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

blog.killtheradio.net

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

#111

Post by joering2 »

bmelton wrote: post #69
alexchamberlain wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't agree with you. We should be establishing a polite ettiquette

You don't agree that different people have different sensibilities regarding language? Or is that you don't agree the author should be allowed to swear in his blog? Or perhaps you don't agree that blue material is fitting for HN?

didn't the second sentence give you a hint good enough to determine what he doesn't agree with?

no offence but I feel like replying to a troll, and I know I shouldn't :(

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

#112

Post by bmelton »

joering2 wrote: post #111
bmelton wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't agree that different people have different sensibilities regarding language? Or is that you don't agree the author should be allowed to swear in his blog? Or perhaps you don't agree that blue material is fitting for HN?

didn't the second sentence give you a hint good enough to determine what he doesn't agree with? no offence but I feel like replying to a troll, and I know I shouldn't :(

If the second sentence answered the question for me, I wouldn't have asked it.

I'm not sure what he disagrees with, or where he intends to enforce this 'polite etiquette', or why someone posting an entry on their blog should be beholden to his set of rules.

It's a genuine question to slake my own curiosity. I am by no means the arbiter of all things tactful, but I am curious where he expects the boundaries to be drawn. I am also extremely eager to hear how one can disagree with the idea of "Diff'rent strokes", as I would posit it as the hallmark of tolerance.

If it is our idea that we should promote civility above tolerance, or above intellectual discourse, then I'd like to hear more insight on that.

Also, not that it's my place to say, but one of my favorite guides for posting on HN is to 'assume good faith'. If you feel like you're responding to a troll, then you shouldn't respond, or you're just feeding worse onto bad. If you're responding, then you should assume good faith, and not make responses like "I'm feeding the trolls".

I don't know what could have been trollish about my question, but I also don't see any particular added value in your comment except to make doubly sure that I actually intended to ask the question I already asked.

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

#113

Post by ams6110 »

icefox wrote: post #65
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…

> Want less spam? Don't distribute your address or sign-up everywhere. Around 1999 or so I noticed someone trying to send spam to every common name on my mail server. I had never given out my email address and yet here I was getting spam just because I had a server. Even if I heavily obfuscate my email address on my website such as with this hack http://icefox.github.com/js_email_link_hack/ I would still get spam bec…

Something like fail2ban could deal with this.

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

#114

Post by ams6110 »

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…

I agree with the entire sentiment as well, but would point out one flaw: You send a message and it either goes where it’s supposed to, or you get an error message back.

Generally yes, assuming everything between you and the recipient is properly configured, but it's not guaranteed. It's possible to send an email had it just disappears. No bounce, no delivery. It doesn't happen often, and as far as I know it's never happened to me, but there's nothing in the protocol that guarantees delivery or guarantees notification of delivery failure.

That said, this is not a big enough problem to require a new protocol or a change to the existing protocol, or in any other way be worth "fixing." If you are building something that requires guaranteed delivery of messages, don't build it on SMTP.

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

#115

Post by ori_b »

icebraining wrote: post #85
Navarr wrote: post #83

> 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…

Or a header. Mail supports custom headers.

    X-Todo-Item: true
Boom. You now have a way of knowing that this email is a todo item.

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

#116

Post by raintrees »

ams6110 wrote: post #114
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…

I agree with the entire sentiment as well, but would point out one flaw: You send a message and it either goes where it’s supposed to, or you get an error message back. Generally yes, assuming everything between you and the recipient is properly configured, but it's not guaranteed. It's possible to send an email had it just disappears. No bounce, no delivery. It doesn't happen often, and as far as I know it's never h…

Doesn't this argue for a TCP-type implementation of "Did you get that or shall I resend?" ala Read Receipts? (On top of SMTP, that is...)

