Email is Broken: People Sent 67 Trillion Emails in 2013 • Hacker News Board

Re: Email is Broken: People Sent 67 Trillion Emails in 2013

#11

Post by vezzy-fnord » Sun, Jan 19, 2014, 6:22 PM UTC

Touche wrote: post #10

chimeracoder wrote: post #4

This title reminds me of the line, "Nobody goes to that bar. It's too crowded."[0]. I'm not sure why people love to insist that "email is broken" Email does its job remarkably well. In 2014, it's one of the only communication forms that's truly open, 100% cross-platform, and free-as-in-both-beer-and-freedom. If there's something more you need, it's easy to write (or extend) a client that handles your email according…

> If there's something more you need, it's easy to write (or extend) a client that handles your email according to whatever logic you set up. This part is not true, it's incredibly hard to write an email client.

I think he meant handling the client's logic and configuration (how it processes messages), rather than writing one from scratch.

Which is not that difficult, what with things like Sieve scripting.

Re: Email is Broken: People Sent 67 Trillion Emails in 2013

#12

Post by ddebernardy » Sun, Jan 19, 2014, 6:24 PM UTC

chimeracoder wrote: post #4

This title reminds me of the line, "Nobody goes to that bar. It's too crowded."[0]. I'm not sure why people love to insist that "email is broken" Email does its job remarkably well. In 2014, it's one of the only communication forms that's truly open, 100% cross-platform, and free-as-in-both-beer-and-freedom. If there's something more you need, it's easy to write (or extend) a client that handles your email according…

> I'd wager that if you compared the volume of email today with the volume of paper mail then, the increased velocity of transactions would account for almost all of the difference.

Doubtful, and methinks the article nails precisely why it's not the case. Back then, workers didn't cc their every move to their boss and colleagues, whereas nowadays doing so often is the norm. Be it FYI or CYA, the cc is used and abused. Reporting and RFC channels from the past have been replaced by live -- and overwhelming -- data streams of information.

Re: Email is Broken: People Sent 67 Trillion Emails in 2013

#13

Post by raldi » Sun, Jan 19, 2014, 6:27 PM UTC

chimeracoder wrote: post #4

This title reminds me of the line, "Nobody goes to that bar. It's too crowded."[0]. I'm not sure why people love to insist that "email is broken" Email does its job remarkably well. In 2014, it's one of the only communication forms that's truly open, 100% cross-platform, and free-as-in-both-beer-and-freedom. If there's something more you need, it's easy to write (or extend) a client that handles your email according…

In your analogy, does going to a bar correspond to sending or receiving email? Because, "Nobody reads email anymore; they receive too much of it" doesn't have any paradoxical self-contradictions.

Re: Email is Broken: People Sent 67 Trillion Emails in 2013

#14

Post by adventured » Sun, Jan 19, 2014, 6:28 PM UTC

alooPotato wrote: post #5

One thing stood out to me in the article "make something free and easy and people will do a lot of it". What about this as a potential solution - in order to send an email to someone, you have to pay something. Here's how it could work: 1) You sign up for a service that autoresponds to all incoming email stating that in order to send this receiver an email, they require at least X BTC. 2) The receivers inbox only sho…

You just complicated email by adding money and monetary transactions to it. This approach would also do a horrible disservice to the roughly 6.7+ billion people with not much money; it assumes someone's communications are to be judged primarily by how much money they have or whether they have bitcoins, rather than the value of what they have to say. Making communication over the Internet more expensive (when the opposite should occur), breaks the Internet and drastically devalues one of the things it's best at and was designed for.

It would be like charging every visitor to your web site, to deal with scrappers, form spammers or dos attacks.

There are already excellent solutions to every possible scenario the money approach would supposedly solve.

Re: Email is Broken: People Sent 67 Trillion Emails in 2013

#15

Post by vezzy-fnord » Sun, Jan 19, 2014, 6:28 PM UTC

gdne wrote: post #9

alooPotato wrote: post #5

One thing stood out to me in the article "make something free and easy and people will do a lot of it". What about this as a potential solution - in order to send an email to someone, you have to pay something. Here's how it could work: 1) You sign up for a service that autoresponds to all incoming email stating that in order to send this receiver an email, they require at least X BTC. 2) The receivers inbox only sho…

Already been tried. It's called hashcash: http://www.hashcash.org/ Coincidentally, hashcash's proof of work is the foundation of bitcoin. But don't let this discourage you from trying your idea. I think it's still a fantastic idea. Making email cost something to send (either btc or CPU time like hashcash) would kill spam, and slow down the flow of over-communication.

