4 ms·

>Email sucks Email is great. I can choose between umpteen providers or run my own mail server, it's a standard protocol with many different clients to suit one

by na85 6y ago

>Email sucks Email is great. I can choose between umpteen providers or run my own mail server, it's a standard protocol with many different clients to suit one's needs, I can't get banned by a faceless FAANG corporation for no reason and with no recourse, I'm not locked into some walled garden and dependent on the benevolence of corporate overlords and I don't need to worry about some intern at Google suffering from NIH syndrome deciding to make completely unneeded "improvements" that negatively impact my UX. Email is old but that doesn't mean it sucks. Internal "semi-spam" is a social problem and needs a social solution. Changing protocols won't change the spam problem at your company.

tormeh 6y ago
All the benefits you're listing are benefits that any federated protocol, for example Matrix, has. Completely orthogonal to email itself.
- na85 6y ago
  And the problems you listed with email aren't actually problems with the technology so much as problems with the way people at your company (and others) misuse the technology. They're completely orthogonal to email itself.
  - mac01021 6y ago
    I'm not sure that's true. Email has a somewhat archaic data model that has suboptimal support for things like threading.
    - rakoo 6y ago
      What exactly does it need to do better threading ? Today a client can write anything they want in the References: and In-Reply-To: headers, and the server doesn't verify that it's valid. Would that be enough for you ?
  - tormeh 6y ago
    I only mentioned one problem with the clients, and an abstract complaint about doing one electronic communication but pretending it's physical. Some problems with email, from a user perspective: - The latency is too high for truly real-time communication - There is no cryptographic verification of the sender's identity (this problem is also shared with telephony). This has lead to really harsh anti-spam measures that make it hard to self-host. Sender verification + client-side sender whitelists would solve spam for good. It also means grouping by sender gives a very false sense of security regarding identity continuity between messages - There is no good support for groups or threads. Subject lines of type "Re: Re: Aw: Re: Sv: new proposal" is not an acceptable solution, as they look ugly and clients often disagree on how to parse and write them, leading to breakage of the thread - Clients do not group by sender, group or thread, partly because these concepts do not actually exist in email (see above) and partly for social reasons - Partly for historical reasons (it's just mail on a computer!) and partly for technical reasons (there is no sender, etc.) email is presented as huge letter-like affairs, leading to a felt need for all sorts of formalisms for every single message even if the messages are two minutes apart. Also email signatures (with logos?!) being attached to every message are just so wasteful both in terms of storage and in terms of screen space
    - dieortin 6y ago
      Some of this problems are (in my opinion) actually advantages. E-mail’s latency makes it so people write longer, thought out messages, instead of spamming very short messages. This makes for a different kind of communication, which is better for many things. It also removes the expectation to respond really soon, and the sender doesn’t know if you’ve read the message.
      - denton-scratch 6y ago
        Indeed! I for one appreciate this property of email. The recipient doesn't neeed to be at their desk; their equipment doesn't have to be switched on; and they don't have to be awake at the same time as me. I also prefer to type considered, thought-through messages (and I am unhappy that various messaging clients have hijacked email, so that my correspondents reply to me in a format that suggests they mistook my email for a text message). Also, I have no messaging client on my laptop; and my fingers are too blunt to accurately type more than a few characters using the virtual keyboard on my mobile.
zimpenfish 6y ago
> I can't get banned by a faceless FAANG corporation for no reason They can make your life difficult though with their seemingly random decisions about what constitutes spam even when you jump through all the SPF/DKIM/DMARC/etc hoops.
- na85 6y ago
  What I mean is they can't lock me out of my emails and contacts without recourse because (unless I use gmail or similar) my contacts are stored on my local device, and potentially so is my mail.

by na85 6y ago

tormeh 6y ago

All the benefits you're listing are benefits that any federated protocol, for example Matrix, has. Completely orthogonal to email itself.

na85 6y ago
And the problems you listed with email aren't actually problems with the technology so much as problems with the way people at your company (and others) misuse the technology. They're completely orthogonal to email itself.
- mac01021 6y ago
  I'm not sure that's true. Email has a somewhat archaic data model that has suboptimal support for things like threading.
  - rakoo 6y ago
    What exactly does it need to do better threading ? Today a client can write anything they want in the References: and In-Reply-To: headers, and the server doesn't verify that it's valid. Would that be enough for you ?
- tormeh 6y ago
  I only mentioned one problem with the clients, and an abstract complaint about doing one electronic communication but pretending it's physical. Some problems with email, from a user perspective: - The latency is too high for truly real-time communication - There is no cryptographic verification of the sender's identity (this problem is also shared with telephony). This has lead to really harsh anti-spam measures that make it hard to self-host. Sender verification + client-side sender whitelists would solve spam for good. It also means grouping by sender gives a very false sense of security regarding identity continuity between messages - There is no good support for groups or threads. Subject lines of type "Re: Re: Aw: Re: Sv: new proposal" is not an acceptable solution, as they look ugly and clients often disagree on how to parse and write them, leading to breakage of the thread - Clients do not group by sender, group or thread, partly because these concepts do not actually exist in email (see above) and partly for social reasons - Partly for historical reasons (it's just mail on a computer!) and partly for technical reasons (there is no sender, etc.) email is presented as huge letter-like affairs, leading to a felt need for all sorts of formalisms for every single message even if the messages are two minutes apart. Also email signatures (with logos?!) being attached to every message are just so wasteful both in terms of storage and in terms of screen space
  - dieortin 6y ago
    Some of this problems are (in my opinion) actually advantages. E-mail’s latency makes it so people write longer, thought out messages, instead of spamming very short messages. This makes for a different kind of communication, which is better for many things. It also removes the expectation to respond really soon, and the sender doesn’t know if you’ve read the message.
    - denton-scratch 6y ago
      Indeed! I for one appreciate this property of email. The recipient doesn't neeed to be at their desk; their equipment doesn't have to be switched on; and they don't have to be awake at the same time as me. I also prefer to type considered, thought-through messages (and I am unhappy that various messaging clients have hijacked email, so that my correspondents reply to me in a format that suggests they mistook my email for a text message). Also, I have no messaging client on my laptop; and my fingers are too blunt to accurately type more than a few characters using the virtual keyboard on my mobile.

zimpenfish 6y ago

> I can't get banned by a faceless FAANG corporation for no reason They can make your life difficult though with their seemingly random decisions about what constitutes spam even when you jump through all the SPF/DKIM/DMARC/etc hoops.

na85 6y ago
What I mean is they can't lock me out of my emails and contacts without recourse because (unless I use gmail or similar) my contacts are stored on my local device, and potentially so is my mail.