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Email Is Still the Best Thing on the Internet

theatlantic.com

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Re: Email Is Still the Best Thing on the Internet

#11

Post by Aqueous »

3pt14159 wrote: post #8

Email will always be around, but I must say that "Email killers" are really going to be successful. For example, I don't remember the last time my team sent an internal email that wasn't a forward from a client. We use Slack. Exclusively. We organize projects around it, sales efforts, everything. It has the async nature of email, the separation of topics like email, and the search power of email. It also means that n…

Unfortunately, the "nobody owns" feature of EMail is something Slack lacks and probably always will. Email is a federated, decentralized protocol of distributed mail servers that anybody can set up. Any email server can participate with any other email server. That's something that Slack will never have (it does interface with XMPP and IRC, but the service itself is centralized.)

It is hard to overstate how critical this fact is to Email's future. If you look at most of the canonical Internet protocols (SMTP, HTTP, DNS, XMPP, IRC, even BitCoin) - they have this fundamental feature in common. Even though they're part of the application layer of the Internet, they've become fundamental protocols that other technologies rely on. They are part of the infrastructure of the Internet.

I say this is someone who just started using Slack and loves it. I still can't see it replacing email, though.

Re: Email Is Still the Best Thing on the Internet

#12

Post by blowski »

3pt14159 wrote: post #8

Email will always be around, but I must say that "Email killers" are really going to be successful. For example, I don't remember the last time my team sent an internal email that wasn't a forward from a client. We use Slack. Exclusively. We organize projects around it, sales efforts, everything. It has the async nature of email, the separation of topics like email, and the search power of email. It also means that n…

> I must say that "Email killers" are really going to be successful.

I remember people saying that in about 1998. Email killers have been successful, but not at killing email.

Re: Email Is Still the Best Thing on the Internet

#14

Post by huntaub »

coldcode wrote: post #9

What if someone designed a new email protocol/etc from scratch without any reference to the existing one. Could it be made better? Can you even define what better is?

Actually, that's exactly what we are trying to do with AirDispatch [1].

We started out intending to "fix" email with a better protocol, and ended up creating something much greater.

The core problems that we tried to solve (to help define "better") were:

- Security: encrypting and authenticating your messages

- Control: the sender hosts the message, so they can edit or delete them before the receiver sees them

- Flexibility: all messages are, in fact, just key-value stores, so any type of data can be sent on the protocol (whether it's Mail, IMs, Vines, Instagrams, or whatever the flavor of the week social network is)

I think it's a great product, and we are going to start the developer release of the client (Melange [2]) tomorrow.

[1] http://airdispat.ch

[2] http://github.com/melange-app/melange

Re: Email Is Still the Best Thing on the Internet

#15

Post by jabelk »

Wholeheartedly agree with the article. I have absolute control of my inbox with filters, labels, and signing up for newsletters and/or updates on various subjects. There is no way a centralized end-to-end service is going to eclipse email for me, unless they radically change their business models.

The value proposition is just really bad in all the services I've seen so far.

"Oh, you want me to sign up for your service so that I can look at the content you think I should see alongside the ads you're making money off of? And what exactly is in it for me?"

Something I would pay for: a rolodex social network. No centralized feed. No useless info. Your profile is 2-3 sentences and your current city (with some sort of maps integration for when you travel, to see who's near you). Two buttons, one to request to view resume, and another to request to view email. That's it. With the idea being, you use the site to enable you to keep up with people. You add people you know or have worked with to your network, and you can easily get their current email and catch up when you're in the same city. Simple, no obnoxious ads, no slimy tactics to increase time on the site.

Probably will never come to pass, but I can dream...

Re: Email Is Still the Best Thing on the Internet

#16

Post by blowski »

coldcode wrote: post #9

What if someone designed a new email protocol/etc from scratch without any reference to the existing one. Could it be made better? Can you even define what better is?

I seriously think that what we have is great. Send this text from here to there. It's so simple that almost anything can be done with it. If only social networking had followed the model of a simple protocol with distributed servers, we would have a serious alternative to Twitter's API restrictions and Facebook's privacy invasions.

That said, if we could redesign email, my quick wishlist would be:

* Better encryption. No surprises that a HN comment thinks we should encrypt metadata as well as contents, and have something better than the way we have to exchange GPG keys at the moment.

* Better security. Easier to guarantee that the ostensible sender of a message really did send it. Also, help prevent the viral problem of malware, which spreads through inboxes protected by rubbish passwords.

Re: Email Is Still the Best Thing on the Internet

#17

Post by pjmlp »

7952 wrote: post #3
Fastidious wrote: post #2

I agree. I think there is more that can be done to enhance it, and make it a more enjoyable tool. Email clients --and I am not talking about third party services a la Mailbox, who rely yet in another server-- are still very primitive.

I feel that gmail has held back development of good desktop clients (which is what we really need). My laptop has an almost empty 1TB hard drive yet I need to wait to download an image attachment every time I want to view it. Email should be built around abundant storage, not a dependency on bandwidth.

Quite happy with Thunderbird.

Re: Email Is Still the Best Thing on the Internet

#18

Post by timjahn »

jabelk wrote: post #15

Wholeheartedly agree with the article. I have absolute control of my inbox with filters, labels, and signing up for newsletters and/or updates on various subjects. There is no way a centralized end-to-end service is going to eclipse email for me, unless they radically change their business models. The value proposition is just really bad in all the services I've seen so far. "Oh, you want me to sign up for your servi…

"Something I would pay for: a rolodex social network. No centralized feed. No useless info. Your profile is 2-3 sentences and your current city (with some sort of maps integration for when you travel, to see who's near you). Two buttons, one to request to view resume, and another to request to view email. That's it. With the idea being, you use the site to enable you to keep up with people. You add people you know or have worked with to your network, and you can easily get their current email and catch up when you're in the same city. Simple, no obnoxious ads, no slimy tactics to increase time on the site."

I really want this too. I need some sort of simple contact rolodex that simply shows who I know, why I know them, and why they're important (where do they work, how do I know them, who are they connected to, etc.). Just a simple UI, something that I would use most of the time simply to search.

Re: Email Is Still the Best Thing on the Internet

#19

Post by inopinatus »

As this article alludes to: the heart of email's longevity, the thing that prevents it being closed by a single entity, is being a classical IETF protocol: federated, decentralized, open and interoperable.

The first two of those properties arise from being based on the DNS for SMTP endpoint discovery.

This is why every protocol needs to specify that it uses the DNS, and how.

And that is why I get so worried that the draft HTTP/2 editors so steadfastly refuses to do so.

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