The merits of charging CPU time are arguable, but adding monetary costs to sending email is absolutely immoral. Especially something like Bitcoin, which has a steep learning curve.

Unless your goal is to transform email into a system more closely resembling snail mail, but for cipherpunks.

Re: Email is Broken: People Sent 67 Trillion Emails in 2013

#16

Post by montecarl » Sun, Jan 19, 2014, 6:28 PM UTC

alooPotato wrote: post #5

One thing stood out to me in the article "make something free and easy and people will do a lot of it". What about this as a potential solution - in order to send an email to someone, you have to pay something. Here's how it could work: 1) You sign up for a service that autoresponds to all incoming email stating that in order to send this receiver an email, they require at least X BTC. 2) The receivers inbox only sho…

I had this exact same idea about a week ago! You can create a forwarding email address that has a payment barrier to sent emails through.

Regarding point number 3, I think the service should charge a small fixed fee for each accepted email not some percent. This would enable users to create services based upon email alone. You could charge people for support or consulting with your entire operation occurring over email.

Re: Email is Broken: People Sent 67 Trillion Emails in 2013

#17

Post by incision » Sun, Jan 19, 2014, 6:32 PM UTC

I think this article is conflating a couple of very different things.

* How much email is sent worldwide.

* How email is used in the workplace and the negative impacts of it.

* Ways to manage email in general and alternatives to email for personal (non-workplace) communication.

These are very different topics that can roughly be divided into workplace and personal spaces.

* Yes, there's a lot of email being sent. It should be pretty obvious why as it's ubiquitous, easy, simple and reliable. Nothing wrong with that.

* Workplace email is a completely different beast. I ran some fairly large internal mail systems for many years. Workplace email isn't about communicating nearly as much as it's "The Record".

A place to record, prove, ass-cover, expose and obtain implied consent in a way that is discoverable as evidence down the road.

The creation of anxiety and lost productivity here due to sheer volume and massive CC/BCC escalation is obvious - a significant part of many modern jobs is active defense of your own borders in a huge distributed audit trail.

* Inbox managers are nice, but they generally don't apply to the workplace, just as Twitter doesn't.

Re: Email is Broken: People Sent 67 Trillion Emails in 2013

#18

Post by unlimit » Sun, Jan 19, 2014, 6:34 PM UTC

I hear this every now and then from "the experts", but I am not sure if it is broken in the first place. Email with a nice client is very efficient and effective, it will not be beaten in the near future. What do we replace it with? IM, skype, google hangout? Nope

Re: Email is Broken: People Sent 67 Trillion Emails in 2013

#19

Post by pixl97 » Sun, Jan 19, 2014, 6:35 PM UTC

pstack wrote: post #3

Email is just fine. It lets you address things as you like, puts no time pressure on you, and gives you a written record of your discussions. It's also low-overhead and universal. Don't blame email, if you can't create a few simple inbox filters to manage the cruft for you. It has been many years since people actually suffered from the weight of zillions of spam messages in their inbox. We've largely addressed the sp…

>It has been many years since people actually suffered from the weight of zillions of spam messages in their inbox.

And this is part of what makes email close to useless these days. Outside of your own organization you have no idea if your mail was delivered or black holed at a server somewhere never to be heard from again. Too many servers still do the wrong thing, accept and delete, rather than reject at HELO.

You wouldn't care much if the post office dropped all the ads for $5.99 pizza before they got to your post box, but if your bills got lost regularly you would be unhappy, and that's the problem with email.

Re: Email is Broken: People Sent 67 Trillion Emails in 2013

#20

Post by esw » Sun, Jan 19, 2014, 6:37 PM UTC

>"Email is probably most invasive form of communication yet devised"

Oh, I find unscheduled phone calls much more invasive. They require that I make myself available at that moment, and if I'm not in an immediate position to talk, then I need to similarly inconvenience the caller when I return the call.