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It is time to ban email

shkspr.mobi

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Re: It is time to ban email

#41

Post by TZubiri »

im3w1l wrote: post #31
edent wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> when a piece of technology has been stable for 40 years, and there is a fuck up, you can't reaally blame it on the tech. After 40 years of the same fuck up - what should you blame?

Maybe deciding who should have access to what information is just an intrinsic difficulty of the problem space? In this day and age, maybe you could have an LLM read the email and ask for confirmation for CC.

>control who gets that information

With you so far yes

>giving read access to an cloud llm

We are doomed

Re: It is time to ban email

#42

Post by TZubiri »

Spivak wrote: post #32
TZubiri wrote: post #18

And replace it with.... Email is a neutral protocol, in a natural monopoly, very hard to replace unless you want to choose a state sanctioned monopoly like you would to Facebook's Whatsapp or Apple's messenger. This sounds like fatalistic throwing the baby with the bath water, I know that there's a fine line between operator's error and bad system design, but when a piece of technology has been stable for 40 years, a…

You replace it with literally any chat application made in the last 30 years. Hell even Microsoft Lync didn't have this problem. You don't even have to replace the email system behind the curtain, just make it work like group chats. People seem to get "start a group chat" vs "send a message to each person individually." Why we even still bother with the letters and mailboxes metaphor is beyond me. It implies a level…

>replace it with literally any chat application made in the last 30 years. Hell even Microsoft Lync didn't have this problem.

Ah yes, let me just ask 1000 people to install microsoft lync before they can see my message

Re: It is time to ban email

#43

Post by TZubiri »

Spivak wrote: post #32
TZubiri wrote: post #18

And replace it with.... Email is a neutral protocol, in a natural monopoly, very hard to replace unless you want to choose a state sanctioned monopoly like you would to Facebook's Whatsapp or Apple's messenger. This sounds like fatalistic throwing the baby with the bath water, I know that there's a fine line between operator's error and bad system design, but when a piece of technology has been stable for 40 years, a…

You replace it with literally any chat application made in the last 30 years. Hell even Microsoft Lync didn't have this problem. You don't even have to replace the email system behind the curtain, just make it work like group chats. People seem to get "start a group chat" vs "send a message to each person individually." Why we even still bother with the letters and mailboxes metaphor is beyond me. It implies a level…

>"Why we even still bother with the letters and mailboxes metaphor is beyond me"

Well for one it enables us to apply a whole lot of law and case law without reinventing the wheel.

Mail contents enjoy a lot of privacy privileges, while headers do not as they are used for routing purposes.

>Just send the file, what does "attaching"

Ah yes just send the file, how didn't we think of this sooner, you must publish your findings with the engineering community, pronto open an rfc

Re: It is time to ban email

#44

Post by stronglikedan »

Spivak wrote: post #32
TZubiri wrote: post #18

And replace it with.... Email is a neutral protocol, in a natural monopoly, very hard to replace unless you want to choose a state sanctioned monopoly like you would to Facebook's Whatsapp or Apple's messenger. This sounds like fatalistic throwing the baby with the bath water, I know that there's a fine line between operator's error and bad system design, but when a piece of technology has been stable for 40 years, a…

You replace it with literally any chat application made in the last 30 years. Hell even Microsoft Lync didn't have this problem. You don't even have to replace the email system behind the curtain, just make it work like group chats. People seem to get "start a group chat" vs "send a message to each person individually." Why we even still bother with the letters and mailboxes metaphor is beyond me. It implies a level…

> You replace it with literally any chat application made in the last 30 years.

And that's how you lose me. Async communication is best for 99% of the time. Sending me an email invite to a meeting covers the 1% where synchronous is better. I'm not using an instant-interruption (chat) service, and I don't get meeting invites any other way than email.

Upon further reflection, a world without email would be nice and quiet, for me at least. Maybe that's not so bad.

Re: It is time to ban email

#45

Post by quesera »

edent wrote: post #24
kylehotchkiss wrote: post #13

Email is one of the best communication protocols humanity has ever invented. Do you want to give Meta the keys to all your communications? Or Slack, who sends them off to AI training models?

Google and Microsoft probably already have the keys to 90%+ of all email comms. They probably already use them to train AI. It is well known that the Enron emails were used to train early AIs * https://qz.com/work/1546565/the-emails-that-brought-down-enr... * https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~enron/ But, if it is one of the best comms protocols, why then do people flock to WhatsApp, Slack, and other non-email products?

