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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.

#101

Post by jasomill »

cdcarter wrote: post #81
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 for…

Not to mention pointless Word documents, "templates" that include background images and difficult-to-read colors and fonts, signatures with embedded artwork, screensful of pointless legalese, and top-posted histories of conversations almost, if not entirely unrelated to the present message.

In other words, it's not at all clear to me how additional features would help decrease email's signal-to-noise problems when users themselves choose to create the noise.

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

#102

Post by ajtaylor »

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…

We've been using SendGrid at $work and I couldn't be happier. It just works, and it's FAST. 3 lines of configuration in the code and we were integrated. Soon I'm going to implement their Events API so we can start doing some detailed analytics.

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

#103

Post by baudehlo »

coderdude wrote: post #37
neilkelty wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's been years since I've actually encountered this problem. Most of the time the person was lazy, forgetful, or lying to me.

I want to believe in the best in people, I really do. But I do know better and that's all the more reason why we need a way to keep track of this without having to rely on humans telling you the truth.

But the protocol does keep track of it. Just because some end implementation is violating the protocol doesn't make the system broken. It makes their implementation broken.

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

#104

Post by baudehlo »

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…

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

Do you have that proof with any other communication medium? You have some level of authentication provided by the service provider, sure (e.g. with the phone), but it's far from perfect and unspoofable.

- 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.

> Same problem with phone calls, letters, faxes. Doesn't mean those systems are broken.

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

There are other protocols for this. I think it's fine that email doesn't solve everything.

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

Sounds like a client problem.

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

This is a problem with open protocols. Not everyone wants to share the same things you do.

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

#105

Post by Zak »

rythie wrote: post #78
cdcarter wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

I may be in the minority, but I don't understand why most people on twitter wish to consume most tweets. Outside of a synchronous or semi-synchronous (e.g. IRC) conversation, It's pretty hard to say anything worth saying in 140 characters. I hate twitter and I hate tl;dr as a meme. HN as a community tends to encourage longer posts for the same reason; they're more likely to be interesting.

It works better for sharing content, but I don't usually want to see all content that a particular person wants to share. Other mechanisms work better for getting a list of content to consume: RSS offers all the content from a particular source, and sites like HN and reddit show recent content that a particular community finds interesting.

The only thing I see twitter as good for is disseminating facts to a large audience when a non-internet-capable phone is the the only communication tool available. It has served that function a number of times during war, natural disasters and other breakdowns of civil infrastructure. Even so, I'd rather consume someone else's aggregation of the facts rather than track down which users to follow myself and unfollow them after the event is over. That's what reporters (including bloggers) are for.

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

#106

Post by arthurrr »

I met a nice girl who went back to her home country and we exchanged email addresses. But the emails we sent each other ended up in the spam folder. This is unacceptable. Email is unreliable. As much as I hate Facebook, it actually works for these situations. Email is ok as a secondary communications tool, but I would never build anything that relies on it.

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

#107

Post by sliverstorm »

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…

Email II

That's the key right there, I think. The email-killer is not some wild off-the-wall idea with a zany name that tries to pretend email never happened; it is email II. It is still email- just, the email of the future.

Come to think of it, you see this trend in a lot of tech history. The successor is a descendant, rather than usurper.

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

#108

Post by drivebyacct2 »

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.

NO. It's the fact that the server stores no archive of content. NO. It's the fact that ALL functionality has to be implemented in a thick client. NO. It's the fact that I just started working there, and thus am missing out on AGES of content that have been available to me instantly in FAR SUPERIOR FASHIONS using software that is built to store Wiki, Docs, Forums, etc, in centralized, indexed, searchable, archived formats that is far more useful for "social network" and documentation purposes.

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

#109

Post by [deleted] »

sliverstorm wrote: post #107
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…

Email II That's the key right there, I think. The email-killer is not some wild off-the-wall idea with a zany name that tries to pretend email never happened; it is email II . It is still email- just, the email of the future. Come to think of it, you see this trend in a lot of tech history. The successor is a descendant, rather than usurper.

[deleted]

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

#110

Post by redwood »

sliverstorm wrote: post #107
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…

Email II That's the key right there, I think. The email-killer is not some wild off-the-wall idea with a zany name that tries to pretend email never happened; it is email II . It is still email- just, the email of the future. Come to think of it, you see this trend in a lot of tech history. The successor is a descendant, rather than usurper.

Email III

We've got to give Gmail the credit of Email II. Think about how much better Gmail was than what existed prior. Would you ever work at an institution that didn't use threading? Never!

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