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All you need is e-mail, e-mail. E-mail is all you need.

monkeymace.com

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Re: All you need is e-mail, e-mail. E-mail is all you need.

#61

Post by jasonjei »

I know all the people pushing for social networks will disagree, but I think email can be fixed, just like static web pages have been fixed to do asynchronous JavaScript to provide dynamic web experiences.

I think the problem is the cure is much worse than the disease. The cures of using social network tools is often an enclosed, controlled network such as Twitter or Facebook, which puts control of the network in the hands of few.

Instead of trying to replace email, I think we should "fix" it rather than trying to replace it. Some advocate using Web/REST/HTTP to replace email; I think email isn't that doomed.

Remember, the popularity of email is because anybody can start an email service. Nobody can just use Facebook or Twitter; you have to have the approval of an inner circle authority. Imagine if every Web site required MPAA or RIAA control, and they prevented even non-infringing material online using SOPA!

Re: All you need is e-mail, e-mail. E-mail is all you need.

#62

Post by trimbo »

coderdude wrote: post #55
trimbo wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There have been so many times where I'd send an email and have it never even reach its destination This is easily explained if you were hosting your own Postfix or something. There are a significant number of hoops that legitimate email senders must jump through in order to ensure their email goes through properly. DKIM signing, SPF records, rDNS, etc. These are some of the ways for gmail and apple identify you as…

I suspect that my host's email servers are at least partially to blame for some of these issues. Like a bad egg or two signed up and screwed everyone else over. From what I've gathered Amazon SES is a reliable alternative since they apparently jump through the hoops for you. That might be where I'm turning to for a solution. It makes sense that they wouldn't notify you if they tanked your email because they think it'…

> From what I've gathered Amazon SES is a reliable alternative since they apparently jump through the hoops for you. That might be where I'm turning to for a solution.

Yes, definitely... at least for commercial sending. SendGrid, SES, Mailgun, Mailchimp - there are a lot of solutions for outbound commercial / bulk and they're reasonably priced and easy to use. They take care of all of the nuts and bolts.

For personal email, I started seeing this change a long time ago and stopped hosting my own at least ten years ago (around the time 1/2 of my DSL got consumed by spam bandwidth). At this juncture, I keep all of my domains on Gmail.

> Do you know why some emails are silently dropped while others are marked as junk and allowed to pass through?

Probably depends on spam score as to whether it gets bulk foldered or killed immediately, and the ISP.

Re: All you need is e-mail, e-mail. E-mail is all you need.

#64

Post by taliesinb »

joe_the_user wrote: post #57
taliesinb wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. It's email clients that are broken, not email. For example, the most imaginative thing we can do with long email threads appears to be to flatten them and render them as a list. Not to mention filtering and categorizing: in gmail, you can't even check in a filter if someone is in your contacts -- your gmail contacts -- let alone whether they fall into a particular contact group.

I feel like that's weirdly true and false. Yes, email clients are "broken". It is "easy to see" that fixing them is the key to really useful communication. The weird thing is that any time you get one of these "broken" mediums, its users nonetheless become adapted to it. Even the stupidest original behavior becomes a part of a common, even socially, understood medium and changing it thus becomes harder. An old girlfr…

That's true. But I think this argues that GMail and Outlook will remain stagnant, not that email will stagnant.

Re: All you need is e-mail, e-mail. E-mail is all you need.

#65

Post by taliesinb »

unimpressive wrote: post #51
taliesinb wrote: post #46

This reminds me of something most new communication media seem not to realize: no matter how fancy your new thing is, not everyone will want to try it initially, so for God's sake make it bridge to email. Otherwise it will become a ghetto. I don't think the Wave people understood this; if they had, Wave might have turned out differently. Asana, on the other hand, made a big deal out of this.

Making something bridge to email doesn't seem terribly difficult. SMTP is; as the name would imply, simple. (At least it seems simple.)

To be a true bridge you need to be bidirectional: to do that you'd need IMAP, not SMTP. IMAP is a bit of a stateful mess of a protocol, unfortunately.

Re: All you need is e-mail, e-mail. E-mail is all you need.

#66

Post by seabee »

nickbarnwell wrote: post #48
TY wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if someone could create a new messaging system that works like previous messaging systems such as email and Usenet, but instead of sending a message along with its entire thread of previous messages, or requiring all responses to be stored in each user's inbox for context, message documents that contain complete threads of multimedia messages (blips) are perpetually stored on a central server. These documents ar…

Doesn't that more or less describe Google Wave?

The link exactly describes (for it is) Google Wave.

Re: All you need is e-mail, e-mail. E-mail is all you need.

#67

Post by nickbarnwell »

seabee wrote: post #66
nickbarnwell wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't that more or less describe Google Wave?

The link exactly describes (for it is) Google Wave.

Well, that is embarrassing. Currently tethered to an EDGE connection and didn't click for fear of a ginormous page on the other end. Serves me right!

Re: All you need is e-mail, e-mail. E-mail is all you need.

#68

Post by antidoh »

mbrock wrote: post #17
pre wrote: post #7

Email is awesome, certainly. But if everyone actually started a mass-email to all their friends about every little topic they post to a Facebook status update, I'd call 'em pretty damned rude abusing my email inbox like that and my email client would need even better filters than it already has to fight the commercial spam. Experiments to find things better than email will mostly fail, but I think we still need more…

You point to the #1 biggest wonderful feature of email. Sending email is an act that incurs responsibility. WHY are we sending all this shit around? Email makes it clear. I have made a decision that you should spend your time reading and understanding this text. If that's rude, tell me and I'll stop. This article strikes a chord because email is about communication instead of endless "sharing," broadcasting, forwardi…

"email is about communication instead of endless "sharing," broadcasting, forwarding, signalling."

I'm in the minority, but Facebook literally depresses me (and by literally, I literally mean literally), and I quit long ago. All these words, and no communication. It's like I'm in a crowd, and the only thing I know about the other people in the crowd is what their Tshirts say.

I communicate by email with most of the people I knew on Facebook, and I'm very happy with that communication channel. Because it's actual communication, rather than mere display.

This is also why HN is my preferred news source. Besides the focused yet eclectic aggregation, the comments are actual communication, not just "regulars" on a typical newspaper's comment forum insulting each other. It's been said many times, but I get as much or more from the comments as I do from the articles, not least because I have to engage my brain to comment.

Re: All you need is e-mail, e-mail. E-mail is all you need.

#69

Post by antidoh »

ajdecon wrote: post #52

I've wondered a lot about why e-mail isn't used more as a backend for different services. But as far as I can tell, messaging products proliferate because their creators want to create profitable products rather than distributed protocols. E-mail is a pretty good group of protocols for distributing arbitrary messages between different locations on the Internet. It's easy to imagine how all sorts of messaging and soci…

"messaging products proliferate because their creators want to create profitable products rather than distributed protocols."

That's a bingo.

Re: All you need is e-mail, e-mail. E-mail is all you need.

#70

Post by drivebyacct2 »

TY wrote: post #38
drivebyacct2 wrote: post #30

NO. I want to scream. NO. I just began working at a company that uses "distribution groups" (mailing lists) as a "social network". It's awful as it's not threaded, it's not archived, it's not searchable. It's terrible.

What if someone could create a new messaging system that works like previous messaging systems such as email and Usenet, but instead of sending a message along with its entire thread of previous messages, or requiring all responses to be stored in each user's inbox for context, message documents that contain complete threads of multimedia messages (blips) are perpetually stored on a central server. These documents ar…

I was one of the few that raved about and loved Google Wave. :(
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