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Inside continues to bet on email, the “largest social network”

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Re: Inside continues to bet on email, the “largest social network”

#111

Post by majewsky »

jon-wood wrote: post #110
jameslk wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm surprised we haven't seen the mIRC's of email yet (or maybe there have but that just didn't work?). mIRC was a popular client for IRC on Windows. It extended IRC with features such as color and formatting in your messages, which was beyond the protocol. A feature like that worked just fine because the color codes were mostly invisible to those who weren't using a client that supported them. In this way, mIRC and…

Multipart emails have been doing this for as long as I can remember - emails are delivered with an HTML part and a plain text on for compatibility with clients that don't support it. There's no reason you couldn't release your new mail client with text/mailml support, but you'll have to get people to use it.

> with text/mailml support

Also, please use text/markdown instead of inventing yet another weird markup. Bonus points if it's CommonMark (which is much more strictly defined and thus guaranteed to look the same across renderers).

Re: Inside continues to bet on email, the “largest social network”

#112

Post by rakoo »

pmlnr wrote: post #52

"[...] People seem to hate email for the same reasons they once loved it. Email's underlying triumph, the quality that made it revolutionary, was that you could instantly deliver a written message to someone even if they weren't there to receive it. [...] Email is neutral, meaning that anyone can email anyone else with an email address. If you have a person's email address, your message will be delivered no matter wh…

> mastodon is a bad example, activityfeeds or linked data are good ones

mastodon uses OStatus underneath, which is an set of open protocols, pioneered by StatusNet.

Re: Inside continues to bet on email, the “largest social network”

#113

Post by mseebach »

alexmat wrote: post #70
gramakri wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Email is a set of protocol and thus it _will_ outlive any centalised, closed, walled garden. What stops email going the way of XMPP?

What happened to XMPP? Not trying to be snarky, I still use it. Is there an issue I should be aware of?

XMPP just wasn't a very good fit for the problem we needed it to solve. It is a verbose, XML-based protocol (reflecting the time in which it was conceived), and it's a mess of extensions (possibly the designers getting carried away with the possibilities of XML) instead of focusing on solving a single core problem well -- this works against the ideal of federation: what happens when you send a message taking advantage of some extension to a user that doesn't support it, or to a user that does, but through an intermediate that doesn't?

Also, it doesn't tackle spam. The concept that anyone can email anyone would probably have killed email, had it not been largely (if by no means completely) solved -- ironically, this was achieved by all but doing away with federation (email now being a oligopoly of Google, Microsoft and a few more, more or less dictating who gets to send email to whom). Finally, what I suspect was the final nail in the coffin, XMPP didn't play well with mobile (not to worry, an extension, XEP-0286, currently in state "experimental" first published in 2010 is fixing that).

EDIT: I should clarify: XMPP works quite well for private (non-federated) IM-setups. I offer this as an explanation of why XMPP isn't the interoperable email of IM across the Internet, and we instead see Facebook/WhatsApp/Slack/million other incompatible things dominating the space.

Re: Inside continues to bet on email, the “largest social network”

#114

Post by wowtip »

a3_nm wrote: post #104
gramakri wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Email is a set of protocol and thus it _will_ outlive any centalised, closed, walled garden. What stops email going the way of XMPP?

I think the situation is a bit different. While some companies have used XMPP for chat, I don't recall that any had advertised prominently the notion that you could use their chat system to talk to people on a different network. This was something that geeks could do (and did), but was never a selling point for the vast majority of users. Compare this to email, where every user expects their email client to be able t…

It is a sad sign of the times, you can no longer (easily) set up an email server of your own and expect emails to be delivered to everyone.

Managing O365 for a few domains I quite frequently see mail from not-so-small companies with their own servers getting stuck in MS Quarantine filtering.

Re: Inside continues to bet on email, the “largest social network”

#115

Post by wwn_se »

mattkrause wrote: post #54
spyhi wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been thinking about this a lot lately--I'd really love in-email applications, especially with Web Assembly working its way into viability. Being able to act on stuff without leaving my inbox would be fantastic. Unfortunately, lots of potential for abuse and also the fact that email protocol is so entrenched.

So...Lotus Notes?

no, no, please dont hurt me, please.............

Re: Inside continues to bet on email, the “largest social network”

#116

Post by [deleted] »

majewsky wrote: post #111
jon-wood wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Multipart emails have been doing this for as long as I can remember - emails are delivered with an HTML part and a plain text on for compatibility with clients that don't support it. There's no reason you couldn't release your new mail client with text/mailml support, but you'll have to get people to use it.

> with text/mailml support Also, please use text/markdown instead of inventing yet another weird markup. Bonus points if it's CommonMark (which is much more strictly defined and thus guaranteed to look the same across renderers).

[deleted]

Re: Inside continues to bet on email, the “largest social network”

#117

Post by pram »

mseebach wrote: post #113
alexmat wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What happened to XMPP? Not trying to be snarky, I still use it. Is there an issue I should be aware of?

XMPP just wasn't a very good fit for the problem we needed it to solve. It is a verbose, XML-based protocol (reflecting the time in which it was conceived), and it's a mess of extensions (possibly the designers getting carried away with the possibilities of XML) instead of focusing on solving a single core problem well -- this works against the ideal of federation: what happens when you send a message taking advantag…

XMPP also had very weird things like BOSH which from my experience never had a solid implementation.

Re: Inside continues to bet on email, the “largest social network”

#118

Post by Flimm »

Spivak wrote: post #35
JetSpiegel wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That and HTML email that doesn't have a text/plain alternative. Even the braindead conversion contain some nuggets of information.

If you want your email to look the same on all clients text/plain is the way to go.

That's not true. Plain text is usually hard wrapped with newlines, which leads to awful experiences on small screens.

Re: Inside continues to bet on email, the “largest social network”

#119

Post by Freak_NL »

majewsky wrote: post #111
jon-wood wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Multipart emails have been doing this for as long as I can remember - emails are delivered with an HTML part and a plain text on for compatibility with clients that don't support it. There's no reason you couldn't release your new mail client with text/mailml support, but you'll have to get people to use it.

> with text/mailml support Also, please use text/markdown instead of inventing yet another weird markup. Bonus points if it's CommonMark (which is much more strictly defined and thus guaranteed to look the same across renderers).

I've wondered about the viability of text/markdown for email from time to time. It would make a very nice sensible default: the sender can write an email with a hierarchy of headers, quoting (exactly the same way done now with text/plain and supported by most clients), emphasis, hyperlinks, lists, etc., all without depriving the receiver of their preferred formatting and font settings. Also, not nearly as verbose as HTML (and not nearly as much crap).

Re: Inside continues to bet on email, the “largest social network”

#120

Post by squiggy22 »

RandomInteger4 wrote: post #4

This is tangential, but needs to be stated: What I've learned from email newletters is that Microsoft Outlook needs to die a swift and horrible death. There is absolutely no good reason why we should have to create email newsletters that require tables for layout.

Web based mail clients are nearly as bad with how much CSS etc. they strip out. Gmail is particularly aggressive. Yes Outlook is terrible, but there's plenty of security conscious developers throwing baby out with bathwater when it comes to email design .
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