Email is Broken: People Sent 67 Trillion Emails in 2013 • Hacker News Board

Re: Email is Broken: People Sent 67 Trillion Emails in 2013

#41

Post by greenyoda » Sun, Jan 19, 2014, 9:50 PM UTC

benihana wrote: post #33

pixl97 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It has been many years since people actually suffered from the weight of zillions of spam messages in their inbox. And this is part of what makes email close to useless these days. Outside of your own organization you have no idea if your mail was delivered or black holed at a server somewhere never to be heard from again. Too many servers still do the wrong thing, accept and delete, rather than reject at HELO. You…

>And this is part of what makes email close to useless these days. Outside of your own organization you have no idea if your mail was delivered or black holed at a server somewhere never to be heard from again. I work in the domain of email and I'm not really sure how you came to this conclusion. I work on an internal team at a fairly well known e-commerce site and because of a few simple metrics, we have very high c…

I'll second that. I've been using e-mail since the 1980s and have never had a problem with receiving a legitimate e-mail. Banks and other businesses always tell you to add their notification addresses to your contact list to avoid their messages being marked as spam, but I've never found this to be necessary.

Re: Email is Broken: People Sent 67 Trillion Emails in 2013

#42

Post by wl » Sun, Jan 19, 2014, 9:52 PM UTC

benihana wrote: post #33

pixl97 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It has been many years since people actually suffered from the weight of zillions of spam messages in their inbox. And this is part of what makes email close to useless these days. Outside of your own organization you have no idea if your mail was delivered or black holed at a server somewhere never to be heard from again. Too many servers still do the wrong thing, accept and delete, rather than reject at HELO. You…

>And this is part of what makes email close to useless these days. Outside of your own organization you have no idea if your mail was delivered or black holed at a server somewhere never to be heard from again. I work in the domain of email and I'm not really sure how you came to this conclusion. I work on an internal team at a fairly well known e-commerce site and because of a few simple metrics, we have very high c…

Speaking for myself, you've got reliable delivery for the kinds of emails that matter least to users. I really don't care to receive most "transactional" emails and I definitely don't care about newsletters. Meanwhile, my experience with gmail is that I sometimes miss individual emails from human beings because they got caught in the spam filter. This state of affairs doesn't make email useless, but the system does seem to favor sophisticated bulk senders with tons of resources to devote to the problem over real people just trying to communicate something important.

Re: Email is Broken: People Sent 67 Trillion Emails in 2013

#43

Post by greenyoda » Sun, Jan 19, 2014, 9:55 PM UTC

raldi wrote: post #13

chimeracoder wrote: post #4

This title reminds me of the line, "Nobody goes to that bar. It's too crowded."[0]. I'm not sure why people love to insist that "email is broken" Email does its job remarkably well. In 2014, it's one of the only communication forms that's truly open, 100% cross-platform, and free-as-in-both-beer-and-freedom. If there's something more you need, it's easy to write (or extend) a client that handles your email according…

In your analogy, does going to a bar correspond to sending or receiving email? Because, "Nobody reads email anymore; they receive too much of it" doesn't have any paradoxical self-contradictions.

For paradoxical effect, try: "Nobody sends e-mail anymore. There's just too much of it."

By the way, the original quote was from Yogi Berra: "Nobody goes there anymore. It's too crowded."

Re: Email is Broken: People Sent 67 Trillion Emails in 2013

#44

Post by mpotra » Mon, Jan 20, 2014, 3:14 PM UTC

I'm deeply sorry, but the entire article is just a rant about personal frustrations, and some figures thrown around. Nothing valid or worthy of reading. Blogging at its finest.

First of all the term "email" refers to a technology, a means to deliver messages. All of this is _brilliantly_ standardized by RFCs, which in my opinion make it the most viable technical solution to open, free and reliable messaging in the world. Yes, things can be improved - as always - but email is and will be here for the long run.

What the author is actually frustrated about is the services he's using; e-mail clients to be more specific. There are many ways to configure an email server and client to filter out spam, unsolicited email and how to manage the entire pool of emails received, by filtering and organizing.

If your Outlook, Gmail, Yahoo or whatever-client you're using doesn't do its job properly, maybe try something else instead of blaming "email".

Email is not invasive at all. The clients (email software) can be invasive - alerts, popups and all that - and the habits of an email user/consumer can lead to messages being invasive. And on the above, if you're using free Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail or such, what do you expect? If you keep subscribing online to all sorts of promotions, contents and newsletters, in the hope to get rich overnight, what do you expect? Maybe next time when you sign-up for some free service, you actually pay attention to those checkboxes that say "Yes, subscribe me to this useless newsletters", before blaming "email".

I personally use email as my primary means of communication, especially when it comes to business and on-the-record messages, but also personal when I don't feel like having my privacy poked around by Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other commercial services. It's not as fast as chat, but it's more reliable and gives the other party the chance to reply when they finish their more important business if any.

If you declare email bankruptcy, that just means you failed at managing your communications behavior; which is a constant process, not a one-off. Too many people expect email (and many services) to simply adjust to their personal needs, without their smallest effort/input. There is no one size fits all, not even on the internet.

And without email, we'd still be at the FAX stage.