For better or worse, email has been and always will be an application. When people say email, they almost always mean their email client and not the protocol. Sorry, that's just the fact. You can use energy trying to change that, but it seems like as much a waste of time as attempts to get the US to change to metric.
Email is not broken: It’s a framework, not an application
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Re: Email is not broken: It’s a framework, not an application
#92As with most things, users will complain that tool X doesn't do job Y therefore it must be broken.
Email is not broken it does what it was orignally intended to do, namely enable communication between a number of parties. To say its broken because it doesn't do x, y or z is as false a statement as saying my screwdriver is broken because its not good at hammering in nails.
If email doesn't do what you want it to do, then find something else that does. If that does not exist, then build it. Better yet, pay me and I'll build it. :-)
Re: Email is not broken: It’s a framework, not an application
#93Couldn't upvote this more. I am fed up with posts telling me email is broken and a new disruptive tech will be the cure. Email is an open protocol, decentralized, providing optional security. Shortcomings—or rather call them additional requirements—can be solved with tools keeping email focussed on async text-based communication. Want to send large files? Dropbox. Want more automation? Improve the client side and/or…
A glut of "email is broken" posts just before the YC decision day and just after Paul Graham's "Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas" essay smacks of insincerity. I can imagine email software that does exciting things with JSON data in emails, but I wouldn't alter the underlying protocol.
Great post and we found the hidden agenda of this "email is broken" propaganda. It's sad that the VC/startup business heavily relies on hype to drive interest and valuation.
Nethertheless, I welcome that seemingly a lot do not blindly follow this BS.
Re: Email is not broken: It’s a framework, not an application
#94Couldn't upvote this more. I am fed up with posts telling me email is broken and a new disruptive tech will be the cure. Email is an open protocol, decentralized, providing optional security. Shortcomings—or rather call them additional requirements—can be solved with tools keeping email focussed on async text-based communication. Want to send large files? Dropbox. Want more automation? Improve the client side and/or…
Email was not designed to be used the way we use it now. ...my inbox is a todo list, and email is the way things get onto it. But it is a disastrously bad todo list. ...it seems unlikely that people in 100 years will still be living in the same email hell we do now. And if email is going to get replaced eventually, why not now? ...some of the most powerful people are all at the mercy of email too. [1] Your posts remi…
When I read this piece from Paul Graham, I wondered if he had an assistant (I mean a flesh and bones personal assistant). Is that that assistant are too expensive nowadays in the West? If I were a powerful influencer with enough money, I'd consider hiring an assistant to help me filter these mails. He or she will probably be easier to train than a Bayesian filter...
Automatisation is not the last word for every human activities. Many people are struggling to find a job. Many could do this kind of task efficiently, and even enjoy it.
Maybe I have a different point of view because I live in China, where labor is cheaper, but for instance here if you have a kid and don't wish to change 100% of his diapers, you can just pay someone to do so, it is cheap enough and many people are happy to do this for you (it is often better paid and always safer than working in iPad factories).
"Externalizing" some tasks to other people also means you have a life with more and deeper human contacts. Surely, these human being must be handled much more carefully than a "web service", you have to smile to them and consider their problems. Sometime you have to do compromise and accept a less than perfect outcome. Sometime you have to manage these people that work for you. But this is life.
Re: Email is not broken: It’s a framework, not an application
#95Love this. This whole "email is broken" argument reminds me of the "SMS sucks, and iMessage/GChat/BBM will destroy it" argument perpetuated by TechCrunch and other tech pundits. There are two reasons that email and SMS are not broken, and the author of this article points them out: asynchronous communication, and no single entity controlling the entire ecosystem. The value of knowing you can reach anyone, anywhere, a…
SMS helps prove the point that email is broken. When my wife sends me a text message, does she care about the protocol? No, she just wants to remind me to pick up appetizers, wine, and beer for tonight's party. Does she want to be limited to 140 bytes? No. She can send a long message and has no idea about the protocol limit. Nice SMS clients take care of splitting it up and packaging it all back together into one seamless text message.
The SMS improvement is not an improvement to the protocol, but to the tools and is a great example of what people mean when they say email can be improved.
