All you need is e-mail, e-mail. E-mail is all you need. • Hacker News Board

Re: All you need is e-mail, e-mail. E-mail is all you need.

#41

Post by chadyj » Mon, May 28, 2012, 7:42 PM UTC

This is a timely article for me as I am just about to launch a email startup called Sendicate that adds tools to simplify and empower email-based communication. Another way of looking at it is like a content publishing app for email. For those interested here are some more thoughts on what I am building http://www.chadyj.com/tagged/sendicate

Email certainly has some issues but it is also infinitely flexible and powerful and drives a lot of our day to day interaction with the internet. I am surprised that there is such a drive to re-invent email when a few specialized tools that add value to email will solve many use cases without re-inventing the wheel.

Re: All you need is e-mail, e-mail. E-mail is all you need.

#42

Post by jimbobimbo » Mon, May 28, 2012, 7:43 PM UTC

drivebyacct2 wrote: post #30

NO. I want to scream. NO. I just began working at a company that uses "distribution groups" (mailing lists) as a "social network". It's awful as it's not threaded, it's not archived, it's not searchable. It's terrible.

NO. It's your mail client makes these distribution groups a pain in the ass, not email.

Re: All you need is e-mail, e-mail. E-mail is all you need.

#43

Post by taliesinb » Mon, May 28, 2012, 7:44 PM UTC

joe_the_user wrote: post #40

drostie wrote: post #32

Email has a lot of warts besides its obvious graces, especially when you look at the back-end of how emails are actually stored and transferred and authenticated. So I think we as programmers are naturally drawn to the idea of developing the email-killer. The central problem with the dreamers seems to be that they're not dreaming deeply enough. Email is a communications multitool which leverages the whole human subco…

Indeed, that email has everything inside is as much its strength as its weakness. It is as unlikely to go away as it is unlikely to remain unfiltered and unchanged. Where the "killing" begins and the extension begins is basically fuzzy. You could create an "Email II" that had present day email as its transmission layer or which had some other transmission layer as it's base. There's a wide area of innovation still av…

This. It's email clients that are broken, not email.

For example, the most imaginative thing we can do with long email threads appears to be to flatten them and render them as a list.

Not to mention filtering and categorizing: in gmail, you can't even check in a filter if someone is in your contacts -- your gmail contacts -- let alone whether they fall into a particular contact group.

Re: All you need is e-mail, e-mail. E-mail is all you need.

#44

Post by yogo » Mon, May 28, 2012, 7:45 PM UTC

thebdmethod wrote: post #2

I am curious about anyone currently trying to build a communication tool, and their argument for why it is a better solution than email.

For most users that just need to communicate regarding a specific item it is much quicker to comment on that and that alone with tools like http://postfrenzy.com.

Having to deal with threads and multiple topics in single email messages for most users often results in a degradation of the conversation, quickly.

Re: All you need is e-mail, e-mail. E-mail is all you need.

#45

Post by trimbo » Mon, May 28, 2012, 7:47 PM UTC

coderdude wrote: post #25

Email is not great. My biggest problem with email is that it's unreliable. There have been so many times where I'd send an email and have it never even reach its destination. I'm not talking about a legitimate message being marked as spam and tucked away in some folder, but not even delivered and my email server isn't notified of this shenanigans (I'm looking at you, mac.com and gmail.com). This is I'm sure because s…

> There have been so many times where I'd send an email and have it never even reach its destination

This is easily explained if you were hosting your own Postfix or something. There are a significant number of hoops that legitimate email senders must jump through in order to ensure their email goes through properly. DKIM signing, SPF records, rDNS, etc. These are some of the ways for gmail and apple identify you as a legit sender as opposed to a spammer.

> I'm not talking about a legitimate message being marked as spam and tucked away in some folder, but not even delivered and my email server isn't notified of this shenanigans

In general, ISPs won't want to let spammers know they're are bulking email. That's why you aren't told.

Re: All you need is e-mail, e-mail. E-mail is all you need.

#46

Post by taliesinb » Mon, May 28, 2012, 7:53 PM UTC

This reminds me of something most new communication media seem not to realize: no matter how fancy your new thing is, not everyone will want to try it initially, so for God's sake make it bridge to email. Otherwise it will become a ghetto.

