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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.

#91

Post by aethr »

ajdecon wrote: post #85
MatthewPhillips wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 y…

You would almost certainly have to use option 1.

Option 2 includes such problems as:

A. A random selection of end-user's email services have spam filtering that some of your app's messages can't get around. To the end user who never actually sees the emails (because you simply use them as message passing items) this will simply seem like your shoddy service flaking out.

B. An end user's personal email service goes down, which has nothing to do with you but renders your service unusable to them, again as far as they are concerned, your service is simply shoddy and unreliable.

C. In the event that the end user's email service does go down, and they know about it, they are likely to turn to a secondary protocol to get in touch with people, only to find that your service also isn't working because it relies on the same protocol.

Frankly, I can see several problems with option 1 as well. Excessive bandwidth overhead from unnecessary headers, the spam problem inherent to email, all the parsing you'd have to do to extract data from the text body. I'm not really sure what the advantages of using email are if you're just going to be running a single mail server for all users of your service.

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

#92

Post by jasonlotito »

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…

Thank you. I came here hoping someone would point out that all these pain points people have with email were essentially solved with Wave. But instead of seeing the underlying system, people focused on a client UI that accessed the Wave protocol.

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

#93

Post by unimpressive »

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…

>A distributed protocol, while in some ways more powerful (and less dependent on a fallible central authority!), doesn't achieve the real business aims.

Then don't build one as a business.

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

#94

Post by unimpressive »

superuser2 wrote: post #86
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, an…

>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.

You don't need significant upload bandwidth for email. Or download bandwidth either. (Unless you're expecting constant DDOS attacks.) Or emergency services. The HVAC might be a good idea.

You could have made your point a lot better by just saying that 99.9% of users will never set up a home server to do email. Which is the truth.

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

#95

Post by superuser2 »

unimpressive wrote: post #94
superuser2 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, an…

>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. You don't need significant upload bandwidth for email. Or download bandwidth either. (Unless you're expecting cons…

True. But residential bandwidth is just one of many reasons why mainstream users aren't going to actually own their own email anytime soon.

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

#96

Post by superuser2 »

unimpressive wrote: post #94
superuser2 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, an…

>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. You don't need significant upload bandwidth for email. Or download bandwidth either. (Unless you're expecting cons…

True. But residential bandwidth is just one of many reasons why mainstream users aren't going to actually own their own email anytime soon.

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

#97

Post by smashing »

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…

I have Gnus and Emacs on my computer because I have myself convinced that with enough macros I could create a completely automated version of my digital self. I imagine it would use a private/local NNTP server for all my notes, documentation, and organizational reference across computers, and emails would handle the communicate with the digital world even to the point of creating snapshots of online articles and posting comments on sites like Techcrunch under the articles using some combination of Jabber/cURL and my public Facebook profile.

But I just never get around to learning elisp.

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

#98

Post by jasomill »

unimpressive wrote: post #59
mdm_ wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

When our life ceases to be inward and private, conversation degenerates into mere gossip. We rarely meet a man who can tell us any news which he has not read in a newspaper, or been told by his neighbor; and, for the most part, the only difference between us and our fellow is, that he has seen the newspaper, or been out to tea, and we have not. In proportion as our inward life fails, we go more constantly and desperately to the post-office. You may depend on it, that the poor fellow who walks away with the greatest number of letters, proud of his extensive correspondence, has not heard from himself this long while.

I do not know but it is too much to read one newspaper a week. I have tried it recently, and for so long it seems to me that I have not dwelt in my native region. The sun, the clouds, the snow, the trees say not so much to me. You cannot serve two masters. It requires more than a day's devotion to know and to possess the wealth of a day.

(Henry David Thoreau, Life Without Principle[1], 1854)

[1] http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Life_Without_Principle

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

#99

Post by signalsignal »

d0mine wrote: post #87
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.

Facebook is a productivity killer, but it does POP email as well.
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