Modern email can be built from borrowed parts • Hacker News Board

Re: Modern email can be built from borrowed parts

#161

Post by baudehlo » Wed, Jul 29, 2026, 3:39 PM UTC

inigyou wrote: post #157

baudehlo wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LMTP is for delivering to an IMAP (or JMAP) mailbox, generally. We also have a plugin for that. But it has certain flaws for exposing it to the internet (I just forget what they are right now).

There's no such thing as an IMAP mailbox. Mail receiving is split down the middle. Your SMTP server stores the email in a folder and your IMAP server provides access to that folder.

That's not how things work at all.

For context, I'm the author of Haraka, a popular open source SMTP server.

SMTP servers don't necessarily store anything. They have two responsibilities: Receiving and delivering email. What they do with the emails they receive is up to the configuration.

Re: Modern email can be built from borrowed parts

#162

Post by jerf » Thu, Jul 30, 2026, 4:27 PM UTC

zahlman wrote: post #63

jerf wrote: post #61

I would advise reconsidering keeping the current format exactly. Something that would allow conventional email addresses to kept in a list that disambiguates them unambiguously would probably be a good idea. You don't want to embed the entire email in JSON. Too many parsers past, present, and future tend to want to decode the entire JSON document into memory before doing anything else, and so you'd be forcing entire…

> You don't want to embed the entire email in JSON. Too many parsers past, present, and future tend to want to decode the entire JSON document into memory before doing anything else, and so you'd be forcing entire email documents to be held in memory at scale Why? Even if your system loads emails into memory a whole email at a time, that doesn't imply that it will load large numbers of emails simultaneously. The kind…

"Even if your system loads emails into memory a whole email at a time, that doesn't imply that it will load large numbers of emails simultaneously. The"

When thinking about a standard like this, thinking about "your" system is a fatal error. You have to think about all the systems. And, yes, there are systems out there in the world that load large numbers of emails simultaneously. Obviously. Many of them. Not only that, if a new standard can't capture some of those, it's going to be a worthless niche standard forever because those are precisely the nodes that you need to get to support the new standard.

"If we're specifically talking about being able to short-circuit after headers, then why not a JSON header followed by JSON representation of the body?"

Just because a JSON representation of the body is pretty worthless. MIME is an extremely well-known standard, already used in HTTP contexts, and it will be more efficient than JSON string encoding at a fairly small transition size.

Re: Modern email can be built from borrowed parts

#163

Post by ojinai » Fri, Jul 31, 2026, 3:43 PM UTC

[flagged]

Re: Modern email can be built from borrowed parts

#164

Post by andros » Mon, Aug 03, 2026, 6:18 AM UTC

zahlman wrote: post #65

andros wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you scroll down, they should all disappear. Do you have JavaScript disabled? What browser and device are you using?

FWIW, I'm on desktop but I do have JS disabled (more precisely, I use NoScript). This results in the top and left-side bars staying decorative and unobtrusive, but the concurrent visitor counter thingy is floating well above the bottom-right of the page. But then, as I shrink in the page width, the left-side bar and the concurrent visitor counter swap sides , and also a bunch of the content from the top is added to a…

I disabled the chat for visitors without JavaScript; I hope this improves your experience. As for the other points, they are design choices. Thank you for your feedback.

P.S.: For future interactions, please message me privately like everyone else. This is not the right place for this.

Re: Modern email can be built from borrowed parts

#165

Post by andros » Mon, Aug 03, 2026, 6:28 AM UTC

mrnotcrazy wrote: post #72

andros wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 foc…

My goal isn't to replace anything else; it's a (game) theory exercise. Companies with more resources and influence try to provide an improved solution without leaving a trace. Is it possible to create a better solution with standard tools? Yes! :)