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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

#261

Post by Zak »

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.

> it has not crippled itself to virtue signal E2E

It's worth considering that there's a place in the world for both a security-first IM system and a features-first IM system. While Telegram does offer optional encryption, I'm not sure I'd trust it if I wanted to hide the content of my communication from a sophisticated adversary.

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

#263

Post by mumblemumble »

anonytrary wrote: post #147
mumblemumble wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who has to interface as a client with companies that want us to use Slack Connect, I just hate it. It's one more information stream I have to monitor, by manually going and checking it. Even if work used Slack - we don't - I'd still have to manually navigate among teams to cycle through all my incoming communications. And bringing additional colleagues into the conversation on a purpose-specific, temporary…

Also it's moving from a more decentralized silo to a completely centralized one. Email continues to be a groundbreaking communication technology. I feel like one company being able to pull the plug on that might be really scary. I guess email is pretty centralized, but if you get banned by Gmail for whatever reason, you can always go run your own email and continue to work within the larger ecosystem.

There are some other interesting implications from centralizing it like that, too. For example, clients who communicate using Slack Connect are unlikely to be retaining their own independent records of the communication. This potentially puts them at a disadvantage in the event of a contract dispute. They may be unable to obtain a record of past communication without resorting to a legal discovery process, and you need to lawyer up and file a lawsuit before you can do that.

With email, on the other hand, retaining one's own copy of the communication is baked into how the mechanism works.

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

#264

Post by leephillips »

wink wrote: post #257

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 diff…

“I can't be the only one keeping 15-18 years of email history and regularly referring back and searching for stuff there?”

You are not alone.

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

#265

Post by arp242 »

Paianni wrote: post #235
arp242 wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 4-6 false positives in the spam folder a month. That seems like a lot; with FastMail I get basically 0. The last time this happened was years ago. I do get the very occasional spam, maybe 5 messages/month or so. Most of them are from marketing agencies that want to "collaborate" on my website or some such and have a spam score of 0 or close to it, and arguably isn't "spam" in the same way as "grow a bigger dick!"-s…

With Fastmail I get a lot of messages purporting to be from Fastmail threatening account termination/verification, something along those lines. Most of them are automatically sent to spam.

Interesting; I can't recall ever seeing anything like that.

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

#266

Post by eythian »

chriswarbo wrote: post #242
benhurmarcel wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It's not a heck of a claim at all, it's a pretty reasonable one.

I moved from a country that tended to use Facebook messenger and sometimes SMS (though that was fading), to one that primarily uses WhatsApp. While I already had WhatsApp installed from travelling there in the past, I almost never used it outside of travel purposes.

When I moved, everything ended up in WhatsApp. If I met someone and wanted to meet up with them another day, it was WhatsApp. I'd get added to a group because it was someone's birthday, it was WhatsApp. Many apartment buildings have a WhatsApp group to discuss building related things. It was how I told my landlord that something needed fixing. So on, so forth. Lately there are some people I talk to on Telegram, and a couple on Signal, but most of my social (and other things) organisation goes via WhatsApp. I could uninstall it, but then I'd lose a chunk of social contact.

For me, email has become mostly an avenue for notifications from companies or newsletters. The most back-and-forth I've done with it in a long time was when I was buying an apartment, a lot of documentation and organising was done through email.

As for SMS, no one uses that except perhaps one automated reminder about something every few months.

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

#267

Post by kureikain »

bradjohnson wrote: post #171
peterpost2 wrote: post #11

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.

I want to throw my hat in here because there are plenty of the "works for me" crowd. I've run a personal mail server for the last 5 or so years and I have SPF, DKIM, DMARC setup correctly, get 10/10 for mail-tester.com and get graded "not spam" for all the other spam tester sites. Spam Assassin loves me and I have a .com mail server. I can land more or less into personal emails (occasionally I get filtered into spam)…

did you send to gmail/hotmail/icloud?

hotmail and icloud are very sensitive and if IP isn't reach a certain reputation(mail volume+age) it's easiser to land on spam even SPF/DKIM/DMARC are passed. But if the recipient interact with sender(mark as non spam, send a reply) then moving forward email send from that won't be flag as spam anymore. So their spam filtering is kind of weak and they used previous interaction as a signal.

gmail, on other hand is rock solid. They have their own false positive obviously but they are rock solid in term of not relying on IP reputation(or less). They are smarte and righfully land your legitimate email on inbox even an email come from a spammy IP.

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

#268

Post by Zak »

chriswarbo wrote: post #242
benhurmarcel wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I can't speak to your life, but not having Whatsapp would result in my being left out of some conversations and activities I want to be a part of. Email or SMS could theoretically substitute with reduced functionality in most situations; Matrix could substitute with no loss of functionality. Most of the time the other people in the conversations prioritize their activity/task/goal/socializing over technical or ideological concerns about their communication tools, so getting them to change tools would be an uphill battle.

In short, unless I'm really important to a group, I have to use what they use or get left out. If I'm the most important person in every group I'm in, I'm probably in the wrong groups.

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

#269

Post by eythian »

MattJ100 wrote: post #216
opan wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

XMPP is having a resurgence with OMEMO being added to clients and some new clients (Dino) being made. However, I'm not sure if it will ever be the popular thing even among the free software options. We have Matrix now, and although most clients are lacking and it can be laggy, in 5 years it will probably be pretty good. I'm especially excited about their P2P work which sounds like it'll allow account migrations, offl…

> However, I'm not sure if it will ever be the popular thing even among the free software options. I'm one of the many people actively working on XMPP projects. Is there something in particular that makes you think this? People often talk about XMPP in the past tense on HN. It's understandable, XMPP had a peak of popularity with the adoption of Google Talk, but Google being Google and shutting that down did not end X…

I run my own XMPP server, have done for years (now just out of the fact it'll take more work to turn it off than to keep it going.)

I almost never use it to talk to people these days, and typically see one, maybe two other people logged in at any given time, when it used to be a lot more. And I think one of those is someone like me who just has a client always connected. I like what XMPP stands for, but it really does feel like it's faded in at least the "general instant messenger" sense.

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

#270

Post by teitoklien »

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?

Atleast for gmail , google has their own telegram bot (has the blue tick beside it) , just type “gmail bot” in your telegram search bar , it will have a bot with a blue tick beside it
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