A better protocol for email seems like it should be lower on the list compared to a better protocol for phone calls.
And don't just say we'll build that on HTTP too!
Modern email can be built from borrowed parts
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Re: Modern email can be built from borrowed parts
#72Unfortunately, stopped reading at one moment, because though the idea might be interesting, the packaging was unbearable. The obnoxious real time visitors counter seriously screws with my screen reader. I don't care how many people are reading this every 3 seconds updated not only with numbers, but with randomly chosen emois in my speech stream. If you have a website, please, don't subject your visitors to something…
I'm sorry to hear about your bad experience. I've hidden the counter for screen readers. Please try again when you're ready.
I liked the counters on the old 90s/2000s web but it was best at the bottom of the page cause it was easy to ignore. I can't ever see me wanting a moving box telling me other people are reading the same article as me but if I did it would blend in better.
Email is more than a technology its a community. There have been plenty of technical attempts at replacing it but they have failed to un-seat email because they focus only on the technology aspect which as you have found is largely a solved problem although... getting the details right might be hard. You need buy in from the community which is not just users but also businesses and organizations that use email which is everyone from CEOs to church leaders. It's not enough to fix email you have to get buy in from the community to make a meaningful change and I don't see anything here that would do that. This isn't really a criticism, just an insight I offer. I work in this field and we're trying to get out of it cause managing email sucks. I would love something new to take its place but the community has heard so many promises that never came to fruition, when that happens you either need a better promise(harder than it seems) or you need credibility which may be very difficult in the current climate. Not an unsolvable problem, those don't exist but sometimes the lever you need to solve the problem is further than you can reach alone and this is one of those times.
Re: Modern email can be built from borrowed parts
#73I don't want to replicate email. I want to fix it.
Sending email should not be free. It should be really, really cheap to send an email to one person (like a fraction of a fraction of a cent), but get exponentially more expensive the more you send.
People shouldn't be able to send emails to you without your prior approval (which you can revoke at an instant).
The recipient should be able to charge a tack-on fee for having email sent to him. I should be able to charge annoying people a lot to send to me, and charge my friends almost nothing. People who send annoying stuff to me should pay more to get my attention.
All of a sudden, forwarding that stupid article without thinking about the content (or even reading the article they're sending) will be second guessed. Save the money (and time), by sending only worthwhile stuff that you penned.
Re: Modern email can be built from borrowed parts
#74> First-contact consent: an unknown sender doesn't get into the mailbox; they land in a "requests" box with their first message visible (like Signal's message requests). You accept, and the thread opens forever. A stranger can knock on your door, which is the essential property of mail, but they can't fill up your living room. I like this. Question: can this e-mail specification/implementation also replace direct-mes…
I (and many others) do this:
https://blog.nawaz.org/posts/2018/Sep/solving-my-email-probl...
(Not answering your question, but referring to the approach).
Re: Modern email can be built from borrowed parts
#75I don't want to replicate email. I want to fix it. Sending email should not be free. It should be really, really cheap to send an email to one person (like a fraction of a fraction of a cent), but get exponentially more expensive the more you send. People shouldn't be able to send emails to you without your prior approval (which you can revoke at an instant). The recipient should be able to charge a tack-on fee for h…
> People shouldn't be able to send emails to you without your prior approval (which you can revoke at an instant).
this sounds terrible... i've gotten so many useful random emails from strangers over the years.
Re: Modern email can be built from borrowed parts
#76> First-contact consent: an unknown sender doesn't get into the mailbox; they land in a "requests" box with their first message visible (like Signal's message requests). You accept, and the thread opens forever. A stranger can knock on your door, which is the essential property of mail, but they can't fill up your living room. I like this. Question: can this e-mail specification/implementation also replace direct-mes…
The unknown request will be buried in spam - a problem we have already, but worse. And I do not want an infinite thread conversation. I want to be able to split off - and perhaps archive and export - different conversations by topic. I recently had to some legal things, which included forwarding copies of a certain conversation to a lawyer. This turns out to be unreasonably difficult because email clients quote previ…
> The unknown request will be buried in spam - a problem we have already, but worse.
Keep in mind that many people around the world already use this solution.
In my case, I give senders a mechanism to go into my inbox without my explicit approval. The server sends them an email with a URL. They follow the instructions, and their email gets whitelisted.
https://blog.nawaz.org/posts/2018/Sep/solving-my-email-probl...
Re: Modern email can be built from borrowed parts
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is similar but not the same thing. It does not have anything to do with the email being legit (non spam) or not. It only catches emails that do not do what they supposed to do when they are deferred for a little bit. They are supposed to try again later. (A super nice feature of email which protects you from losing all incoming emails when your server is down for a short time). The reasoning here is hopefully a sp…
It's definitely possible, a few companies do it, and let me tell you: People hate it.
I've been doing it for almost a decade. Only one person has complained. I'm surprised by the hoops people are willing to go through to contact me.
https://blog.nawaz.org/posts/2018/Sep/solving-my-email-probl...
Re: Modern email can be built from borrowed parts
#78I don't want to replicate email. I want to fix it. Sending email should not be free. It should be really, really cheap to send an email to one person (like a fraction of a fraction of a cent), but get exponentially more expensive the more you send. People shouldn't be able to send emails to you without your prior approval (which you can revoke at an instant). The recipient should be able to charge a tack-on fee for h…
> People shouldn't be able to send emails to you without your prior approval (which you can revoke at an instant). this sounds terrible... i've gotten so many useful random emails from strangers over the years.
Depends how it's designed. I've been doing something similar for almost a decade. If I get an email from a non-whitelisted person, they get an auto reply asking them to go through a simple hoop. Once they do that, the email lands in my inbox.
Yes, many people go through that hoop!
I can still see their emails if they don't. They site in a Quarantine folder. I used to look at it frequently to catch the occasional straggler, but I rarely do that now. I've set up an LLM to go through all my quarantined emails in the last N days, and send me an email on which of the quarantined emails probably should be viewed.
I'm OK missing out on a (very rare) good email if it means I don't have to deal with crap mass mails. And let me tell you: Life is great when you don't deal with mass mails.
Re: Modern email can be built from borrowed parts
#79HTTP? It would be a more interesting thought experiment with CoAP. And, is it really “modern” if it still uses a model (essentially) requiring stateful compute like JMAP?
Re: Modern email can be built from borrowed parts
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
> People shouldn't be able to send emails to you without your prior approval (which you can revoke at an instant). this sounds terrible... i've gotten so many useful random emails from strangers over the years.
Depends how it's designed. I've been doing something similar for almost a decade. If I get an email from a non-whitelisted person, they get an auto reply asking them to go through a simple hoop. Once they do that, the email lands in my inbox. Yes, many people go through that hoop! I can still see their emails if they don't. They site in a Quarantine folder. I used to look at it frequently to catch the occasional stra…
ah, quarantine makes sense
i handle the overload a different way... i age everything out of my inbox one day at a time, each gets a label showing the remaining days; they start at 7 and count down. that way i only ever have 7 days of email to look at. it also makes it clear who the big offenders are... if 10% of the emails are some new marketing thing it's easy to see and unsubscribe. i do hate that there's still so much manual work involved though, i would love if marketers had to pay.