Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Email will last forever

blog.frontapp.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 169 posts

Re: Email will last forever

#131

Post by andrewaylett »

grexi wrote: post #5

The single most important issue with email: Team Inboxes. As soon as more than one person works with an inbox, it sucks big time. But I agree - email will last forever, nearly none of the products you mentioned work without an email notification feature.

That's a problem with the end-point, not with the medium. Consider a system like RT[0]; it has no concept of an inbox, yet most (if not all) client interaction is via email. My take is that if you're tempted to set up a shared inbox, don't. Set up a ticketing system instead.

[0]: http://bestpractical.com/rt/

Re: Email will last forever

#132

Post by _delirium »

aaronem wrote: post #97
andyl wrote: post #55

There are tools to make use of HTTP in all sorts of ways. Curl, Wget, Restful APIs, Sinatra, Grape, etc. Fast, flexible, lightweight. Email - not so much. Want a local email server? There's Postfix - yuckkk. The overhead of spam - yuckk. The lack of tooling, the lack of configurability, the DNS complexity. The fact that it requires a SAAS to do shared inboxes. Yuck. Email could be so much better.

What's wrong with Postfix? Sure, configuring it takes a little work, but it's not hard , especially not by comparison with Sendmail, which was the standard everywhere when I began my career.

I didn't even find configuring Postfix to take much work, and I'd never configured a mailserver until a few months ago. Debian's config script autogenerated a basic configuration for me, after prompting with a few questions: receive email for my domain to my unix account, and relay mail only from local or AUTH'd clients. This is the entirety of the manual config I added on top of what Debian produced:

    # use maildir instead of mbox
    home_mailbox = Maildir/

    # reject obvious spam
    smtpd_client_restrictions = permit_mynetworks, permit_sasl_authenticated,
       reject_unknown_client_hostname,
       reject_rbl_client zen.spamhaus.org
It has a very nice manual too, but I have not had to use most of it, because it just works out of the box.

Re: Email will last forever

#133

Post by TeMPOraL »

userbinator wrote: post #118
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 agree with your reasons, but it's interesting to consider that realtime IM is one area that, while there exists a standard, simple, and scalable protocol that's been around for a long time - IRC - it's nowhere near as popular as the proprietary alternatives that followed. IRC usage is declining, and of the people I know, the majority have never heard of it. Yet almost everyone knows about email, AIM, MSN Messenger,…

There's IM the one-to-one communication, and there's IM the multi-user chat. Those are two different concepts, they have their own mechanics of working and are treated differently by society.

But since you brought it up, let's talk about IRC. I'm betting its lack of widespread success is because of the general UX combined with some historical mishaps.

There are things you need to think about when IRCing, like:

  - servers
  - channel discovery
  - NickServ, ChanServ
  - channel modes
that all boil down to a. thinking, b. learning, and c. typing magic incantation into a command prompt. It all gives off this complicated, "techie" vibe.

Remember that the general population can't use a computer [0]. That level of involvement is already too much for people to start using it without a strong reason to do so.

I remember when I started IRCing for the first time. There was another solution, that captured much more users - the web chats. Those ugly, scammy looking Java applets embedded on news portals. They solved all the above problems, i.e. you didn't care about "servers" or "connecting", all channels ("rooms", they were called) were listed on a website and there were no magic modes or something, just users, administrators and kicking (and you as an user had only to grok what "being kicked/banned" means).

And of course you could post rainbows and cat gifs and animated faces made by a crazy artist on drugs.

Chats ultimately mostly died, having gained the (deserved) reputation of scammy and ugly places. Or maybe because society still thinks that talking with random strangers on the Internet is something weird and/or dangerous, I don't know.

Anyway, back to the topic of technological obstacles. At my local Hackerspace, every now and then we invite people to our IRC channel, and sometimes those people are not exactly of computer-competent type. A good way to do this is to point a person to a IRC web frame, that is pre-configured with server and channel names. From his point of view, it's just like entering that old-school chat, except that it looks less crappy. After that person hangs out a bit with us and likes the place, we teach him how to install and configure a best-suited IRC client.

If the IRC is ever to reach popularity again, I think someone needs to build a, pardon the startupy meme, GMail of IRC. That is, an UI that looks good, hides complexity from you. An UI that lets you click through everything, and explains things like "+v", "@", "-c" or "NickServ" in human-readable terms. With icons and colors and simple sentences.

Then there's the marketing angle, but I bet you, if Google ever built an IRC client for massess, we'd see a great resurgence of this protocol

[0] - http://coding2learn.org/blog/2013/07/29/kids-cant-use-comput...

Re: Email will last forever

#134

Post by adnsr »

Something is weird about email: Everyone can pretend to be someone else. It would be sane to reject all emails from a domain, that has no SPF record. I was asthonished when i realized that this is not already happening. Designing a large communication system it is just pure insanity to not include a sentence like this in the spec: "One can only send messages as one of the names he has power over." This could be ensured simply by SPF. It should be safe to assume, that a domain that has no SPF-record is not used for sending emails. I know that this is not the case right now, but it would change really fast, if you would push an update to the SPF-checkers, to enforce that rule. SPAM would be much less of problem than it is right now. Today you have to block ip-addresses, which is a large mess. With this rule enforced, you could block domains. Which are much harder to obtain and have a way smaller quantity.

Re: Email will last forever

#135

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Email will last forever

#136

Post by EntiPag »

deathanatos wrote: post #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:

To me that is a good example of how email is flexible, and also simple.

It's flexible because it could support non-ascii text strings, without changing a thing.

It's simple because the protocol doesn't care what the subject says. It only cares that it's an ASCII string.

That sounds like good engineering to me, as well.

You could argue that a new version of the email protocol could be improved to do away with those hacks, but that doesn't take anything away from email's simplicity and flexibility.

Re: Email will last forever

#137

Post by EntiPag »

aianus wrote: post #120
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…

There are a lot of people for whom I have no email address, but whom I can reach at a moment's notice on Facebook. The problem with email is there is no directory, whereas on Facebook it's easy to search for "Friends of Joe named July" or what have you and get in touch with them.

> The problem with email is there is no directory

That's like saying that the problem with home addresses is that there is no directory.

Well, that's why you ask the people you wish to interact with the contacts he prefers. Business cards, writing you a quick email, phoning them,... You know, stuff that works for centuries.

What doesn't work at all is spreading your info for anyone to see and having to spend the good part of a day to fend off cold callers.

Re: Email will last forever

#138

Post by EntiPag »

cloakandswagger wrote: post #110
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" ?

This.

Those who complain about email tend to focus on arguing for solutions to problems that don't exist.

Re: Email will last forever

#139

Post by _pmf_ »

deathanatos wrote: post #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.…

You're actually confirming the point that email is fundamentally simple.

Re: Email will last forever

#140

Post by aianus »

EntiPag wrote: post #137
aianus wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a lot of people for whom I have no email address, but whom I can reach at a moment's notice on Facebook. The problem with email is there is no directory, whereas on Facebook it's easy to search for "Friends of Joe named July" or what have you and get in touch with them.

> The problem with email is there is no directory That's like saying that the problem with home addresses is that there is no directory. Well, that's why you ask the people you wish to interact with the contacts he prefers. Business cards, writing you a quick email, phoning them,... You know, stuff that works for centuries. What doesn't work at all is spreading your info for anyone to see and having to spend the good…

How do I ask them how they prefer to be contacted if I can't contact them? Imagine an old friend or acquaintance or someone you briefly met at a party. A Facebook friend request is hardly intrusive or difficult to ignore.
Post reply on HN