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

#117

Post by flogic »

icefox wrote: post #65
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…

> Want less spam? Don't distribute your address or sign-up everywhere. Around 1999 or so I noticed someone trying to send spam to every common name on my mail server. I had never given out my email address and yet here I was getting spam just because I had a server. Even if I heavily obfuscate my email address on my website such as with this hack http://icefox.github.com/js_email_link_hack/ I would still get spam bec…

Yeah you can't really avoid spammers getting your address. That said, it's pretty much a solved problem.

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

#118

Post by protomyth »

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…

> Want less spam? Don't distribute your address or sign-up everywhere.

Quite a lot of spam isn't my e-mail address on mailing lists or sign-ups, it is people I know getting a virus or downloading an app that uploads their address book. I have an e-mail only used with friends that gets an amazing amount of spam (not a common name).

E-mail has problems because it isn't one thing. E-Mail is SMTP, IMAP, POP3, and whatever weird thing Exchange is doing.

I really don't see a replacement since we seem to be in the "closed system" stage of social media much like we once were in the same stage with e-mail (e.g. MCI could not send e-mail to AOL). Variants of IM might have worked but the open versions really didn't make it to everyone.

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

#119

Post by flogic »

gbog wrote: post #94
oskarth wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

When I read this piece from Paul Graham, I wondered if he had an assistant (I mean a flesh and bones personal assistant). Is that that assistant are too expensive nowadays in the West? If I were a powerful influencer with enough money, I'd consider hiring an assistant to help me filter these mails. He or she will probably be easier to train than a Bayesian filter... Automatisation is not the last word for every human…

Yea he should probably hire an assistant. Good secretaries can light saber through bullshit. That said, I can't afford a secretary and my inbox is completely out of control. It's won. I've lost. There is virtually nothing I can do about it at the moment.

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

#120

Post by dkrich »

joedev wrote: post #95
dkrich wrote: post #84

Love this. This whole "email is broken" argument reminds me of the "SMS sucks, and iMessage/GChat/BBM will destroy it" argument perpetuated by TechCrunch and other tech pundits. 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, a…

SMS helps prove the point that email is broken. When my wife sends me a text message, does she care about the protocol? No, she just wants to remind me to pick up appetizers, wine, and beer for tonight's party. Does she want to be limited to 140 bytes? No. She can send a long message and has no idea about the protocol limit. Nice SMS clients take care of splitting it up and packaging it all back together into one sea…

But your wife is one use case. Think of the users of SMS or email or any asynchronous communications protocol as a Venn diagram. You have categories of people who need to communicate with each other that happen to both have iPhones. Others both have GChat. Others both have BBM. Still others happen to be online for real-time chat at the same time.

All of these users fall into one umbrella category, however: a group of at least two people, at least one of whom needs to say something to another person. If I need to say something now to a friend, I use SMS ten times out of ten. Why? Because I know, without a doubt, that if I send an SMS, it is going to be read by that person regardless of device, software, etc. A centralized protocol is required to tie together disparate software. The 140 byte limit is annoying. But what happens when technology catches up to human length requirements, and it is extended to 400 or 1000 characters? Then you are going to care about length limits even less.

The author's point is that email as a concept and prototype is not broken and is functioning exactly as it should be, which is why it is the preferred communication medium for most people despite decades of development in better chat/list/calendar clients. Knowing you can get a hold of somebody every time is a benefit that outweighs any other. Same reason Skype hasn't taken over cell/land line phones. Centralized protocols are a necessity. Do they come with limitations for some use cases? Of course. Nothing can be everything to everybody. Which is why the author's point is so well taken: that additional functionality catering to single use-cases belongs at the client level in the form of extensions.

Edit: Also, it seems strange to me that people argue that email is broken because their inboxes have turned into todo lists. I think the reverse is true and people are looking at it through the wrong end. Email is such a simple, useful tool, that people not only use it for its intended purpose (communication) they now also use it for managing todo lists. After all, there are boatloads of todo list software and more and more coming on the market everyday, and yet people still use email while they talk about how shitty a solution it is.

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