Just Use Email – How to Use Email for Everything • Hacker News Board

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

#271

Post by twobitshifter » Wed, May 12, 2021, 2:27 PM UTC

cgrealy wrote: post #189

or.... use the appropriate medium/channel/whatever for what ever it is you're doing. My family has a group whatsapp chat. It's mostly for sending pics of my nieces and nephews and random conversations. Email would be terrible for that. Ditto, the literally decade old skype chat I've with friends. You can cook a meal with a campfire. If you put enough effort into it, you might even get a better result than cooking in…

what about email is terrible for that? Email can do everything WhatsApp can, look at these 2 email clients:

https://www.spikenow.com/ https://delta.chat/en/

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

#272

Post by ryandrake » Wed, May 12, 2021, 2:33 PM UTC

MereInterest wrote: post #167

ryandrake wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If any of us are ever going to convince friends and family to leave proprietary platforms I’ve kind of thrown in the towel on this fight. People are going to use what they like. For me, it’s E-mail. My friends and family know how to get in touch with me if they need to: using E-mail. If they want to text each other or WhatsApp each other or Snapchat each other or whatever it is they do, they can go right ahead: it…

> If they want to text each other or WhatsApp each other or Snapchat each other or whatever it is they do, they can go right ahead: it doesn’t affect me. So when Facebook slurps up your email address by virtue of your friends using WhatsApp, that doesn't affect you?

Not really, because I don't use Facebook. I'm avoiding the bulk of the harm from Facebook (e.g. the dopamine spikes, wasted time I'll never get back, feed addiction, emotional manipulation/experiments, etc.) by simply not using it. Until I start getting ads from them even off of Facebook properties, I don't really care what they think they know about me.

Sure, they now have my E-mail address. I guess that sucks, but it was due to some other idiot's lack of OpSec, and there is nothing I can do about it. I'm not going to convince 2,000 people to stop using Facebook, let alone 2 million or 2 billion.

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

#273

Post by tomjen3 » Wed, May 12, 2021, 2:41 PM UTC

u801e wrote: post #193

tomjen3 wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thats funny, because I hate facebook message threads because it is effectively impossible to have a conversation there because everything overlaps and I can't take the time to write something clear and in multiple paragraphs. Honestly at this point I wonder if the right solution is a private usenet server: just like email it is not instant but async, unlike email it is spilt into topics better and you can have new pe…

> I hate facebook message threads because it is effectively impossible to have a conversation there because everything overlaps and I can't take the time to write something clear and in multiple paragraphs. I've actually adopted some email like conventions when participating in Facebook comment threads. When I click the reply button, it will fill in the name of the author of the comment I'm replying to. I then will a…

I guess you are right on that one, my thoughts were drifting more towards a corporate environment.

I also love your Facebook maners, but, unfortunately I haven't met anybody who does that.

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

#274

Post by Balgair » Wed, May 12, 2021, 2:43 PM UTC

Aside:

I'm reminded of this law:

Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can. - jwz's Law of Software Envelopment

How true it is even years later

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

#275

Post by Biganon » Wed, May 12, 2021, 2:44 PM UTC

thaumaturgy wrote: post #9

Gmail alone currently handles over 50% of US email traffic, with Microsoft and a handful of other service providers taking up a good chunk of the other half. These large providers all use internal blacklists and filtering rules, which cannot be queried, and no support is available if you get blackholed. Worst of all, Gmail especially isn't great about tagging messages as spam; a good chunk of messages sent from outsi…

This is an extremely important point, and I find it weird to see so few people mentioning it.

I run my own mail server and have been for years. My e-mails use SPF, DKIM, DMARC, I have a reverse DNS record set up, a score of 100/100 on mail-tester.com... yet Microsoft refuses to accept my emails. They are sent to the spam folder of my recipients.

I tried contacting their support about it, I'll let you guess how well it went. A man from a warm country told me to join some sort of Microsoft partner program, for which I would have to pay.

This is a disgrace. E-mail is behind closed gates now, because of bullies such as Microsoft.

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

#276

Post by twobitshifter » Wed, May 12, 2021, 3:01 PM UTC

approxim8ion wrote: post #196

I love email, it's great for long letters and so. That said, I have trouble (further) adopting and especially recommending a fundamentally insecure and flawed medium like email in 2021 when clearly technically superior channels of communication exist. Signal, Matrix etc are not 1:1 replacements for email at all, but when it comes down to it, they are simpler and more secure.

If you go back to the beginning of email you’ll see it was the simplest invention possible. you@domain.com was just your user account on an actual Unix computer. Mail messages were appended to a text file in a folder for each user. Somebody could get your IP address/email if they had your machine in their host file, but at that time you didn’t have to worry about spam, viruses, or eavesdropping. You didn’t even need POP or IMAP, since messages were sent directly to the machine that you had access to. This is still possible, but nobody has a static IP or hosts their own mail server.

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

#277

Post by gcells » Wed, May 12, 2021, 3:02 PM UTC

Like most people, I use both. Email however has better tooling IMO around high volumes. IM starts becoming a problem once you reach volumes of ~2K messages per day.

As soon as you have few hundred channels or groups in non business oriented messengers like whatsapp, missing critical/important messages cannot be avoided. Skipping certain lists/groups, training your spam filter etc is at least available when you use email.

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

#278

Post by vlunkr » Wed, May 12, 2021, 3:05 PM UTC

solidasparagus wrote: post #206

vlunkr wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Something isn't better just because it has more features

You're right, but being able to be spammed with a string ID absolutely is a positive feature. While your inbox may annoy you, I'm sure you also use to sign up for services, get marketing info that you're interested in, get billing notifications, etc. Could Messenger do all that? Yeah potentially, but now you've just moved the spam problem into Messenger. That's why I'm saying Messenger isn't the better tool because it doesn't have spam, it doesn't have spam because it lacks the features that introduce spam.

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

#279

Post by packetlost » Wed, May 12, 2021, 3:14 PM UTC

Zak wrote: post #261

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.

> 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.

If you're trying to hide your communications from state-level actors, there are better options than a consumer messaging platform

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

#280

Post by Siira » Wed, May 12, 2021, 3:22 PM UTC

teitoklien wrote: post #270

warrenm wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I also use this, but it's not gotten any updates since it was introduced. I would like to rewrite a bot from scratch, but the Gmail bot's initial offering is still good enough that I don't have the motivation.

The worst problem it has is the lack of multi-account support. The reply functionality is also a bit buggy. I generally only use it as a read-only client.