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Email will last forever

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Re: Email will last forever

#101

Post by andruby »

ejr wrote: post #54
ChuckMcM wrote: post #38

I find it interesting to contrast 'forever' with another technology that will last forever 'vinyl records'. I expect there will always be point to point, store and forward communication channels, but those channels have existed for millenia, from travelers who stacked rocks to tell those who came after where the trail was, to people who send compromising photos of themselves across cellular networks. So if we set asi…

Vinyl was physical. As were cassettes, envelopes, postcards etc. Email has one thing going for it that other platforms similarly didn't offer : It's the first personalised, and therefore recognisable, addressing system for an intangible communications platform that's still largely open (Ex: Unlike twitter et al. which has severely limited means of communication and, more importantly, what I can communicate). I submit…

It would be interesting to see an alternative to Twitter that is as open as email is. eg: A microblogging system that is built on open standards in a distributed and federated way. Where no-one owns the platform and protocols.

In the beginning of the internet a bunch of open system emerged: Email, IRC, DNS, ... Nowadays it's mostly businesses that launch proprietary solutions to make $$$. What has changed since those early days?

Re: Email will last forever

#102

Post by ufmace »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #76
ChuckMcM wrote: post #38

I find it interesting to contrast 'forever' with another technology that will last forever 'vinyl records'. I expect there will always be point to point, store and forward communication channels, but those channels have existed for millenia, from travelers who stacked rocks to tell those who came after where the trail was, to people who send compromising photos of themselves across cellular networks. So if we set asi…

My opinionated 2¢ on why e-mails will live while many an "e-mail killer" dies mourned by no one. E-mail is just better way of doing snail-mail, a technology that we had since we first invented writing. One could say that our whole civilization is built on such communication, as one could not conduct business, make a war or govern a country without mail. E-mails is just the same, only faster, and it shares all the ben…

I'd add one more thing to ubiquitous, distributed, and federated, and that's free-form.

Quite a few of these email replacement services seem to add a bunch of stuff specific to some particular use-case. It might make it nicer for that particular use-case, but as soon as you need to do something outside of what's anticipated, it grinds to a halt. That means that any organization that uses something like that ends up using 3 or 4 of them, in addition to email. At that point, it's easier to just use email for everything.

Re: Email will last forever

#103

Post by ghaff »

ibisum wrote: post #89
liotier wrote: post #9

No one mentions portability, but I believe it is a wonderful property of email - I have more than 15 years of email, moved across various servers and clients on various operating systems and it is still available and functional. What other personal communication channel is that resilient to technological change ?

True. But on the other hand, its still (against all reason) too hard to actually do anything with such massive archives unless you really prepare for it .. like you, I have more than 15 years of email collected over the decades, but actually being able to do something productive with it depends on just how much time I want to spend setting up a system that can handle the mbox files of the 80's, the Eudora archives of…

And the reality is that there's a vanishingly small percentage of that archived email that is of any use to you or anyone else. I don't have anything before about 2001 for reasons of isolated proprietary mail systems (e.g. minicomputer-based), disk failures, or just not making the effort to archive. I do have about the next 10 years saved but it's sitting in Outlook on a retired Windows system I keep around for such purposes--but there's no easy way AFAIK to translate it to another format and it's not something I'm inspired to devote great energy to.

Re: Email will last forever

#104

Post by TeMPOraL »

ufmace wrote: post #102
TeMPOraL wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My opinionated 2¢ on why e-mails will live while many an "e-mail killer" dies mourned by no one. E-mail is just better way of doing snail-mail, a technology that we had since we first invented writing. One could say that our whole civilization is built on such communication, as one could not conduct business, make a war or govern a country without mail. E-mails is just the same, only faster, and it shares all the ben…

I'd add one more thing to ubiquitous, distributed, and federated, and that's free-form. Quite a few of these email replacement services seem to add a bunch of stuff specific to some particular use-case. It might make it nicer for that particular use-case, but as soon as you need to do something outside of what's anticipated, it grinds to a halt. That means that any organization that uses something like that ends up u…

> free-form

Yes! A thousand times yes!

Being free-form is also extremely important. I think that the best way to add another "stuff specific to some particular use-case" is just to add additional layers of UI over current form.

Look at how HTML mail is implemented - it's just using underlying text protocol. Ditto for images and other attachments.

I don't see any reason for people not to agree on Markdown formatting, folding Org-mode style headings, rendering [ ] as checkbox that will send a special "I'm ticked" e-mail as a reply when clicked (didn't GitHub start to do something similar with checkhoxes in readme files recently?), etc. Just keep the underlying format simple and gracefully degrading to plain-text for clients who don't support your new feature.

