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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

#91

Post by swiley »

paxys wrote: post #3

I'm on the exact opposite end of the spectrum. I haven't used email outside of work for many years now, and don't miss it one bit. And even at work most communication now happens on Slack. The digital world has evolved since 1997, and email simply hasn't kept up. I skimmed a couple articles on the blog and my biggest problem with it is that the author is making a social rather than technological argument (which are a…

>The digital world has evolved since 1997, and email simply hasn't kept up.

Evolved beyond instant text messages? because that's all email is.

Honestly I hate IM tools. The threading is crap, the search is crap, the startup time is crap. there's no understanding of who can read what or what the edit history of messages are (I've been in IMs with people who will edit their messages days later to gasslight you, that alone is enough to make me hate IM apps.)

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

#92

Post by sleepybrett »

paxys wrote: post #71
dvt wrote: post #5

I don't think this kind of Luddism is useful. It's purported by the same kinds of people that, upon seeing a new SaaS, quickly retort: "couldn't you just do that with Google Docs/Word/pen and paper?" Not to mention that email absolutely sucks . The confusing threads, the forwarding, the constant CC'ing, someone making it or not making it into a list, the spam. It's absolute garbage. In fact, people have been seeking…

Agree about Google Wave, but I want to point out that we already see its evolution in just about every real-time collaborative system today – from Google Docs to Slack to Figma and more. "The next Google Wave" isn't going to show up soon, it is already here and widely in use.

unfortunately each of those apps has their own protocols. I don't really remember wave well but wasn't the idea there is that they provide the networking portion but allowed people to build apps on top of the wave protocol. Essentially giving you the potential for a 'global inbox'.

I think this concept of a 'global inbox' is exactly what I want. In a general day I'm using Jira, Slack, Email, SMS, gitlab issues, etc for my 'work input'. Which means many different interfaces that I'm constantly checking or are constantly beeping at me.

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

#94

Post by megous »

throwawayboise wrote: post #48
edoceo wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just switched my long running SMTP to a new IP. I've got SPF, DKIM and DMARC all dialed in. I'm not getting tagged as spam. Even when I add new domains to this host for sending - still gets through to G, Y and MS based services.

As SPF, DKIM and DMARC have become more widely implemented, is IP reputation less of a factor than it used to be in spam detection algorithms? This is just my speculation, but it seems plausible.

Why would it be less of a factor? These things don't prevent spam. I can create a proper mail server with all these and send billion messages from it wherever I like. These technologies prevent various kinds of forgeries.

Quick look at my archive, of 37k spams only 7k fails SPF. (I accept all email no matter what.) So it's some signal, but not nearly enough.

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

#95

Post by tempestn »

daveslash wrote: post #7
paxys wrote: post #3

I'm on the exact opposite end of the spectrum. I haven't used email outside of work for many years now, and don't miss it one bit. And even at work most communication now happens on Slack. The digital world has evolved since 1997, and email simply hasn't kept up. I skimmed a couple articles on the blog and my biggest problem with it is that the author is making a social rather than technological argument (which are a…

I'll give you an up-vote because I think a variety of different viewpoints is important, but I'm very much in the e-mail camp. My biggest reason is simply: it's the only ubiquitous, decentralized, open protocol that I can think of. I can run my own server if I want, an I can interact with anybody with an e-mail address . Sure, there was XMPP for IM, but that doesn't have wide adoption; same with other protocols.

Those are great aspects of email, and I certainly wouldn't want it to go away. But that doesn't mean it's the most effective or efficient tool for all use cases. Like the GP, our team switched to Slack some years back, and our email volume dropped to near zero, while quality of communication went way up.

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

#96

Post by zmmmmm »

Sadly email is starting to die as the universal protocol for communication it used to be. My organisation has now implemented so many filters and blocks that a huge range of simple things are just broken now. It's pretty hard to send an attachment through other than a few predefined doc types that wont get physically removed by the spam filter. Every link gets re-written in some horribly mangled way and virtually clicked that often causes undesirable side effects. Giant warnings and labels get inserted into the body text telling me this or that is suspicious, and subject lines are frequently rewritten, breaking the feeble semblance of threading that my poor email client attempts.

And meanwhile people are flocking to walled garden proprietary systems like Slack etc and saying how great they are. But half of it is to escape the monstrous mutilations that have been applied to email.

Email might be like the venerable cockroach that will survive nuclear war, but it's not a healthy cockroach.

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

#97

Post by darau1 »

daveslash wrote: post #7
paxys wrote: post #3

I'm on the exact opposite end of the spectrum. I haven't used email outside of work for many years now, and don't miss it one bit. And even at work most communication now happens on Slack. The digital world has evolved since 1997, and email simply hasn't kept up. I skimmed a couple articles on the blog and my biggest problem with it is that the author is making a social rather than technological argument (which are a…

I'll give you an up-vote because I think a variety of different viewpoints is important, but I'm very much in the e-mail camp. My biggest reason is simply: it's the only ubiquitous, decentralized, open protocol that I can think of. I can run my own server if I want, an I can interact with anybody with an e-mail address . Sure, there was XMPP for IM, but that doesn't have wide adoption; same with other protocols.

I really think all email needs is a fresh coat of paint. I believe the ruby on rails team worked on something like this, but I forget the name of the service

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

#98

Post by darau1 »

paxys wrote: post #90
chii wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It literally is just an electronic equivalent of sending a letter, and inherits most of the limitations that implies that's not giving email enough credit. Email has zero limitations unlike real snail mail - the email client is the limitation, and that's "just" software. The fact that gmail client was so successful is evidence that email could've been _the_ premiere platform for open communication. Instead, we now…

Email has very real limitations, imposed both by the protocol itself and by lack of consensus among all the major and minor clients.

Can you give some examples? I've never seen any mentioned.

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

#100

Post by squiggleblaz »

rubatuga wrote: post #42
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.

If you want clean IPs for self-hosting a mail server, you can use a service we created called Hoppy Network: https://hoppy.network Our IP addresses are not on any blacklists, and we don't block SMTP or mail ports.

I also just found out about a service called Tailscale (maybe 30 mins ago). It's not a field I have investigated but both your services and theirs sounded vaguely useful for some problems I'm having. Are they somewhat similar? It sounds like I could solve the same problems in perhaps two different ways.
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