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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

#251

Post by thisCtx »

slacktide wrote: post #181
thisCtx wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is just a presentation one. Email is thought of as grandpas business tool. Look at Spike for IOS. Messengers are just whitelisted users. Email providers or clients simply provide a shit interface for managing that list. To me it’s like that story about NASA spending millions on a zero gravity pen when Russian astronauts just used pencil. Someone was looking to impress people with their spam filtering code…

NASA didn’t spend a single dime developing the Fisher space pen. It was developed by the Fisher company at their own expense, in the hopes that it could be profitable. Yay, capitalism. Lead pencil tips frequently break during use. Carbon pencil lead is electrically conductive. You really do not want random pieces of electrically conductive debris floating around in your spacecraft. I’m still waiting for my TSO’d penc…

Yeah who cares though? I thought the story was apocryphal altogether.

I was using it for the concept not the specifics.

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

#252

Post by chki »

u801e wrote: post #198
chki wrote: post #24

I want to point out something from one of the articles which is so far from the truth that it somewhat undercuts the authors credibility: > For instance, if WhatsApp goes down, not only can you not send/receive messages, you won’t be able to see your old ones, and no one else on your network will be able to either. You could argue that a single email provider has the same effect, but you’d be wrong. If Gmail goes dow…

> Obviously you will be able to see all your WhatsApp messages when WhatsApp goes down. The same is true for Facebook Messenger and many other applications, because everything is saved locally. It's even possible to send WhatsApp messages while being offline which will then be delivered later on. I wonder how long this has been the case. My experience in the past is that these applications are not usable without a st…

>That said, email clients have a concept of an outbox where messages that were sent are placed until an internet connecton is established. At that point, those messages are actually sent to their recipients

This is also possible with WhatsApp. Messages can be sent while not being online and will be delivered as soon as you go online.

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

#253

Post by jameshart »

jjav wrote: post #204
darau1 wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don’t understand how your client can solve for someone else sending you top-quoted replies, or word-html-engine compatible HTML designed to work in outlook. Or eighty other people hitting reply all on the email chain you’re on. The clients other people use can behave completely differently, because the protocol leaves so many decisions up to clients.

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

#254

Post by Siira »

lhorie wrote: post #86
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.

If anything, I like email now because these days people in my circles only use it for informational purposes, which means no annoying chain messages, empty inspirational videos, Facebook conspiracies and their ilk. Also, unlike the unfiltered stream model of chat, you can organize emails into folders, delete useless ones and actually have a decent chance at finding past things via keyword search (because email subjec…

The last paragraph can be done with a good IM, such as Telegram, as it has not crippled itself to virtue signal E2E, and has functional cloud sync and search. I even forward my emails to it as it’s easier to organize them there.

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

#255

Post by warrenm »

Siira wrote: post #254
lhorie wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If anything, I like email now because these days people in my circles only use it for informational purposes, which means no annoying chain messages, empty inspirational videos, Facebook conspiracies and their ilk. Also, unlike the unfiltered stream model of chat, you can organize emails into folders, delete useless ones and actually have a decent chance at finding past things via keyword search (because email subjec…

The last paragraph can be done with a good IM, such as Telegram, as it has not crippled itself to virtue signal E2E, and has functional cloud sync and search. I even forward my emails to it as it’s easier to organize them there.

How do you forward email to Telegram?

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

#256

Post by kureikain »

warrenm wrote: post #255
Siira wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The last paragraph can be done with a good IM, such as Telegram, as it has not crippled itself to virtue signal E2E, and has functional cloud sync and search. I even forward my emails to it as it’s easier to organize them there.

How do you forward email to Telegram?

You can use a system like https://hanami.run. It support forward to Telegram.

FULL DISCLOSURE: I'm the founder

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

#257

Post by wink »

I wonder why no one ever mentions my big problem with solutions other than email: archiving and backup.

Let's play dumb here, back with POP3 if you configured it to leave the messages the server already had a copy. If you use IMAP you can still have a local copy. (I'm not saying these are valid backup strategies, but if all else fails it's still a decentral copy).

But more importantly, importing and exporting to different email clients and hosts (and even different IMAP server) is varying degrees of work, but it is doable EASILY by default. I can't be the only one keeping 15-18 years of email history and regularly referring back and searching for stuff there? (could be 5 more years but I was careless and didn't properly backup and maybe it's still on some medium...)

Even with matrix, the completely open new hip thing I don't see a good archival strategy by anyone except "somehow keeping logs" like on IRC. Maybe DB backups if it's your own instance. Not cool, but at least possible. And don't even get me started on all the other messengers here. Sometimes the backup works (via Android and maybe iOS) but not always and it's surely not open or accessible.

I'm actually not using email for a lot of private communication these days, but mostly because most of my communication to friends isn't really worth saving (except for logs in matrix/irc channels), I've never been a fan of formal emails between friends. But it's perfect to ask a random question to a semi-stranger. Surely beats Twitter DMs by a mile.

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

#258

Post by flal_ »

lhorie wrote: post #86
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.

If anything, I like email now because these days people in my circles only use it for informational purposes, which means no annoying chain messages, empty inspirational videos, Facebook conspiracies and their ilk. Also, unlike the unfiltered stream model of chat, you can organize emails into folders, delete useless ones and actually have a decent chance at finding past things via keyword search (because email subjec…

Organisation, I tend to disagree conversation/threading is fundamentally broken with email. I really liked nntp for that stuff but alas...

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

#260

Post by twobitshifter »

jonnydubowsky wrote: post #197

Evernote uses a custom email address to route whatever media, link or text you want to send, to the specific notebook you select in your email subject. This is one of my favorite uses of email. You are given a unique email address that is linked to your account and defaults to your default notebook. The formatting of the email subject lets you choose any notebook as the destination for your email. You can also create…

Remember the milk is similar for scheduling tasks and reminders called “smart add” Evernote may have got the idea there.

https://www.rememberthemilk.com/services/email/

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