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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.

#121

Post by acuozzo »

mbrock wrote: post #17
pre wrote: post #7

Email is awesome, certainly. But if everyone actually started a mass-email to all their friends about every little topic they post to a Facebook status update, I'd call 'em pretty damned rude abusing my email inbox like that and my email client would need even better filters than it already has to fight the commercial spam. Experiments to find things better than email will mostly fail, but I think we still need more…

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…

You may enjoy the following TED Talk on the consequences of ``sharing'': http://www.ted.com/talks/sherry_turkle_alone_together.html

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

#122

Post by acuozzo »

arthurrr wrote: post #106

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.

> This is unacceptable. Email is unreliable.

Isn't this a spam-filter problem? How does a bad spam-filter imply that e-mail's unreliable?

Did you even __attempt__ to configure your spam-filter(s)?

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

#123

Post by drivebyacct2 »

slowpoke wrote: post #111
drivebyacct2 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's so painfully obvious just from looking at the email model that that is not true. A lack of a central index? Separate content types that by their very nature contain more information? A searchable archive? None of those things are naturally part of email and providing them, at best is work, at worst is cludgy and unnatural.

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

#124

Post by vannevar »

MichaelGG wrote: post #31
vannevar wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So are some of the later ones. Twitter built a multi-billion dollar business by duplicating the functionality of email and listserv in a proprietary service.

Listserv had an SMS-oriented design? It automatically made every user their own independent channel that other users could choose to subscribe to? I don't use Twitter, but saying it's just email/listserv is rather silly. Also, it's only a mutli-billion dollar business by investment; it doesn't generate even 1bn in revenue.

Email-to-SMS gateways have been around a long time. And sure, an email provider could set up a service that automatically gives every email account their own listserv. I'd agree that Twitter's valuation is arguable, but the investor consensus is that it's a multi-billion dollar business, whatever the revenue is.

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

#125

Post by slowpoke »

drivebyacct2 wrote: post #123
slowpoke wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

It's so painfully obvious just from looking at the email model that that is not true. A lack of a central index? Separate content types that by their very nature contain more information? A searchable archive? None of those things are naturally part of email and providing them, at best is work, at worst is cludgy and unnatural.

You're thinking of this in the completely wrong way. Why should email - the protocol - offer you all of this? It's nonsense, and goes against basic UNIX philosophy (do one thing). It does another part of the UNIX philosophy very well, though: it's a universal interface. Email can be used to communicate between all sorts of applications, and those applications can give you the features you want easily. Which brings us back to what you're complaints amount to: client problems.

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

#126

Post by MatthewPhillips »

akrymski wrote: post #120
MatthewPhillips wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

I requested an invite (same name as I go by here), would love to check out your service.
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