If my mother in law wants to send a gigantic PowerPoint deck of "Our Grand Canyon Vacation.ppt", why should she sign up for a separate service to do so?
There is opportunity to improve the tools which have been and always will be known as email.
Re: Email is not broken: It’s a framework, not an application
#96Couldn't upvote this more. I am fed up with posts telling me email is broken and a new disruptive tech will be the cure. Email is an open protocol, decentralized, providing optional security. Shortcomings—or rather call them additional requirements—can be solved with tools keeping email focussed on async text-based communication. Want to send large files? Dropbox. Want more automation? Improve the client side and/or…
This.
Only partially related, but I'm sick of people coming up with more, 'better' ways to communicate which are then embraced by a subset of my friends and colleagues. My email arrives on my phone, on my laptop, on my (and any) PC, in an easy to read, indexable, exportable and simple format, wherever I am in the world, in near real time. I have had the same email address for ~ 12 years and with Google's spam filter I get zero spam. I actively manage mailing list subscriptions and have no problems there either.
Seriously, for people asking where their jet pack is - take a step back and think about all of that.
It's infuriating for me that my friends choose to use Facebook, Twitter DMs, any number of 'groundbreaking' proprietary messaging apps and a million other message transports (don't get me started on iMessage). Email is a message, in text format (with optional binary attachments), between a number of people. Nothing more, nothing less.
The world has bigger problems to solve.
Re: Email is not broken: It’s a framework, not an application
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
Documented? Email is a good asynchronous messaging protocol, it's not a great one though. I'd say authentication would be a requirement for such a protocol to be great. I think the next logical step of content protection (encryption) is free if you have authentication and most would want it too. You also don't know if a message has been received, ignored, or blocked by a spam filter. It's good, it does manage to work…
What's wrong with layering, say, GPG on top of email if you want authentication or encryption?
Indeed. A great protocol is a flexible protocol, and restricting email to one authentication and/or encryption protocol would prevent it from adapting to advances in cryptography.
Re: Email is not broken: It’s a framework, not an application
#98For better or worse, email has been and always will be an application. When people say email, they almost always mean their email client and not the protocol. Sorry, that's just the fact. You can use energy trying to change that, but it seems like as much a waste of time as attempts to get the US to change to metric.
Well, as one piece of data, I certainly mean the system, rather than any one client, when I say "email."
When I say "email me," I don't mean "make something show up in gmail," I mean, send me a message over the email protocol. I don't use email as a to-do list. I use it for correspondence, often with people who use other clients.
My conception of email is client-agnostic, and I think almost everyone I deal with (admittedly outside of the tech/valley/startup inside) thinks of it the same way. I hear things like "I'll shoot you an email," or "I need to check my email," or "what program do you use for email?", none of which imply that the speaker intends to be talking about an app.
Texting isn't an app, the telephone isn't an app, email isn't an app, at least for many people.
Re: Email is not broken: It’s a framework, not an application
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
Email was not designed to be used the way we use it now. ...my inbox is a todo list, and email is the way things get onto it. But it is a disastrously bad todo list. ...it seems unlikely that people in 100 years will still be living in the same email hell we do now. And if email is going to get replaced eventually, why not now? ...some of the most powerful people are all at the mercy of email too. [1] Your posts remi…
When I read this piece from Paul Graham, I wondered if he had an assistant (I mean a flesh and bones personal assistant). Is that that assistant are too expensive nowadays in the West? If I were a powerful influencer with enough money, I'd consider hiring an assistant to help me filter these mails. He or she will probably be easier to train than a Bayesian filter... Automatisation is not the last word for every human…
Good point, it reveals a lack of organizational and leadership skills. If one is so wanted that his inbox is quickly full either he has to reduce workload or hire staff and delegate.
Re: Email is not broken: It’s a framework, not an application
#100I thought this was obvious, but I guess not. When people say email is broken, they mean that their email client is broken. When people talk about fixing email, they mean producing a better email client. That the OP doesn't get this obscures his message to the point that I don't even think I get what he's saying. In the end, he doesn't disagree with people who say email is broken, because he tells them just to fix the client.
Can anyone offer some links to recent/current projects that want to "fix" email by changing the protocol?