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

I haven't been following this so closely, but the articles I have read seem to position these proposals as changes to e-mail as a system, if not as a protocol. I leave thinking the authors want to do something radical, to alter something longstanding, to go up against giant, ingrained players and conventions.

I don't think this post would have happened if we were instead hearing more about "new ways to use e-mail," or "adding functionality to an email client." I think the narrative is more like, as others in the thread have referenced, PG's frighteningly ambitious ideas, more like visionaries who are daring to challenge something so established.

Making a new email client that has some extra features is one thing. Changing email forever is another. I think that's what the post is reacting to.

Edit: and, anyway, I think sharpening the discussion by invoking the difference between the client and the protocol is useful, and hopefully will make future conversations about this more clear.

This type of writing sure gets people excited and attracts many readers but it's a quite destructive way to think of our world. Just because something has certain annoying problems or has maybe become boring and mundane does not mean that the only way to make it better is to completely reconstruct it. Most "It's broken" essays usually come with a dangerous degree of hubris and presuppose that in order to make things better, the offending industry needs full destruction before it can be rebuilt and renewed in the image of writer's glorious new vision (often times this vision is not even presented - it seems that something being "broken" implies that there is a better and completely different way of doing it). Lessons learned doing things the old way become meaningless or at least decline in value because, well it's broken.. we didn't really learn that much right?

I agree that sometimes a complete re-framing is needed to get on the (more) correct path towards making something better or at least just to allow yourself to "think outside of the box". But going on a deconstruction campaign of everything that's served us reasonably well thus far is another box which you can easily trap yourself into.

Yes, but which client? I use mutt, my office manager at work uses Outlook, our accountant uses Gmail, and our advertising manager uses Yahoo.

The fact that we can all email each other seamlessly is inherently because of the common protocol, even though we don't think of it consciously when talking about email.

I think PG is in the minority when he considers a conversation over email a "degenerate case" of a TODO list item. A public-writeable personal todo list application is separate from my email client, whether it uses the email protocol to send todo items, or a new protocol to send todo items, or http to put todo items on a centralized database, etc.

Nothing is beyond disruption. Just because a technology is sufficiently functional doesn't mean there's no benefit to rethinking it.