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Just Use Email – How to Use Email for Everything

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Re: Just Use Email – How to Use Email for Everything

#201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You really can't run your on email server nowadays though, you need to have been running one for several decades otherwise the email common email providers(gmail, outlook) will automatically just assume its spam. Also due to the way extensions added to the email protocol configuring and learning how to properly configure it so it gets accepted will be a dayjob.

This is a recurrent FUD dropping. I’ve run my own for about 15 years and it works. Occasional mails get sent to spam by Gmail, but that can happen if you use a big provider, too. Take an hour to set up DKIM, etc., and you should be OK.

> Occasional mails get sent to spam by Gmail, but that can happen if you use a big provider, too.

In fact it'll happen even when you send from gmail to gmail itself!

My deliverability from my own email server to gmail feels better than from my company account (on gmail) to gmail users.

Re: Just Use Email – How to Use Email for Everything

#202
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just switched my long running SMTP to a new IP. I've got SPF, DKIM and DMARC all dialed in. I'm not getting tagged as spam. Even when I add new domains to this host for sending - still gets through to G, Y and MS based services.

As SPF, DKIM and DMARC have become more widely implemented, is IP reputation less of a factor than it used to be in spam detection algorithms? This is just my speculation, but it seems plausible.

SPF, DKIM and DMARC are more about anti spoofing than spam prevention.

Re: Just Use Email – How to Use Email for Everything

#203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Worst of all, Gmail especially isn't great about tagging messages as spam My experience is the exact opposite of yours - I find Gmail's spam detection absolutely amazing. I get essentially zero spam in my inbox, and perhaps 4-6 false positives in the spam folder a month. >As a Gmail user, there is nothing you can do to verify that you're getting all of the legitimate mail traffic that is being sent to you. What oth…

> perhaps 4-6 false positives in the spam folder a month That's 4-6 valid messages a month the average user will never see.

little value in a single number like this, it would be better to give a percentage wrt monthly incoming mails... 4-6 seems true to me but I subscribed to way too many mailing lists and the false positives basically always come from them

Re: Just Use Email – How to Use Email for Everything

#204
post #136
post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are all problems with the protocol, considering that the protocol doesn't define how to do any of this.

Then should we not amend the protocol to define these things? Why reinvent the wheel, when we could improve it?

> Then should we not amend the protocol to define these things?

Most of the OP list of things they don't like are about client UI presentation. Inherently unrelated to the protocol itself.

I don't have any of those issues because I use a client that does the interaction and presentation exactly how I like it.

Re: Just Use Email – How to Use Email for Everything

#205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll give you an up-vote because I think a variety of different viewpoints is important, but I'm very much in the e-mail camp. My biggest reason is simply: it's the only ubiquitous, decentralized, open protocol that I can think of. I can run my own server if I want, an I can interact with anybody with an e-mail address . Sure, there was XMPP for IM, but that doesn't have wide adoption; same with other protocols.

> I can interact with anybody with an e-mail address Why is that a good thing? My email is full of spam both literal and mundane (email notification from stuff I only occasionally care about like CI or products). My Messenger account has zero noise because I can't be contacted by companies - only friends I've chosen to let in.

> > I can interact with anybody with an e-mail address

> Why is that a good thing?

Because it is useful to have a communication mechanism which is universal. It is a standard and not owned or controlled (censored) by anyone. Sure there a dozens, possibly hundreds, of fragmented chat protocols that can't talk to anything other than their own proprietary clients. But only email is universally available.

> only friends I've chosen to let in

You could configure your email client the same way and then you have the same behavior.

Re: Just Use Email – How to Use Email for Everything

#206
post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're coming from a position that email is good and it's worth configuring it to work well. But I don't particularly like email. I have zero interest in setting up aliases or filters when the problem simply doesn't exist when I use a better tool.

This doesn't make much sense to me. We're talking about functionality (being contacted by companies or automated processes) that doesn't exist at all in Messenger. You can't say it's the better tool in this case when it makes no attempt to compete with that feature.

> You can't say it's the better tool in this case when it makes no attempt to compete with that feature

Sure I can. Something isn't better just because it has more features. Easy ability to be spammed with nothing more than a widely shared string ID is not a positive feature.

Even if I used FB auth to log into all of my various internet accounts, my Messenger still won't get spammed. It's a better tool (at least for me).

My email inbox just annoys me while Messenger is so good I haven't deleted my FB account.

Re: Just Use Email – How to Use Email for Everything

#207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is my experience too: there are a couple providers that are more difficult (Verizon, iirc), but I’ve never found a personal email server much of a hassle to maintain.

I run my own email server, and have for many years. More recently, Verizon/Aol/Yahoo have been a pain in the butt for our larger email lists, even though we run a very clean operation. Still, our deliverability is, on the whole, better than through the much more expensive providers, such as Mailchimp.

I've recently given up on running my own email server and changed to postmark. The deliverability has gone up, but most importantly I spend less time managing it.

Re: Just Use Email – How to Use Email for Everything

#208
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll give you an up-vote because I think a variety of different viewpoints is important, but I'm very much in the e-mail camp. My biggest reason is simply: it's the only ubiquitous, decentralized, open protocol that I can think of. I can run my own server if I want, an I can interact with anybody with an e-mail address . Sure, there was XMPP for IM, but that doesn't have wide adoption; same with other protocols.

Signal is an open protocol and supports E2E encrypted text, voice and video.

> Signal is an open protocol and supports E2E encrypted text, voice and video.

It's open in name but proprietary. How many competing open source clients exist? Right.

Also, it's extremely limited like every other proprietary system, by the fact that the client is proprietary and thus can only do what they feel like supporting.

How do I pipe incoming signal messages to a script which will process it in ways I like? How do I programmatically send messages based on the output of other scripts? And so on.

All this is trivially easy functionality with email because it is an open protocol.

Re: Just Use Email – How to Use Email for Everything

#209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I can interact with anybody with an e-mail address Why is that a good thing? My email is full of spam both literal and mundane (email notification from stuff I only occasionally care about like CI or products). My Messenger account has zero noise because I can't be contacted by companies - only friends I've chosen to let in.

I don't feel that's a medium / tool issue, I've found it's a usage pattern issue. I have many email addresses. My most personal is known to people I like and trust. I use it the way many people use IM. I get zero zero spam in it. The emails I use for business or subscriptions or untrustworthy friends of course is spammy. I imagine if one uses any IM service to enroll into dozens of services / products / subscriptions…

> I imagine if one uses any IM service to enroll into dozens of services / products / subscriptions / websites / etc... Spam will come regardless of medium :)

Not if I use FB auth. My Messenger would remain spam free. Because ability to authn someone and ability to send someone a message were decoupled, which is just better than email.

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