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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.

#111

Post by slowpoke »

drivebyacct2 wrote: post #108
jimbobimbo wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 for…

>It's the fact that the server stores no archive of content.

And that's still not a problem of email. That's a problem of your employer's competence. They should have an archive. Everything else you mention are client problems.

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

#112

Post by slowpoke »

jasonjei wrote: post #61

I know all the people pushing for social networks will disagree, but I think email can be fixed, just like static web pages have been fixed to do asynchronous JavaScript to provide dynamic web experiences. I think the problem is the cure is much worse than the disease. The cures of using social network tools is often an enclosed, controlled network such as Twitter or Facebook, which puts control of the network in the…

>just like static web pages have been fixed to do asynchronous JavaScript to provide dynamic web experiences

If by that you are trying to imply that email needs more awful HTML junk and other "features", stop. Now. That would finally destroy email, not fix it.

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

#113

Post by lucian1900 »

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 a terrible, terrible set of protocols and formats. We should really move to something less horrible.

There are several social network projects built on top of XMPP, though, which is a lot less terrible.

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

#114

Post by qznc »

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! :)

Email is not the problem here.

The problem is people doing task management/version control with the wrong tool. So how do you get managers (in my case the are called professors) to use proper tools? They already know how to use email and they are convinced that it is sufficient.

Maybe a simplified bug/issue tracker for task management?

Maybe something like Dropbox or Time Machine for version control?

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

#115

Post by monkeymace »

TimPC wrote: post #22

E-mail has a culture around it that doesn't work for many tasks. It's called "inbox zero". Basically for most e-mail users they attempt to clear out their inbox to zero new messages every time they go to e-mail. This means if you want to do things that require thought over a period of time you'll almost always have someone using e-mail the wrong way for the task.

I gave up on keeping on tidy inbox long ago. I have 16,794 unread emails in my Gmail account. I feel like keeping my email organized would easily become a full time job.

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

#116

Post by monkeymace »

jtheory wrote: post #90
thebdmethod wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I like the formula you invoke here.

Looking back, if I spent the same amount of time messaging and communicating with people that I spent building an app to facilitating future communication I would be much better off, thought more thoughts, and grown closer to more people.

(Also, thanks for keeping me honest with the "loose" typos, they've been corrected.

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

#117

Post by josephkern »

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…

You probably should be expecting consistant DDOS attacks, or at least aggressive scanning.

OP failed to mention setting up DKIM and SPF as well.

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

#118

Post by monkeymace »

antidoh wrote: post #68
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…

"email is about communication instead of endless "sharing," broadcasting, forwarding, signalling." I'm in the minority, but Facebook literally depresses me (and by literally, I literally mean literally), and I quit long ago. All these words, and no communication. It's like I'm in a crowd, and the only thing I know about the other people in the crowd is what their Tshirts say. I communicate by email with most of the p…

I think you nailed it. My feeling is that if its not worth the time or consideration to send someone a email then why bother sharing it at all. The mindless broadcasting/signaling with no real intent seems cheap and not terribly interesting.

I see the value perhaps in Facebook as a a glorified catalog of your interests and liked content, as a canonical record of your browsing.

The content I like best in my Facebook news feed are links to content on the web.

There is this one girl I barely know, who regularly posts the coolest and most obscure old music videos from the 50s and 60s. To me she is the ideal Facebook friend.

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

#119

Post by monkeymace »

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…

Simple. Effective.

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

#120

Post by akrymski »

MatthewPhillips wrote: post #73
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…

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 w…

Spot on, this is what we do on www.post.fm (sorry for the plug) - organize your email around people & organizations, and then offer distinct user experiences based on various use cases (going through notifications, participating in threads or groups or chatting one-on-one with people you know).

This HN post shows how passionate people still are about email. I have to admit reading the comments has been like reading through my own thoughts for the past 2 years we've been working on this. I can't wait to share what we've done with all of you.

PS Email is indeed great. The protocols - not so much. Unfortunately most email clients are limited to using IMAP as the email API, which in some ways limits what they can do with email. Hotmail started as (and probably still is) just an html client for IMAP. So the UI is built around IMAP functions - get a list of headers, etc. Forget running sophisticated SQL queries against your inbox, the user experience is dictated by the API designers - never a good choice.

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