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

monkeymace.com

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

#71

Post by rythie »

The problem is that email is so broken, you could sort of fix it, but people have been trying for years and it's easier to start again. For example we still have these problems:

- No proof that people are who they say they are, we have PGP/GPG but no one uses it.

- Related to the above, I can't control who can send me email, people use different email addresses and any address can be faked anyway.

- No accepted way to post short messages, people still post long email with big disclaimers and/or adverts at the bottom

- Poor email client support for sending/receiving large numbers of pictures, with thumbnails and full versions

- Lack of any real semantic support tags, share a single link, geo information etc.

- No way to public display of your timeline (i.e. twitter)

- No obvious way to have all contact's photos against emails [seems to be coming in now somehow, not sure how really]

- Inability to remove content you accidentally sent

- User expectations that email works in a certain way and doesn't need to change.

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

#72

Post by chmike »

Mail is broken in many ways. Because there is no authentication and thus forged from addresses, error messages can't be returned. Relays are allowed to modify mails which invalidates hashes and signatures. Attached and included documents are encoded in base64. ...

The main usage problem is abuse of this communication channel. While our email addresses should be public so that anyone in the world may contact us, we are forced to use hidden emails to protect ourselves. This Is the reason of the success of messaging system limited to friends. There is much less abuse.

The problem was known with fax, and will happen with phones if the phone call price drops to zero.

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

#73

Post by MatthewPhillips »

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…

Yes, Email might be ugly on the backend but that matters none at all. The client is obviously what is broken here, we are using the same client paradigm as when a handful of people had an email address! At the very least a better email client should do this:

1) Categorize notifications. Use the common web services as a base, and then look for obvious signs of repeated messages of the same type.

2) Prioritize people who are in your contact list. In fact this functionality should be broken out as a separate app. Actually, the same app that we current only use for text messages. I could rant on this for days; why in the hell are apps separated by what protocol they use rather than what the use case is? Ridiculous!

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

#74

Post by MatthewPhillips »

ajdecon wrote: post #52

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 soci…

There's a chicken and egg problem to this. If you do what you suggest, you are going to flood the user's inbox and although you will clean it up in your client, the user is also going to have a standard email client that notifies them constantly about your messages.

We need a transitory client that is better than the one we have today, but still is the only email client you use. It would do a better job of categorizing and prioritizing your messages. When the user gets used to this, they might be willing to accepting dropping general purpose email clients all together.

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

#75

Post by cdcarter »

rythie wrote: post #71

The problem is that email is so broken, you could sort of fix it, but people have been trying for years and it's easier to start again. For example we still have these problems: - No proof that people are who they say they are, we have PGP/GPG but no one uses it. - Related to the above, I can't control who can send me email, people use different email addresses and any address can be faked anyway. - No accepted way t…

Of these issues, I only see #1 and #4 as real. Some of them perhaps you could elaborate on? What do you mean by #3? I send short messages all the time. I just write a short message and hit send. Why would you even want #6? Email is designed as a private mechanism, this seems to go against the very reason I use email...

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

#77

Post by h84ru3a »

Email is a bootstrap that no "next-generation" communications solution can do without. Every startup, whether focused on communications or not, wants your email address. That is not a coincidence.

From a marketing perspective, email also has the greatest reach, greater than the web. The majority of the still relatively small percentage of the world's pop. that is connected to the internet are more likely to use email than the web, and they spend more time using email than they do the web.

If you do the research I believe you will find that these are the facts.

Email needs to be improved (e.g. cut out the middlemen -- "email providers" -- somehow, perhaps run email servers within trusted peer-to-peer groups: groups that are established using only the internet and without the need for a web browser, javascript, etc.). Email does not need to be "replaced".

Email is a simple and effective concept and as such, it is not going to "go away". So let's work on trying to improve it, architecturally.

The "walled garden" approach to communications, maybe using different gardens for different types of contacts to whom you provide your mail address, makes sense. Maybe it wouldn't stop spam, but it might contain it, e.g. to certain gardens. But any solution dubbed an "email killer" that based on the public web is not truly walled. It relies on a complex web browser. There will be ways to get in. And it's the same old story: people want to get in to spam you or scan your email for hints they can give to advertisers.

Imagine if the post office scanned every letter for hints they could give to advertisers, like the ones who fill your physical mailbox with junk postal mail. Why do we accept this with email?

Improvements on email need to start at a lower level: the IP layer. Peer-to-peer. Move away from "calf-cow". Take back control of our mail.

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

#78

Post by rythie »

cdcarter wrote: post #75
rythie wrote: post #71

The problem is that email is so broken, you could sort of fix it, but people have been trying for years and it's easier to start again. For example we still have these problems: - No proof that people are who they say they are, we have PGP/GPG but no one uses it. - Related to the above, I can't control who can send me email, people use different email addresses and any address can be faked anyway. - No accepted way t…

Of these issues, I only see #1 and #4 as real. Some of them perhaps you could elaborate on? What do you mean by #3? I send short messages all the time. I just write a short message and hit send. Why would you even want #6? Email is designed as a private mechanism, this seems to go against the very reason I use email...

Most people don't do #3 and without tools either limiting (twitter) or coaxing you (facebook) you get big run on messages, which you don't want to read.

You want #6 because many people are trying to share you thoughts with everyone, and the post is titled "All you need is e-mail, e-mail. E-mail is all you need."

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

#79

Post by zmmmmm »

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…

Imagine if someone created that and then completely failed to integrate it with legacy email so that nobody could transition across, ran it as invite only beta for so long everyone lost interest and then failed to succesfully engineer the product so that it had stability issues and was nearly unusable on low end or old computers.

I'm convinced that the world could be a different place now if Google had done just a few things differently with Wave ...

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