4 ms·

I tried some similar things when making Zombition, but I found that blurring the line between email and instant message mainly results in a more complicated UI

I tried some similar things when making Zombition, but I found that blurring the line between email and instant message mainly results in a more complicated UI and more details for end users to remember. For example, with instant messages you generally have some status information about whether or not the other user is online, whether or not they may have read whatever you just sent them, and whether or not they're typing a reply. If you want to add that into a email interface, how do you indicate to your end users that another user will never have associated status information because their account is on a server that is incompatible with the method you proposed? Plus the behavioral differences between email and instant message didn't blend well: was I going to wait in a mixed email/instant message conversation for a response, or was I going to move on to the other conversations in my inbox and send a reply or archive each so that I could move on to doing other things? And if I wanted to temporarily leave an instant-message-like conversation so that I could deal with some more email-like conversations, would the person I was chatting with know whether or not I would return? Eventually I stepped back to look at what additional value a user gained by blurring instant message and email in this way. Fundamentally they're both asynchronous text-based communication, and the things you can actually do with them aren't strikingly different. The biggest difference is in the expectations that a user has for each. Anyway I still wanted to "innovate in the email space", so I decided to go a more extreme route, and I made my own pull-based protocol (superficial similarities to IM2000 - http://cr.yp.to/im2000.html http://cr.yp.to/im2000.html) that retains backwards compatibility with email while adding abilities like stateful plugins (JavaScript apps/widgets) that can share data through the new protocol, editing messages after they're sent (SMTP recipients receive the new version after the update), and inline replies to parts of messages to enable nested conversations. If you're interested, I posted it earlier this afternoon here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10693535 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10693535).

systoll 11y ago
It's also very hard to push the benefits of the integration without having the product on both sides of the communication. A similar issue popped up in Windows phone 8. They combined sms and Facebook messenger -- but if you
zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 11y ago
> inline replies to parts of messages to enable nested conversations. Just to be sure: You know that that is really easy with email as it existed until about 20 years ago, including BBS networks, usenet, etc., and that it is still trivial with good email clients? That was a solved problem that made email really efficient, until some clueless developers and users came along and disinvented (is that a word?) the solution in order to make email easy to use (or so they claimed).
- zombition 11y ago
  Actually I didn't know; thank you for telling me! (That also makes me realize that I could likely do it in a much easier way than I currently am...) What are the email clients that allow that kind of behavior?
  - zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 11y ago
    Well, essentially, all of the traditional text-only clients do (such as Mutt, which is what I use), I think Thunderbird does as well, beyond that, no clue, but there probably are others. Traditionally, if you chose to reply to an email, the mail client would put the mail you were responding to into your editor, with > marks in front of every line. The only socially acceptable way[1] to write your answer was to insert your responses in between those quoted lines, without > marks, and to delete everything of the original mail that was irrelevant to establish the context for the reply. That's how easy it is. Usually, a good mail client would also color quoted lines so that it's easy to see and read only the response lines in a received email, so you'd only have to read the quoted text if you weren't sure about the context. Clueless developers and users around the turn of the millenium then somehow didn't understand the purpose of providing you with a quoted version of the email you replied to, and started putting the reply above the quoted mail, thus ending up sending a copy of the mail they just received back to the person they received it from ... and nobody seemed to notice how idiotic an idea that actually is, and so it became sortof the new norm in large parts of the internet to attach large blobs of completely useless and often close to unreadable text to every mail, up to the point where some people even invented justifications for the behaviour that mostly tend to describe how this "feature" allows them to work around the lack of proper thread handling in their mail clients. Obviously, easy quoting traditionally relies on plaintext only mails with fixed (short) line length, but format=flowed encoding has since been invented (the original RFC is from 1999) to accomodate screens and windows of variable width while maintaining backwards compatibility with old clients. [1] https://www.netmeister.org/news/learn2quote2.html https://www.netmeister.org/news/learn2quote2.html

systoll 11y ago

It's also very hard to push the benefits of the integration without having the product on both sides of the communication. A similar issue popped up in Windows phone 8. They combined sms and Facebook messenger -- but if you

zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 11y ago

> inline replies to parts of messages to enable nested conversations. Just to be sure: You know that that is really easy with email as it existed until about 20 years ago, including BBS networks, usenet, etc., and that it is still trivial with good email clients? That was a solved problem that made email really efficient, until some clueless developers and users came along and disinvented (is that a word?) the solution in order to make email easy to use (or so they claimed).

zombition 11y ago
Actually I didn't know; thank you for telling me! (That also makes me realize that I could likely do it in a much easier way than I currently am...) What are the email clients that allow that kind of behavior?
- zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 11y ago
  Well, essentially, all of the traditional text-only clients do (such as Mutt, which is what I use), I think Thunderbird does as well, beyond that, no clue, but there probably are others. Traditionally, if you chose to reply to an email, the mail client would put the mail you were responding to into your editor, with > marks in front of every line. The only socially acceptable way[1] to write your answer was to insert your responses in between those quoted lines, without > marks, and to delete everything of the original mail that was irrelevant to establish the context for the reply. That's how easy it is. Usually, a good mail client would also color quoted lines so that it's easy to see and read only the response lines in a received email, so you'd only have to read the quoted text if you weren't sure about the context. Clueless developers and users around the turn of the millenium then somehow didn't understand the purpose of providing you with a quoted version of the email you replied to, and started putting the reply above the quoted mail, thus ending up sending a copy of the mail they just received back to the person they received it from ... and nobody seemed to notice how idiotic an idea that actually is, and so it became sortof the new norm in large parts of the internet to attach large blobs of completely useless and often close to unreadable text to every mail, up to the point where some people even invented justifications for the behaviour that mostly tend to describe how this "feature" allows them to work around the lack of proper thread handling in their mail clients. Obviously, easy quoting traditionally relies on plaintext only mails with fixed (short) line length, but format=flowed encoding has since been invented (the original RFC is from 1999) to accomodate screens and windows of variable width while maintaining backwards compatibility with old clients. [1] https://www.netmeister.org/news/learn2quote2.html https://www.netmeister.org/news/learn2quote2.html