I don't think the Wave people understood this; if they had, Wave might have turned out differently.

Asana, on the other hand, made a big deal out of this.

Re: All you need is e-mail, e-mail. E-mail is all you need.

#47

Post by joe_the_user » Mon, May 28, 2012, 7:56 PM UTC

kijin wrote: post #15

> Why build a new messaging product when the basic functionality of email combined with a little effort from the user can achieve the same result? Well, to begin with, users don't want to expend even a little bit of effort. Isn't that why everyone is trying to minimize friction in the sign-up process? I agree that e-mail, as a protocol, is a powerful tool that is often misunderstood. But we really need e-mail clients…

You'd be surprised at the effort that users will and won't engage in.

I know plenty of utterly non-technical users who have strong opinions about what are the uses of an email list versus the uses of a web forum versus the uses of a Facebook group page.

Which means, to me, that on the one hand, these folks would be interested in a new messaging approach if it was strongly distinguished from the functionality of email and on the other hand, these users quite likely wouldn't bother with something that seem too much like email. Essential, it seems like average people are up for multiple communications mediums but treat each medium as kind of a given, not something that's going to evolve.

I'd be interested in ways of dealing with this.

Re: All you need is e-mail, e-mail. E-mail is all you need.

#48

Post by nickbarnwell » Mon, May 28, 2012, 7:57 PM UTC

TY wrote: post #38

drivebyacct2 wrote: post #30

NO. I want to scream. NO. I just began working at a company that uses "distribution groups" (mailing lists) as a "social network". It's awful as it's not threaded, it's not archived, it's not searchable. It's terrible.

What if someone could create a new messaging system that works like previous messaging systems such as email and Usenet, but instead of sending a message along with its entire thread of previous messages, or requiring all responses to be stored in each user's inbox for context, message documents that contain complete threads of multimedia messages (blips) are perpetually stored on a central server. These documents ar…

Doesn't that more or less describe Google Wave?

Re: All you need is e-mail, e-mail. E-mail is all you need.

#49

Post by chadyj » Mon, May 28, 2012, 7:58 PM UTC

unimpressive wrote: post #18

erikpukinskis wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It'd take a long time to type in those 20 email addresses every time you snap a photo on your vacation.

Any decent email client should do autocomplete. Even if that's not the case, this is something the client should handle.

Or even better, use address book groups.

Re: All you need is e-mail, e-mail. E-mail is all you need.

#50

Post by mdm_ » Mon, May 28, 2012, 7:58 PM UTC

mbrock wrote: post #17

pre wrote: post #7

Email is awesome, certainly. But if everyone actually started a mass-email to all their friends about every little topic they post to a Facebook status update, I'd call 'em pretty damned rude abusing my email inbox like that and my email client would need even better filters than it already has to fight the commercial spam. Experiments to find things better than email will mostly fail, but I think we still need more…

You point to the #1 biggest wonderful feature of email. Sending email is an act that incurs responsibility. WHY are we sending all this shit around? Email makes it clear. I have made a decision that you should spend your time reading and understanding this text. If that's rude, tell me and I'll stop. This article strikes a chord because email is about communication instead of endless "sharing," broadcasting, forwardi…

Hi. Long-time lurker here; I just created an HN account to reply to you. Your post expresses some of the things I've been feeling about social media that I haven't been able to express very well myself (I had to look up "Maslow pyramid"). The sort of unease and nausea, the whole thing just feels somehow creepy and wrong.

I deactivated my Facebook account long ago because of this feeling. I think what it boils down to is that I don't think I should know so much stuff about my friends, family, co-workers, etc without having obtained that knowledge by directly interacting with them in meaningful ways over long periods of time. The Facebook model appears to let me know people better, but it's in a shallow, passive way and encourages me to conceptualize people as caricatures, assembled from a handful of their most obvious or outstanding personality traits. I realize this stuff has been around for a long time, but FB turbo-charges it, and I feel like it's an extremely poor way to "know" people.

The really messed up part is that while the effects Facebook seems to have are often anti-social (think of how many times you've been out with someone and they're too busy checking status updates on their phone to carry on a real, actual conversation), people are labelled anti-social for not participating.