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

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

#51

Post by unimpressive »

taliesinb wrote: post #46

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.

Making something bridge to email doesn't seem terribly difficult. SMTP is; as the name would imply, simple. (At least it seems simple.)

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

#52

Post by ajdecon »

I've wondered a lot about why e-mail isn't used more as a backend for different services. But as far as I can tell, messaging products proliferate because their creators want to create profitable products rather than distributed protocols.

E-mail is a pretty good group of protocols for distributing arbitrary messages between different locations on the Internet. It's easy to imagine how all sorts of messaging and social network products could be implemented as a specialized e-mail client with a good user experience. Their forms might be slightly different than they have now, but they'd serve approximately the same consumer purpose.

For example, you could build a social networking "client" with e-mail as a backend. Status updates, photos, etc. would be distributed to all your contacts via email, and the client would produce a "timeline" based on the data in its mailbox, without ever showing the user the original messages.

But you give up a lot of control that way, and it's harder to monetize. What developers want (and users too, to be honest) is a centralized service that they can control, mine data with, and sell products or show ads. A distributed protocol, while in some ways more powerful (and less dependent on a fallible central authority!), doesn't achieve the real business aims.

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

#53

Post by benblodgett »

I think the broken part of email exists in business communication, in my experience it's grossly overused. It becomes an endless todo list that requires processing (eg, response, forward, assign, done, etc). This is inefficient and distracts us from our primary functions.

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

#54

Post by stan_rogers »

gklitt wrote: post #21
verganileonardo wrote: post #3

Email is OK as a communication tool. But companies use it as a task/to-do list and to work together on tasks. Email is terrible to achieve this. You will end up with lots of emails and multiple versions of the same documents... That is why I wish someone fix email! :)

I agree with this. The business context is really the one where email is most broken. Tools like Basecamp and Trello do a good job with project management, but they aren't a 100% substitute for all the various functions of email. I sometimes think that a hybrid between email and a forum/bulletin board would be the best way to manage complex communication, instead of convoluted cc lists...

You do realise that you've just described Notes, right? If it were a new product, without all the baggage of having to be backward-compatible to the late paleolithic (R2 in '93) and with a UI consistent with everything else on the host OS, folks'd be all over it.

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

#55

Post by coderdude »

trimbo wrote: post #45
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…

I suspect that my host's email servers are at least partially to blame for some of these issues. Like a bad egg or two signed up and screwed everyone else over. From what I've gathered Amazon SES is a reliable alternative since they apparently jump through the hoops for you. That might be where I'm turning to for a solution.

It makes sense that they wouldn't notify you if they tanked your email because they think it's "super spam" or something. It is frustrating though. Especially since I'm talking about very low volume emails (not a newsletter or anything). Do you know why some emails are silently dropped while others are marked as junk and allowed to pass through?

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

#57

Post by joe_the_user »

taliesinb wrote: post #43
joe_the_user wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I feel like that's weirdly true and false.

Yes, email clients are "broken". It is "easy to see" that fixing them is the key to really useful communication.

The weird thing is that any time you get one of these "broken" mediums, its users nonetheless become adapted to it. Even the stupidest original behavior becomes a part of a common, even socially, understood medium and changing it thus becomes harder.

An old girlfriend of mine was not terribly computer literate but understood the trick of clicking on an email link in Internet Explorer, having an outlook express window come up and then copying the resulting email-address to her webmail account to send an email. Once she learned this trick, she was far less concerned about the round-about-clunkiness involved in the whole process than I would be. It was just "how computers worked" and a simpler process she didn't know would quite possibly confuse her. She probably wouldn't even know that Outlook Express was an email client itself, for example.

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

#58

Post by benblodgett »

mdm_ wrote: post #50
mbrock wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I agree that your points do apply to the majority of facebook users. However, I think fb can be very useful as a social messaging/event calendar if applied properly. Without sacrificing the importance of direct social interaction.

To me it makes me wonder if the application or the popular belief of usage is the problem.

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

#59

Post by unimpressive »

mdm_ wrote: post #50
mbrock wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>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.

Your certainly not the first person to point this out. [0]

[0]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_%28novel%29

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

#60

Post by kijin »

joe_the_user wrote: post #47
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…

> average people are up for multiple communications mediums but treat each medium as kind of a given, not something that's going to evolve.

People have been thinking like that for a long time about a lot of things. They have strong opinions about when to use a car vs. truck vs. minivan, or when to take the bus vs. the subway. They also have strong opinions about the purpose of each room in their home and each piece of furniture in their office. This is OK because most of these things don't change very often, and when they do (e.g. a new subway route or a major renovation), the change is obvious. Today's technology, on the other hand, changes very quickly and in subtle ways. It's hard to catch up with all of that, so the inertia becomes more noticeable. I shared a Dropbox folder with my father a while ago, but he still sends me large files as email attachments.

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