls imposed by common legacy software? Email is far from being 'simple' imho.

Yes, a lot of stuff can be done at the client. But email protocol stack is still very ugly as a whole, especially if you need to reliably inter-operate with the rest of the net.

Re: Email is not broken: It’s a framework, not an application

#37

Post by icebraining »

ed209 wrote: post #15

>We fix it by building smart clients. I think improving email lies before the client. Email is just a message container and apps generally throw a load of different content into that container, events, to-do's, photos etc. Some of this stuff should never arrive in my inbox. A to-do email should automatically go to my to-do list, an event should automatically go to my calendar, photos should automatically go to iPhoto…

KDE's system-centralized PIM solution, Akonadi, seems a decent way to solve that problem. It's designed to share data between local application and external services in a standardized way.

Of course, considering almost everyone is using webapps for that type of stuff nowadays, you'd probably need an Akonadi-on-the-cloud solution, POSTing stuff to each webapp as messages come in.

Re: Email is not broken: It’s a framework, not an application

#38

Post by ranit8 »

SagelyGuru wrote: post #11
alexchamberlain wrote: post #3

The poster is correct that email is not a TODO list. However, email is broken. Email is inherently insecure, unauthenticated and wide open to abuse. There is no way of knowing that an email from me is really from me and wouldn't it be better if SPAM could never get onto the network in the first place?

Email can be secured and authenticated with GPG and perhaps more people should consider doing this. The problem with SPAM is that what some may consider to be a 'fascinating circular' will be perceived by others as SPAM. SPAM is often in the eye of the beholder.

Spam is a human problem more than a technical one. We need deanonymization to name and shame the spammers.

Re: Email is not broken: It’s a framework, not an application

#39

Post by alexchamberlain »

SagelyGuru wrote: post #29
kelnos wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Email can be secured and authenticated with GPG and perhaps more people should consider doing this. > Doesn't work unless you teach people about security, which is difficult. Simple, transparent security is hard. But this is again a UI problem, not a failing of email. Think about this for a second: let's say Google decided that it was going to transparently PGP-sign all GMail users' emails. Now GMail knows that an…

Gmail etc. could have provided encryption and authentication if they wanted to. Unfortunately they don't want to because their business model(s) rely on reading our emails.

This comment is rather silly. Gmail is a hosted service, and tgerefore, their servers would decrypt incoming email on your behalf. Therefore, they could still read your email.

Re: Email is not broken: It’s a framework, not an application

#40

Post by skeptical »

oskarth wrote: post #31
tferris wrote: post #12

Couldn't upvote this more. I am fed up with posts telling me email is broken and a new disruptive tech will be the cure. Email is an open protocol, decentralized, providing optional security. Shortcomings—or rather call them additional requirements—can be solved with tools keeping email focussed on async text-based communication. Want to send large files? Dropbox. Want more automation? Improve the client side and/or…

Email was not designed to be used the way we use it now. ...my inbox is a todo list, and email is the way things get onto it. But it is a disastrously bad todo list. ...it seems unlikely that people in 100 years will still be living in the same email hell we do now. And if email is going to get replaced eventually, why not now? ...some of the most powerful people are all at the mercy of email too. [1] Your posts remi…

Facebook and twitter fill a niche were email was being used in a way that it was not supposed to. It's electronic mail, you want to send a message to a friend that he/she checks whenever he/she decides to check, emails does that flawlessly. It's not rocket science.

Saying that email 'is broken' touches the hilarious. It's like saying a bycicle is 'broken' because it's not able to take you the same places a car can. I don't know why I even take part in such discussions. I guess I'm bored.

Post reply on HN