Re: Email will last forever

#105

Post by spindritf »

andruby wrote: post #101
ejr wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vinyl was physical. As were cassettes, envelopes, postcards etc. Email has one thing going for it that other platforms similarly didn't offer : It's the first personalised, and therefore recognisable, addressing system for an intangible communications platform that's still largely open (Ex: Unlike twitter et al. which has severely limited means of communication and, more importantly, what I can communicate). I submit…

It would be interesting to see an alternative to Twitter that is as open as email is. eg: A microblogging system that is built on open standards in a distributed and federated way. Where no-one owns the platform and protocols. In the beginning of the internet a bunch of open system emerged: Email, IRC, DNS, ... Nowadays it's mostly businesses that launch proprietary solutions to make $$$. What has changed since those…

First, money showed up on the Internet. Second, if you don't stand to make a ton of it, you can keep using email, IRC, DNS... No need to launch something else.

Although it's not like new IRC daemons are not written, or new irc networks are not started. It's not dead, it's slowly evolving.

Re: Email will last forever

#106

Post by ufmace »

mrb wrote: post #2

The fact "email will last forever" is precisely why I believe it is absolutely the best protocol to build automatic services to access and share personal information. I have spoken about it here: http://blog.zorinaq.com/?e=76 Edit: Someone1234: you don't need to wait for companies to support my proposal. It already works today with Gmail: try my live demo on pm33at@gmail.com - it works by leveraging standard auto-res…

That sounds like a really cool idea. Have you submitted it here? Got me thinking of pluses and minuses, and ways to bootstrap. Probably somebody would have to put up a free email service that implemented these hidden auto-replies, and maybe submit some pull requests to open-source projects to use it. Maybe Android and iPhone apps for the service that handled the phone info side. Sounds a bit big for an individual side project to me, but maybe it's a startup. It would probably help to get input from a bunch of people/projects on what they'd want for specific use cases.

Re: Email will last forever

#107

Post by rakoo »

ibisum wrote: post #89
liotier wrote: post #9

No one mentions portability, but I believe it is a wonderful property of email - I have more than 15 years of email, moved across various servers and clients on various operating systems and it is still available and functional. What other personal communication channel is that resilient to technological change ?

True. But on the other hand, its still (against all reason) too hard to actually do anything with such massive archives unless you really prepare for it .. like you, I have more than 15 years of email collected over the decades, but actually being able to do something productive with it depends on just how much time I want to spend setting up a system that can handle the mbox files of the 80's, the Eudora archives of…

You might want to have a look at notmuch (http://notmuchmail.org/). Said abruptly, it's a wrapper on top of Xapian (the search engine) that you feed with your email, after which you can query using mail-related queries:

    $ notmuch search from:linus crap
and, most usefully, tag:

    $ notmuch tag +rant from:linus crap
Tags work exactly how you would expect them to:

    $ notmuch count tag:rant
There are myriads of frontends (even a web-based one [0]) if you want to go further than cli.

You're gonna have to transform everything to maildir or mh though (unless you can somehow iterate over your mails from the formats you have), but I guess that's not too unreasonable to do anyway.

[0] https://bitbucket.org/wuzzeb/notmuch-web

Re: Email will last forever

#108

Post by djyaz1200 »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #38

I find it interesting to contrast 'forever' with another technology that will last forever 'vinyl records'. I expect there will always be point to point, store and forward communication channels, but those channels have existed for millenia, from travelers who stacked rocks to tell those who came after where the trail was, to people who send compromising photos of themselves across cellular networks. So if we set asi…

As a former Pro DJ that now leads a Unified Communications Startup I find your comparison especially entertaining... and accurate. Vinyl records are still around now although they are more of a novelty item (no one is making real money on them). What has persisted is the analog user interface (especially around DJ'ing). While Email may persist in the future all your contacts and all your communications will be all together in one place. It is ABSURD that when we lose/misplace our physical phones we often simultaneously lose contacts and the ability to make/receive calls & SMS. It is also ridiculous that we can't all have a simple threaded chat log of our communications with all our friends/contacts regardless of if they were calls/SMS/Email etc. Different messaging channels are like different music genre's, many people used to think genre's like rock and hip hop were totally separate because the companies that marketed them worked hard to reinforce this distinction. As tools like the iPod gave the user more choice in how to organize and experience their music they blurred the lines between these genre's. The same thing will happen in messaging. People don't care whether it's a Twitter Message, Email, SMS or call. They just see it as all as communication and no one platform will win the day, it will be a mashup of all of them.

Re: Email will last forever

#109

Post by AndrewDucker »

The reason email will last forever is that nobody owns it.

If Twitter goes bust then you lose all of your tweets. If Facebook goes bust then all of your status updates go out of the window.

But email is an open, free protocol that anyone can implement and is deliberately designed to be decentralised.

And so the ecosystem will last as long as a few people find it useful.

Re: Email will last forever

#110

Post by cloakandswagger »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #38

I find it interesting to contrast 'forever' with another technology that will last forever 'vinyl records'. I expect there will always be point to point, store and forward communication channels, but those channels have existed for millenia, from travelers who stacked rocks to tell those who came after where the trail was, to people who send compromising photos of themselves across cellular networks. So if we set asi…

Vinyl records are bulky, expensive to produce and fragile.

Now, what are the problems with e-mail that it's inevitable successor will fix other than, "it's old" ?

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