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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

#241

Post by kitkat_new »

MattJ100 wrote: post #237
kitkat_new wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Check out Google Trends with XMPP

Can that predict the future? ;) I feel it's right that a protocol doesn't need to be in the general consciousness. See the even worse Google trend for SMTP, for example, despite email still being considered a growing network. I wrote a bit about protocols being for developers and not users at https://snikket.org/blog/products-vs-protocols/

No, it can't, but it is a good indicator.

Why didn't you look up Email instead of SMTP? It's not like you want to measure XMPP based on a XEP.

Protocols might not be for (end)users, but the underlying concept is - depending on what you want to build: A product or an open standard.

The protocol is important to users in the sense of devs.

An open standard requires users and devs.

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

#242

Post by chriswarbo »

benhurmarcel wrote: post #218
mjgs wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your points are even more valid when you start to move to different counties. You quickly realise that people in other countries often don’t use the apps you are using, in fact you most likely won’t have heard of the apps they are using. But “everyone is using X” they will tell you, but you’ll have no way to know for sure. Are you really going to install every piece of software people say to install? At least with em…

When you move to a new country that has a dominant messaging app, you can't avoid installing it without making your life a lot more difficult. And moving already makes your life difficult enough.

That's a heck of a claim.

Could you give an example of such a "messaging app"? I don't have any "messaging apps"; although I do have a 'phone which supports SMS (I assume it supports email too, although I don't know how comfortable email would be without a physical keyboard).

Do you have examples in mind about how my life might be "a lot more difficult" than if I installed the sorts of software you allude to?

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

#243

Post by mjgs »

benhurmarcel wrote: post #239
mjgs wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real question though is how you determine the “dominant app”, that’s really not that obvious, especially when you don’t speak the local language. Long term you might be right, installing an app would be beneficial, but in the short term it’s a lot safer to just use email.

I think in most cases it's fairly obvious. I moved to a country that mainly use Whatsapp, and you can't miss it. People will tell you that they "Whatsapp" you, they ask for your "Whatsapp", your bank advertises customer support on Whatsapp, your local barber has the Whatsapp logo on his door, your colleagues want to add you to their Whatsapp group, your landlord sends the bills on Whatsapp, ads in the metro have the…

That sounds awesome. In many of the places I’ve been I couldn’t read any of the signage, it’s often not even obvious where the word boundaries are, it just looks like squiggles to me. And the apps people tell you by word of mouth, I often had never heard of. I just decided to stick with email. Boring, perhaps old fashioned, but safe.

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

#244

Post by raspyberr »

paxys wrote: post #3

I'm on the exact opposite end of the spectrum. I haven't used email outside of work for many years now, and don't miss it one bit. And even at work most communication now happens on Slack. The digital world has evolved since 1997, and email simply hasn't kept up. I skimmed a couple articles on the blog and my biggest problem with it is that the author is making a social rather than technological argument (which are a…

Slack will not be around in 10/20 years. Email will be. I think the only way email hasn't "evolved" is it doesn't have any good built in encryption.

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

#245

Post by irowe »

ticviking wrote: post #102
nonameiguess wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Old-school snail mail and voice telephony are just as open, distributed, and ubiquitous. The delivery channel providers are centralized, but that is just as true of email. Hosting your own server means nothing without an ISP. That said, I think all three methods of communication feel obsolete and useless to me for the same reason, they're drowned out by marketing chatter. The one nice effect of the recent real estate…

I really want a way to take an old eve online thing of charging people who aren't a contact for the ability to ensure delivery. If I have a business relationship with someone I'll add them to my contact list. I assume they can do the same. Otherwise gimme see BAT or something for the spam

For a brief moment, there was a service (Earn.com/21.co) that did this. It was a company that had previously made a SoC mining rig for crypto and the pivoted to this thing where people would pay you to open their messages. Eventually it was overrun by spam messages from scammy crypto ICOs and there were conditions on payouts where you had to sign up for an external email list or register for an airdrop. I think they were bought and shut down by Coinbase.

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

#246

Post by account42 »

megous wrote: post #94
throwawayboise wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why would it be less of a factor? These things don't prevent spam. I can create a proper mail server with all these and send billion messages from it wherever I like. These technologies prevent various kinds of forgeries. Quick look at my archive, of 37k spams only 7k fails SPF. (I accept all email no matter what.) So it's some signal, but not nearly enough.

> These technologies prevent various kinds of forgeries.

Preventing forgeries is what allows the trust to be based on the domain/address rather than the IP.

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

#247

Post by swiley »

egypturnash wrote: post #161
Qwertious wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, invisible edits are a UI problem that people really ought to solve - highlight (or in some way indicate with a color change or such) that something has been edited (and specifically, what has changed vs what is unedited in the comment). Or perhaps restrict editing, e.g. instead of being able to delete text, you can only strike through+slightly shrink+grey out text.

I hope you relly rely lik typos siting there forever.

I'd take typos over that any day.

Plus they don't sit there "forever" because the archiving is usually crap.

Also it's IM. If you're going to obsess over grammar and spelling maybe just use email.

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

#248

Post by hansor »

na85 wrote: post #148
paxys wrote: post #3

I'm on the exact opposite end of the spectrum. I haven't used email outside of work for many years now, and don't miss it one bit. And even at work most communication now happens on Slack. The digital world has evolved since 1997, and email simply hasn't kept up. I skimmed a couple articles on the blog and my biggest problem with it is that the author is making a social rather than technological argument (which are a…

>The digital world has evolved since 1997, and email simply hasn't kept up. Email has its warts I'll give you that, but since 1997 the world has gotten objectively worse in terms of open, distributed messenging. Everything is a fucking walled garden controlled by some data-harvesting megacorp these days. I like email because I can roll my own server (and have done so) or I can choose to trust one of several commercia…

Amen

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

#249

Post by selfhoster11 »

peterpost2 wrote: post #11
daveslash wrote: post #7

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.

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.

Not true. With some effort, it's possible to set up a pre-made email server script like Mail-in-a-Box or Mailcow and make sure its reputation is clean enough to send and receive email from the big providers like Outlook, Gmail and Yahoo.

It's much easier these days. The ecosystem has gotten more complicated, but the community has put in a lot of effort into automating that complexity away.

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

#250

Post by selfhoster11 »

swiley wrote: post #91
paxys wrote: post #3

I'm on the exact opposite end of the spectrum. I haven't used email outside of work for many years now, and don't miss it one bit. And even at work most communication now happens on Slack. The digital world has evolved since 1997, and email simply hasn't kept up. I skimmed a couple articles on the blog and my biggest problem with it is that the author is making a social rather than technological argument (which are a…

>The digital world has evolved since 1997, and email simply hasn't kept up. Evolved beyond instant text messages? because that's all email is. Honestly I hate IM tools. The threading is crap, the search is crap, the startup time is crap. there's no understanding of who can read what or what the edit history of messages are (I've been in IMs with people who will edit their messages days later to gasslight you, that al…

Yup. Slack sucks for work.

- a single window to do stuff with (so you can't really switch between two channels very easily)

- no ability to mark and unmark individual actionable messages as read

- slow as molasses client that sometimes takes seconds to react with high system load (no chance to have your own client)

- inability to integrate with self-developed tools unless you're blessed with an application token

- inability to set up advanced/granular filtering

- no user macros support beyond some primitive workflow automations

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