> why then do people flock to

UI and delivery latency.

I think both are fixable but the latter is more difficult.

Re: It is time to ban email

#46

Post by [deleted] »

TZubiri wrote: post #42
Spivak wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You replace it with literally any chat application made in the last 30 years. Hell even Microsoft Lync didn't have this problem. You don't even have to replace the email system behind the curtain, just make it work like group chats. People seem to get "start a group chat" vs "send a message to each person individually." Why we even still bother with the letters and mailboxes metaphor is beyond me. It implies a level…

>replace it with literally any chat application made in the last 30 years. Hell even Microsoft Lync didn't have this problem. Ah yes, let me just ask 1000 people to install microsoft lync before they can see my message

[deleted]

Re: It is time to ban email

#47

Post by ranger207 »

Email's a unique protocol because it's structured fundamentally differently than every other messaging protocol/app. It's focused on sending documents around, which are individual and have no external context. This is unlike most messaging apps which are chat focused: the base unit of interaction is the chat thread/channel/DM/whatever, not the individual chat message. Email's not really good for chat. You can have replies and stuff, and you can have threads, but because each email is independent and threads are made up of ad hoc links between messages, if one message forgets to include threading or reply metadata then the thread is broken. Modern messaging apps have a first-class concept of a thread or channel that messages belong to, which makes breaking conversations much more difficult. At the same time though, not everything needs to be a conversation. If I get a weekly newsletter, I think of it more as an individual document than a message in a conversation. If Amazon tells me my order is shipped, it doesn't really have any relation with the other times they've told me an order has shipped, so it doesn't really belong in the same thread of conversation

So many articles I read about "email needs to go" don't understand that messaging apps/protocols are conversation-based, while email is document-based, and that the latter model does have its benefits and should be retained. Yes, whatever replaces email needs to be federated and open instead of closed off like Discord or Twitter or whatever, but that's in addition to the fact that it needs to be document-based as well

Re: It is time to ban email

#48

Post by quesera »

macchi wrote: post #36

I for one am in favor of leaving the protocol alone and using Delta Chat: https://delta.chat/en/

You're a new user, and you've made two comments on this story, adding no context, but promoting the same service.

Is this a legit recommendation? Are you shilling? Are you associated? Help us out.

Re: It is time to ban email

#49

Post by quesera »

ranger207 wrote: post #47

Email's a unique protocol because it's structured fundamentally differently than every other messaging protocol/app. It's focused on sending documents around, which are individual and have no external context. This is unlike most messaging apps which are chat focused: the base unit of interaction is the chat thread/channel/DM/whatever, not the individual chat message. Email's not really good for chat. You can have re…

I don't agree that there's a fundamental difference between conversation-based and document-based.

Or more correctly, I would argue that both email and messaging protocols are both, and it's just a matter of UI differences.

... and the pesky realities of mail spools and spam filtering and federation and open addressability, etc.

Re: It is time to ban email

#50

Post by davidbanham »

Spivak wrote: post #32
TZubiri wrote: post #18

And replace it with.... Email is a neutral protocol, in a natural monopoly, very hard to replace unless you want to choose a state sanctioned monopoly like you would to Facebook's Whatsapp or Apple's messenger. This sounds like fatalistic throwing the baby with the bath water, I know that there's a fine line between operator's error and bad system design, but when a piece of technology has been stable for 40 years, a…

You replace it with literally any chat application made in the last 30 years. Hell even Microsoft Lync didn't have this problem. You don't even have to replace the email system behind the curtain, just make it work like group chats. People seem to get "start a group chat" vs "send a message to each person individually." Why we even still bother with the letters and mailboxes metaphor is beyond me. It implies a level…

> People seem to get "start a group chat" vs "send a message to each person individually."

The WhatsApp groups for my kids school classes, bands and sports teams beg to differ.

Communities seems like a legitimately useful feature to manage this. Absolutely nobody uses it because that would require an iota more forethought than the bare minimum.

The difference with email here is that if these were email groups I have access to sophisticated tools to manage that noise on /my end/. With WhatsApp I’m beholden to the tools that Meta deign to provide, then to the subset of those that the group chat convener bothers to enable. Thus, all I actually have in practice is “mute this chat”.

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