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Now it's 2017 and I don't see powerful people leaving email.
I want to understand why. If you're powerful and are reading this, what's stopping you from quitting email?
First is reason nothing goes away at most big companies: if it ain't broke, don't fix it. It's something they understand, they're often lay people who might not want to learn something else, they might have tons of stuff built on top of it (tech or processes), tons of important information stored in old emails (it's archive medium, too), and they'll get emails from other people anyway. So, why not keep using what you've been using.
A few others I hear occasionally on top of that big set. One that I like is that it's asynchronous. They can put emails off easier without it seeming like they're ignoring people. Managing it is fast and easy vs some web apps for communication. The security might be perceived as better esp with security software they likely have for email & data breaches they see on other things that aren't intranets or Gmail. It's decentralized, vendor-neutral protocol which existed for ages (stability). Bosses in smaller firms even use it straight-up as free alternative to paid chat or archive tools if it's Gmail. Just to avoid paying anyone past the ISP which is also cheap or someone's Wifi haha.
So, there's a few I've heard that tell me email ain't going anywhere.
So: What would be better? Given that the world currently runs on email, what would be enough better that it would be worth it to switch? I don't know. I don't think Paul Graham knew then, or knows now. And I think that the reason people haven't switched is that, so far, there isn't an alternative that's enough better. And the reason there isn't one is because, contrary to Paul Graham's expectation, creating something better is actually pretty hard.
Paul Graham said that email was horrible, and it shouldn't be hard to come up with something better. But he didn't actually put forward a concrete proposal. So: What would be better? Given that the world currently runs on email, what would be enough better that it would be worth it to switch? I don't know. I don't think Paul Graham knew then, or knows now. And I think that the reason people haven't switched is that,…
Paul Graham said that email was horrible, and it shouldn't be hard to come up with something better. But he didn't actually put forward a concrete proposal. So: What would be better? Given that the world currently runs on email, what would be enough better that it would be worth it to switch? I don't know. I don't think Paul Graham knew then, or knows now. And I think that the reason people haven't switched is that,…
This is something I've thought about quite a bit recently. For one, I absolutely hate the fact that when I give out my email address, the receiver can give my address to a third party. The third party has full capability to contact me, I can never know who gave up my email address, and I can never revoke the capability. At a minimum, an email replacement would need to address this.
You're right, replacing email would be really hard. There are a few things I'd like to see that could at least improve the current situation.
1. Push companies/organisations that request your email address to provide you in advance with the sender address they will use in the future to contact you, so that if we wanted to we could maintain a whitelist of accepted addresses to prevent all unsolicited mail.
2. Come up with a service that makes it easy to manage throw-away addresses that redirect to the same inbox so that I can essentially revoke the address that I hand out to somebody.
Paul Graham said that email was horrible, and it shouldn't be hard to come up with something better. But he didn't actually put forward a concrete proposal. So: What would be better? Given that the world currently runs on email, what would be enough better that it would be worth it to switch? I don't know. I don't think Paul Graham knew then, or knows now. And I think that the reason people haven't switched is that,…
>So: What would be better? Given that the world currently runs on email, what would be enough better that it would be worth it to switch? I don't know. This is something I've thought about quite a bit recently. For one, I absolutely hate the fact that when I give out my email address, the receiver can give my address to a third party. The third party has full capability to contact me, I can never know who gave up my…
Use sub-addressing [1]
So, if you signup on example.com, and your email is "foo@bar.com" you give them "foo+example-com@bar.com" or whatever format works for your mailbox provider/software.
If you wanted to go one step further, a filter could be configured to look at the sub-address component, and compare it with the sender's domain and mark it as spam if there isn't a match.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email_address#Sub-addressing
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>So: What would be better? Given that the world currently runs on email, what would be enough better that it would be worth it to switch? I don't know. This is something I've thought about quite a bit recently. For one, I absolutely hate the fact that when I give out my email address, the receiver can give my address to a third party. The third party has full capability to contact me, I can never know who gave up my…
> when I give out my email address, the receiver can give my address to a third party Use sub-addressing [1] So, if you signup on example.com, and your email is "foo@bar.com" you give them "foo+example-com@bar.com" or whatever format works for your mailbox provider/software. If you wanted to go one step further, a filter could be configured to look at the sub-address component, and compare it with the sender's domain…
In face-to-face exchanges (for me recently, this came up a lot while giving out my address to real estate agents), anything involving '+' causes a huge amount of confusion and they start asking questions. I'd much rather a "normal" looking address, where I'm perfectly happy for normal to be say base64 with '.', '_' and '-' and as the three special characters (at least people will think its valid).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> when I give out my email address, the receiver can give my address to a third party Use sub-addressing [1] So, if you signup on example.com, and your email is "foo@bar.com" you give them "foo+example-com@bar.com" or whatever format works for your mailbox provider/software. If you wanted to go one step further, a filter could be configured to look at the sub-address component, and compare it with the sender's domain…
This can work for online services during signup. I haven't yet seen this, but I wouldn't be surprised if some services were smart enough to drop the sub-address before on-selling your email. In face-to-face exchanges (for me recently, this came up a lot while giving out my address to real estate agents), anything involving '+' causes a huge amount of confusion and they start asking questions. I'd much rather a "norma…
If you have your own domain, you can of course also do shifty-bobs-realestate@mydomain.com and have it go to a catch-all style mailbox.