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Email will last forever

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Re: Email will last forever

#151

Post by lazylizard »

wlesieutre wrote: post #99
lazylizard wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i change my phone number more often than my email address, though..

Why's that? At least within the US I can easily port a number between providers. But if I want to stop using Gmail and switch to Yahoo, I'm screwed. All of my accounts use the gmail address for my login, and most have no visible mechanism for changing it. I don't change my phone number because it's easy to keep it. I don't change my email because the address is tied to a specific provider and getting everyone to swit…

gmail and yahoo have not shut down, so i've had no reason to stop receiving mail from those accounts. if i so desire, i can keep renewing a .com domain almost indefinitely for a pittance, and run my own mail for the domain. on the other hand, every 1-2 years when my mobile phone and/or internet connection contract runs out, i reconsider my phone plans. free phone number portability is relatively new thing compared to how old gmail,yahoo mail and hotmail(or running your own mailserver) are.

Re: Email will last forever

#152

Post by TeMPOraL »

quoiquoi wrote: post #149
TeMPOraL wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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: - serv…

Relay.js is a user friendly IRC client, see http://relayjs.jit.su/ for a demo. Converse.js ( https://conversejs.org/ ) is an XMPP web client that supports XMPP conference rooms. So I'd say we already have good, nice-looking clients and there's room for improving integration on a single service to reach for the masses.

I've never heard of those tools before, thanks.

Unfortunately, Relay.js seems to not support colors in IRC, i.e. the "^C3i'm green^C" mIRC encoding. But it looks sweet though, and if one could just skip the "type the server and channel name" (i.e. embed on a community website), it would pretty much mimic the chat experience, only better :).

Anyway, so even if we have examples of pretty, somewhat simple and good enough XMPP/IRC clients, the next step is to get them to the world at large. That pretty much leaves marketing to focus on.

EDIT:

Somebody should bundle a pre-configured IRC server and a webserver hosting Relay.js into a Docker/Sandstorm (https://sandstorm.io/) container set and give it/sell it to companies as "awesome internal collaboration facilitator that improves communication and helps empower the teams to build products for the next generation of the web", or sth.

Re: Email will last forever

#153

Post by makeset »

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.…

> Watching a coworker unwilling to take the time to the read the RFC try to write a parser for this… is a very special hell.

I had to do this once (some fifteen years ago, when finding a bulletproof library wasn't necessarily an easier task) and after reading the RFC very carefully, it still wasn't exactly a cakewalk.

Re: Email will last forever

#154

Post by innguest »

mrb wrote: post #146
innguest wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seconded. This is a great idea, please submit it here for discussion.

Alright, I submitted it again: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8263848 I had submitted it twice before, but it got few upvotes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8157645 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8030337 It is hard to find a short title that succinctly describes the concept. ufmace: I think writing a browser extension that configures filters + auto-responders on some popular webmails (Gmail, Ho…

Upvoted and commented. Thanks for thinking good ideas.

Re: Email will last forever

#155

Post by arethuza »

mrb wrote: post #147
arethuza wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Put "autoresponder:online_identity" in the subject, you will get a reply. I do like the blank email + HATEOAS idea.

Ah yes - I was being a bit thick and I hadn't read your blog post at that point.

NB I left a comment there but it didn't format correctly. What I suggested was having the subject line be similar to the first line of an HTTP request i.e.

Re: Email will last forever

#156

Post by deathanatos »

EntiPag wrote: post #136
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,…

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

I fail to see how a complex encoding is "simple". (Maybe I should mention that there are complex rules about where that encoding can appear, and there's two variants of it)

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

No, clients had to be upgraded to support it.

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

Well, sure; why would the protocol care about it? But at some point you're encoding the email for delivery (say, you're a web service) or you're an email client trying to display it. At that point, its a deceptively simple not-ASCII string.

> but that doesn't take anything away from email's simplicity

I'm arguing that you have a twisted definition of "simple".

Re: Email will last forever

#157

Post by dredmorbius »

aianus wrote: post #140
EntiPag wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

FOAF. If you can't reach someone directly, find someone who might be able to. Through their work, friends, organizations, etc. Much of that is fairly easy to work out.

It's how people used to get by. It's called legwork.

Re: Email will last forever

#158

Post by dredmorbius »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #91
afterburner wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assume the only reason people boldly claim they will kill email is so they can get VCs excited about their disrupt strategy. It's always about taking out an entire existing industry or system (see Uber).

I think that Maciej Cegłowski got it right in his talk [0] with the concept of investor storytime . To quote: "Recall that advertising is when someone pays you to tell your users they'll be happy if they buy a product or service. Yahoo is an example of a company that runs on advertising. Gawker is a company that runs on advertising. Investor storytime is when someone pays you to tell them how rich they'll get when yo…

I've re-read that a few times (and created my own local copy with some simplified and fixed HTML -- it's missing a section heading and has a slew of un-closed anchors). My opinion of it continues to climb. It's well up my list as one of the ten best recently written essays I've read this year. Maciej posts here as "idlewords".

"Investor storytime" is a pretty good insight as well.

Re: Email will last forever

#159

Post by ldng »

AndrewDucker wrote: post #109

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.

Exactly. Email is so resilient because it's an open decentralized protocol. Every other alternatives I've seen is closed and/or centralized in a way or another. No wonder they fail.
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