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.

#81

Post by cdcarter » Mon, May 28, 2012, 9:30 PM UTC

mrhonza wrote: post #19

I couldn't agree more. I deal with a large number of older people on a daily basis as part of my volunteer work. Getting these folk to use the Internet in any way is painful. For example, I send out these PDF reports once a week. It's the same template every time but for accounting purposes, it has to be done. I wrote a Python script to generate those for me and I stick them up on a simple website on S3. The script t…

Lately my industry has hit a new trend that I've fallen in love. Basically, each night all the departments on a live performance receive performance reports, reports listing what went well and what went wrong in the performance, as well as start times, run times, audience size, etc...

In the olden days, these were posted or hand distributed. Then over time they moved to being emailed out as PDF attachments, still formatted to perfect beauty as the old printed copies. Now more and more, the attachment is forgone and the data is just typed directly into the body of the email. Sure it doesn't have the glitz of a pristine PDF with the production font and header, but with one glance I can see the numbers I want to see from my iPhone.

I find it funny that it took us until mobile devices to get to the point where we are using email as intended, instead of as a vector for attaching PDFs.

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

#82

Post by prostoalex » Mon, May 28, 2012, 9:31 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.

And then you remember you forgot the 21st one, and your choices are either to email the original 20 plus the added address, or email the 21st one separately, thus creating a one-off thread.

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

#83

Post by icebraining » Mon, May 28, 2012, 10:00 PM UTC

jimbobimbo wrote: post #42

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.

Agreed. I use Sup[1] and it's wonderful. Threaded, extremely fast search (indexed), configurable, etc.

[1]: http://sup.rubyforge.org/

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

#84

Post by coderdude » Mon, May 28, 2012, 10:01 PM UTC

trimbo wrote: post #62

coderdude wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'…

> 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. Yes, definitely... at least for commercial sending. SendGrid, SES, Mailgun, Mailchimp - there are a lot of solutions for outbound commercial / bulk and they're reasonably priced and easy to use. They take care of all of the nuts and bolts. For personal…

Thanks for letting me pick your brain. Time to take a serious look at moving things over to dedicated mail provider.

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

#85

Post by ajdecon » Mon, May 28, 2012, 10:03 PM UTC

MatthewPhillips wrote: post #74

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 categorizi…

I don't even want to make the user drop general-purpose email clients; I just think that email, as a back-end distributed messaging protocol, is more understood and battle-tested than just about anything a startup is likely to invent.

Two possibilities that occurred to me:

1) Your service just uses email as a backend messaging protocol, and provides a new "user@myservice.com" mailbox to all users. Advantage is that you can put all your logic in the client, and just run a mail server.

2) Better: include an email header along the lines of "Intended-For-Application: MyService", and encourage general-purpose email clients to auto-archive these messages out of the inbox.

But yeah, it's just the kernel of an idea, and there are tons of problems with it.

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

#86

Post by superuser2 » Mon, May 28, 2012, 10:07 PM UTC

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…

Email is decentralized to us. We have the very specific skils, attitudes, and patience required to buy a domain name, rent a VPS or dedicated server and configure SSH public keys, Postfix/Courier, DNS, SPF, DKIM, and keep it up to date and patched, audit it to make sure it stays secure, and detect/respond to intrusions. And even then, unless you are going to roll your own emergency power, multiple redundant HVAC, and fire supression, as well as shell out hundreds of dollars a month for significant upload bandwidth to your house or apartment, your data and encryption keys are still in the physical possession of a corporate datacenter.

Email is most certainly not decentralized to anyone outside the IT world. They can, with extreme difficulty, move between providers, but they are still dependent on a provider.

Email decreases the volume of users that mediocre players can own (Google does email better than anyone else, so it gets a significant share of the market) but users are still going to be owned by someone.

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

#87

Post by d0mine » Mon, May 28, 2012, 10:09 PM UTC

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…

Outside a work environment we already have e-mail killer — it is called facebook.

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

#88

Post by thebdmethod » Mon, May 28, 2012, 10:31 PM UTC

mbesto wrote: post #26

I've thought about writing this post so many times. E-mail is not broken, but we'll continually try to convince ourselves that our inabilities to be collaborative and communicate properly is because we're not given the right medium to do so. This is bullshit. People who are terrible at communication will continue to be terrible at communication regardless of what tool they use. The hammer isn't broken, the carpenter…

I agree with you here.

My point of writing this post was the illustrate that in the pursuit of ultimate convenience we sometimes loose sight of the importance doing committing to new behaviors or overcoming our own laziness.

And technology should not enable laziness, or replace effort, but rather elevate and extend and magnify existing effort.

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

#89

Post by waldr » Mon, May 28, 2012, 10:50 PM UTC

I agree with a lot of the points here, Email in itself isn't broken. I've spent the last 2 months studying users email habits, who sends what?, what do they receive?, what are the conversations like?, how is the platform being used? etc.. the conclusion is simple email is incredibly personal each single users works in their own way.

The problem is where these habits collide, the way I receive an email from you doesn't match how I'd construct and send an email, therefore whatever I receive is going to cause me a problem.

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

#90

Post by jtheory » Mon, May 28, 2012, 10:55 PM UTC

thebdmethod wrote: post #88

mbesto wrote: post #26

I've thought about writing this post so many times. E-mail is not broken, but we'll continually try to convince ourselves that our inabilities to be collaborative and communicate properly is because we're not given the right medium to do so. This is bullshit. People who are terrible at communication will continue to be terrible at communication regardless of what tool they use. The hammer isn't broken, the carpenter…

I agree with you here. My point of writing this post was the illustrate that in the pursuit of ultimate convenience we sometimes loose sight of the importance doing committing to new behaviors or overcoming our own laziness. And technology should not enable laziness, or replace effort, but rather elevate and extend and magnify existing effort.

It's a very good point, and reminds of the "Confessions of a Recovering Lifehacker" post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4012852

It's worth doing some approximate cost/gain math now & again.... E.g., my core goal is to better communicate about important things with family/friends. To that end I have... spent about 30 hours of my spare time this month implementing a solution to save me 30 seconds per email, and about 1 hour actually writing 5 actual emails. QED.

Side note: in your message here (and twice in the blog post), you're using the verb "loose" (means "set free") when you mean "lose" (means "fail to retain").