81–90 of 146 posts
To all hungry devs who can't wait to build something amazing: don't try to reinvent the wheel, build on top of it. Leave the email be, and focus on what's next.
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…
Documented? Email is a good asynchronous messaging protocol, it's not a great one though. I'd say authentication would be a requirement for such a protocol to be great. I think the next logical step of content protection (encryption) is free if you have authentication and most would want it too. You also don't know if a message has been received, ignored, or blocked by a spam filter. It's good, it does manage to work…
Except when you DON'T. Except when the mail server is broken, except when the error message you get is ENTIRELY CRYPTIC.
Email works. That's it. It doesn't work WELL, It just works. That's why it needs to be fixed.
> But sometimes I just want to send a fucking message, not “make a TODO.” Boom, I just “broke” the new email.
Though I think you're fairly right about this one - you're also wrong. You're making whoever you're messaging a TODO. "Read This" Email has become a TODO list, you can't fix that - not without a new mail protocol that takes that into account and separates the todos from the messages. Certainly a client could do this but a client can never ever be smart enough to get it right all the time.
There are two reasons that email and SMS are not broken, and the author of this article points them out: asynchronous communication, and no single entity controlling the entire ecosystem. The value of knowing you can reach anyone, anywhere, anytime is worth a lot more in most use cases than some extra features appealing to one or two very specific use cases.
> You send a message and it either goes where it’s supposed to, or you get an error message back. That’s it, that’s email. It’s simple. It works. Except when you DON'T. Except when the mail server is broken, except when the error message you get is ENTIRELY CRYPTIC. Email works. That's it. It doesn't work WELL, It just works. That's why it needs to be fixed. > But sometimes I just want to send a fucking message, not…
Separating TODOs from messages reliably can be done using MIME. You do not need a new protocol for that, just define a format and give it a custom MIME type.
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…
I can imagine email software that does exciting things with JSON data in emails, but I wouldn't alter the underlying protocol.
> You send a message and it either goes where it’s supposed to, or you get an error message back. That’s it, that’s email. It’s simple. It works. Except when you DON'T. Except when the mail server is broken, except when the error message you get is ENTIRELY CRYPTIC. Email works. That's it. It doesn't work WELL, It just works. That's why it needs to be fixed. > But sometimes I just want to send a fucking message, not…
Though I think you're fairly right about this one - you're also wrong. You're making whoever you're messaging a TODO. "Read This" Email has become a TODO list, you can't fix that - not without a new mail protocol that takes that into account and separates the todos from the messages. Certainly a client could do this but a client can never ever be smart enough to get it right all the time. Separating TODOs from messag…
There are so many problems to solve in the world. Why would you take the one system that has been working perfectly for the last 40 years, and rebuild it from scratch ? To all hungry devs who can't wait to build something amazing: don't try to reinvent the wheel, build on top of it. Leave the email be, and focus on what's next.
Just because something WORKS doesn't mean it works WELL. Making an Asynchronous email protocol would not be difficult. We can do it. Everyone talking about re-inventing email is talking about making a protocol, not centralizing it, not de-synchronizing it.
Email is an AWFUL AWFUL mess. It was good for its era but its no longer as good. Any good replacement will use things like MIME and other such things and simply be a better replacement to the protocol. It'll be the same thing but better.
Which has happened many times before, considering how many versions of POP and IMAP there are. Or the fact that IMAP even exists. Somebody said that email was bad and it needed this and they made it, now we all use it.
Clearly, there is room for improvement.
"Email is a distributed, asynchronous messaging protocol." What a complete disconnect from the users of email. To 99.99% of people who use email, Paul is correct: "Email is not a messaging protocol. It's a todo list. Or rather, my inbox is a todo list, and email is the way things get onto it." When people say "email", they almost always mean their email client. Failure to account for the common usage of the word and…
"To 99.99% of people who use email, Paul is correct: "Email is not a messaging protocol. It's a todo list. Or rather, my inbox is a todo list, and email is the way things get onto it." I don't agree with this, in fact I feel this projecting the email power user's use of email onto everyone. At the end of the day, I think most people just want to email each other a message or a small file or pics of their kids or the…
And Email is just the messenger.