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

161–169 of 169 posts

Re: Email will last forever

#161

Post by hobarrera »

Yardlink wrote: post #119
danielweber wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like to say "Email: it's good enough." Spam is horrible, but filtering seems to work well enough these days. (Which makes me wonder why people are still spamming, but that's a separate post about game theory.)

Filtering doesn't work well enough at all. The fact that you can't be sure if your email was received is a problem. Many companies have over-aggressive spam filters and the recipients sometimes never even see the emails in their spam box - they're either bounced or black-holed. Often this is done by blacklisting IP addresses. When that IP happens to be the mail server of a service provider with many customers, when o…

Actually, [spamd](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spamd) configured to [blacklist-only](http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/man.cgi/OpenBSD-current/man8/...) works quite awesomely. I reduced my spam volume from several dozens a day to no more than a pair a week. I haven't had any loss in legitimate email, or anyone complaining about inapropiate bounces.

I'm actually surprised, since I actually expected more spam to get through.

Re: Email will last forever

#162

Post by hobarrera »

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,…

IRC is for multi-user on-topic chats (eg: support, help channels, or specific topics, etc), while XMPP is more for personal IM. Plus, XMPP is open, standard, and decentralized.

Re: Email will last forever

#163

Post by hobarrera »

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.

Business cards? Writing down their address? Smartphones? Bluetooth? Etc.

Re: Email will last forever

#164

Post by hobarrera »

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…

I like the proposal, but rather than using special (unfriendly) subjects, I'd use custom email headers. eg: X-Autorespond: name, age, location

Why? So that clients that do not support this protocol will display a normal email to the end-user, instead of something not-so-friendly.

This also means that the body can be free-formed text explaining to the user what this message represents, and how to support this protocol.

Re: Email will last forever

#165

Post by hobarrera »

rakoo wrote: post #17
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…

It strikes me that this is all available with XMPP, which also has user@domain address; If we build the correct tools, XMPP can very well supplant SMTP. http://sat.goffi.org/features.html

Indeed, if XMPP gained enough popularity, it would solve this problem, since it already implements several of these things (personal information, location, etc), AND is extensible.

Re: Email will last forever

#166

Post by grinich »

MetaCosm wrote: post #141
EntiPag wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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,…

Email is simple the way a plane is simple. As long as you don't see all the moving parts, and get to go along for the ride, it just seems like a magical flying tube! I spent about 18 months on an email client project (was already 3 years in when I joined the team). I can tell you email is insane... so much more broken than you would expect (on all sides). There is a reason many clients do "gmail" instead of "email".…

That's why we built Inbox. :)

https://www.inboxapp.com/

In short, the Inbox API is a translation layer between IMAP's eccentricities and modern JSON REST endpoints. Plus it's open source free software.

Re: Email will last forever

#167

Post by MetaCosm »

grinich wrote: post #166
MetaCosm wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Email is simple the way a plane is simple. As long as you don't see all the moving parts, and get to go along for the ride, it just seems like a magical flying tube! I spent about 18 months on an email client project (was already 3 years in when I joined the team). I can tell you email is insane... so much more broken than you would expect (on all sides). There is a reason many clients do "gmail" instead of "email".…

That's why we built Inbox. :) https://www.inboxapp.com/ In short, the Inbox API is a translation layer between IMAP's eccentricities and modern JSON REST endpoints. Plus it's open source free software.

Wow, how long have you guys existed? I am shocked I didn't know about this product. That is IMHO, EXACTLY the product that has needed to be built for awhile. Get all those eccentricities into one library that provides a clean interface.

Re: Email will last forever

#168

Post by grinich »

MetaCosm wrote: post #167
grinich wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's why we built Inbox. :) https://www.inboxapp.com/ In short, the Inbox API is a translation layer between IMAP's eccentricities and modern JSON REST endpoints. Plus it's open source free software.

Wow, how long have you guys existed? I am shocked I didn't know about this product. That is IMHO, EXACTLY the product that has needed to be built for awhile. Get all those eccentricities into one library that provides a clean interface.

We announced this a couple of months ago, though the company has been around for a while. We're also just quieter than most startups. Less blogging and talk, more code. :)

Re: Email will last forever

#169

Post by waynesilby »

grinich wrote: post #166
MetaCosm wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Email is simple the way a plane is simple. As long as you don't see all the moving parts, and get to go along for the ride, it just seems like a magical flying tube! I spent about 18 months on an email client project (was already 3 years in when I joined the team). I can tell you email is insane... so much more broken than you would expect (on all sides). There is a reason many clients do "gmail" instead of "email".…

That's why we built Inbox. :) https://www.inboxapp.com/ In short, the Inbox API is a translation layer between IMAP's eccentricities and modern JSON REST endpoints. Plus it's open source free software.

Looks interesting. IMAP is a pain! We spent months trying to get really simple stuff working for a mail client we're building (http://www.sortd.com). Actually, to be accurate it runs inside Gmail because it's more of a way to manage email rather than a standalone client, but we still need to connect to the mailbox itself via IMAP. Started using context.io, which was useful, but they went kind of wayward from their original vision.

What about performance though? Things like search are almost just not viable with IMAP - WAY too slow - we find ourselves having to hack the Gmail DOM to do things we should be able to do directly via the mailbox.

Seems to me that IMAP needs to be updated or replaced. What do you think of the new Gmail API?

Post reply on HN