if you will not delete it so it will last forever.lol
Email will last forever
121–130 of 169 posts
Re: Email will last forever
#122I 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…
Good points. And I would also observe that email's share of electronic communication is going down with the rise of Facebook and other messaging services.
Re: Email will last forever
#123Re: Email will last forever
#124Made me remember the quote by Reinhold Niebuhr: "Frantic orthodoxy is never rooted in faith but in doubt. It is when we are unsure that we are doubly sure."
Re: Email will last forever
#125There are certain phrases I hear in startup pitches that immediately cause me to tune out. One of them is some combination of social, mobile and local. Another is "fixing emaiL" or "email is broken". It isn't. With all the change that's happened with the Internet two forms of communication have proven to be incredibly resilient: SMS and email. SMS is resilient because every phone has it. It's portable and it's simple…
The "fixing email" / "email is broken" are quotes you only hear from startup guys and UX geeks. Email is indeed working really well. Most people outside of this niche seems to have no fundamental problems with it.
Just an example: I recently needed to send a script to an 8 year old kid and a grandma at around 75. Couldn't have done it any other way than email. The point being that email is an enormously broad platform.
Its so broad that the second you turn to mobile to solve email, you have limited your way out the competition.
Re: Email will last forever
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Thanks for the recommendation - I'll check it out!
Re: Email will last forever
#127> The email protocol is simple and flexible.
Ha, okay. I'm going to include actual emails in "the email protocol", because if you just count the network protocols you're not doing anything useful. Emails are anything but simple. They were born in the early days of the Internet, and no doubt time and the impossibility of predicting the future is responsible for how things turned out — but they are anything but simple.
Email messages are ASCII only. You can put non-ASCII characters into a header however. It looks like this:
Subject: =?UTF-8?B?SMOpbGzDtOKApgo=?=
The body also has to be ASCII, so just about every email client out there has to do:
Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64
There's also that every message has a text version and an HTML version — hopefully semantically similar — but HTML support in email clients (at least the big ones) is terrible. (see for example http://www.email-standards.org/ ) You'll think support is great on the web after you're done.
I've not covered un-wrapping headers. Or the things people think aren't valid email addresses. (Your average Joe thinks [a-zA-Z0-9]+@ matches all valid emails. Oh, and that they're case insensitive too.) Or IMAP. Or encryption. Or even whether email gets encrypted while on the wire from Hotmail to Comcast. > Slack pretends to be “an email killer” I'm not sure they're out to kill all emails… just the ones that would be better as a real-time communication. ¹Don't test your library's output email on Gmail, either. Gmail is creepy good at correcting bad input. "It works on Gmail" != it's correct. I do wish I could send restructured text emails and have the client just render them. In theory, email has everything I need. Clients just need to support it, that's all. I'll admit, that is kinda cool.
Re: Email will last forever
#128It is, however, a horrifically bad protocol. We don't need a new app, but a better protocol for unified mail, IM and audio/video. XMPP is close, but flawed.
I have my own opinions on the subject but curious what you see as XMPPs failings?
Very high overhead (largely because of all the XML) and the implicit requirement of a persistent connection.
There are other things, like awkward and unevenly supported voice and encryption, but those are higher level concerns.
TextSecure's protocol is probably closest to what I'd like to see as a standard.
Re: Email will last forever
#129I like email and can't see it dying at all. I have several email addresses for various purposes and it's no hassle to manage.
I have about 5 email addresses and 1 work email. It's good having a dedicated "website sign-up" email address for forums and so on, where you don't care about the spam level.
The flexibility in setting up your in-box how you want is a great thing about email. I don't understand people who constantly complain about their in-boxes. Learn to manage your in-box, I say, and stop crying about your first-world inbox clutter problem!
I'm interested in secure online collaboration tools, and it's great to see so many options emerging. These secure tools can easily coexist with email and keep everyone happy.
Email is a familiar, reliable, predictable service that everyone knows about. It doesn't get "updated" every 3 months by some agenda-driven tech giant with ideas about how we ought to be communicating.
Re: Email will last forever
#130The 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…
I tried emailing that address and didn't get a reply.
But I think that could be a rather cool idea - something like REST over SMTP? Know a single email address, send it a blank email get back and kick off the whole HATEOS process - which actually might more sense for something like this rather than over HTTP.