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I love email, had a Blackberry and that thing was just great. Today, I have everything I can go to email. If I could get it all, I would. I do not need or wa

I love email, had a Blackberry and that thing was just great. Today, I have everything I can go to email. If I could get it all, I would. I do not need or want lots of silos. I do want one store, some rules, and for it to operate off line and async. Replacing email will take a lot. There was email before http. I have seen nothing even close to the simple utility, robustness of email, never mind anything that looks to endure like email has. I have almost all email I have ever received. Amazing. And it just works. The better search is, the better it works. There are tons of emails to myself too. I know I can search them and read what past me suspected present me needs to know and that all weaves right in. I wish more things worked as well and like email does. RSS is one of those things, BTW. USENET is another one, but well out of favor. Fact is, someone could spiff USENET up and it could very easily come back. Async, threaded discussion is amazing. Make inline media a little easier, and... yeah. Problem is none of those high utility things are sexy. Maybe there should be a floor that just works well. Maybe we are not all that well served by all these attempts to disrupt and own people through what are important interactions. Big conflict of interest there, if you ask me. It matters now, is lean, mean, near universally used. Ok, so what is there really to disrupt? Not much. And that is why I love email. Unlike just about every other thing I have loved, it will be there, and I will not have to think about it much. It is awful nice to have something be that way. Nice enough for me to think long and hard about putting it at any kind of risk.

joshspankit 6y ago
Slack exploded on the scene with a refresh of IRC. USENET could come back with a proper refresh.
- ddingus 6y ago
  I hate Slack. Unlike IRC, it is too much. And it is thick. Many do not though, your point is good. I love email because I rarely have to think about it. Thought is action. Same with IRC.
  - joshspankit 6y ago
    Like, to be fair: Many people don’t know how lean and thin IRC is, they are just happy that they get flexible channels for group communication. But those who know, know. I also feel like I dug in to the original code for Slack and it literally was an IRC client.
    - ddingus 6y ago
      Totally.
- qbasic_forever 6y ago
  Aren't Slack's threaded conversations basically a new take on usenet? It's not distributed, and silo'ed of course.. but it's the same idea if you squint.
  - ddingus 6y ago
    Same sort of flow, sort of. Not distributed and siloed are very big differences.
  - jjav 6y ago
    > It's not distributed, and silo'ed of course.. But that's the key. Can I write my own slack client to automate everything just the way I want to, relying only on standard APIs that cannot go away?
- saberdancer 6y ago
  Wouldn't USENET be Reddit? Various subreddits, async communication, sharing of stuff. User accounts. Only major difference (and it is a big one) is voting. I must admit I never realized Slack is IRC. It makes perfect sense.
  - LinuxBender 6y ago
    In my opinion there is no need for voting on usenet. You can reply to anyone or ignore anyone. No global echo chambers, no global moderation beyond removing illegal content on a specific provider or filtering a usenet group on a specific provider. If you had a group of like-minded friends that wanted to ignore specific ways of thinking, then you could all contribute to your own group specific ignore-list. Corporations have no financial incentive to build around usenet for this reason, as they have zero control over the client.
- krageon 6y ago
  > proper refresh. If it gets a "refresh" the way slack murdered IRC for work, I hope it never does. While were at it, slack can go straight into a volcano. Any value it adds over IRC is A. marginal and B. not work-relevant (because you can't upload anything containing sensitive data there, bearing in mind what it is...).
  - encryptluks2 6y ago
    Usenet is more similar to a group mailing list, so hopefully they aren't talking about "refreshing" it to be like Slack.
  - herbst 6y ago
    How would work related IRC work in practice? Everyone running their own bots so you dont miss messages? You also need a bot for push notifications, as well as one for mirroring. Also a custom solution for file sharing. I know its part of the fun. However it does not sound suitable for a work environment.
    - krageon 6y ago
      We used to have a centralised bouncer that both fixed push notifications as well as transparent history and presence (i.e. automatic away). File sharing has been part of literally every client for so long I don't know what you want me to say about that. It works, it's p2p. What more is there?
      - c0l0 6y ago
        $oldjob had that too, and it worked really well for most people - tech and business alike. I like IRC because it makes you focus on what really matters instead of some sort of seamless Giphy or Wikipedia "rich"-content integration. It's sufficiently async to not bother me at all times, and I can interact with it programmatically very, very easily. Also, due to its rigidly ephemeral nature (ultimately depending on your personal preference of course, but the default for most clients these days - and opposed to something like Teams, which seems to store everything forever), it nudges its users to use a more suitable, more permanent medium to capture information that is to be persisted. It's clearly a different kind of animal than a wiki or an email archive/mailing list, whereas new "alternatives to email"-tools like Slack, Teams and their ilk are anything and everything in-between, which causes "now where the hell did I read that thing about that other thing..."-syndrome for me.
- encryptluks2 6y ago
  The biggest issue with Usenet was spam. NNTP is an open protocol. It is supported in quite a few email clients. Have you tried Pan?
- swiley 6y ago
  If the Usenet refresh is anything like slack I certainly won't use it.
ROARosen 6y ago
DISCLAIMER: To all chat-app haters, my point is that the user experience of these newfangled services is just much better, o course I'm not taking into acct all the very real concerns stemming rom these apps. Since your talking about user experience, (not mentioning privacy, security, etc.). How is email better in terms of usability than say Telegram or any other app. Which keep every chat you've ever had. You can "Save" chats for yourself for later. You can have usenet-style conversations in huge mega-groups. You can follow the latest news from channels just like RSS. All without needing to keep the data downloaded on your device, and backed up in the cloud. Basically all those separate services you mention (with separate software required to be downloaded to view them) are rolled into in any one-stop-shop chat app. Oh, and it also has phone and video calls too.
- ddingus 6y ago
  I like Telegram a lot. Has merit in the ways you mention, and it is pretty lean, not too much going on, not pushy either. None of this replaces email. A big one is I am not sure I will have every Telegram chat I received a decade or two from now, and I will have all my email. Another is everyone uses email. Not everyone uses other apps. So far Telegram is entertainment only. That is fine. Email can act like chat, chat is not email. I very strongly disagree with better. Different? Yup. More experiences possible? Yup. But not better. Email is killer. And it is not hard, is time tested, production proven, near ubiquitous. UX is bang on simple, and I hardly ever think about it. "Better" needs some reevaluation to be frank. I see a general failure to understand why email is great. That means a claim of better UX may make very little sense.
  - leephillips 6y ago
    I agree about email. And the main thing, and what distinguishes it from Telegram, etc., is that it is a protocol, not an app. You can use any client you want, or write your own.
    - Jiocus 6y ago
      Telegram is one of the few messengers that actually enables you to use any Telegram client available, or write your own[1]. The protocol that is de facto Telegram is called MProto[2], and is publicly available. § [1]: https://telegram.org/apps https://telegram.org/apps [2]: https://core.telegram.org/mtproto https://core.telegram.org/mtproto § edit: The main difference between email and Telegram, is that anyone can host email servers, while Telegram manages theirs. edit2: MProto being widely available to study, one could perhaps reverse-engineer their own server - but that hasn't been a desire to accomplish this from what I can see. Much of the value-proposal of Telegram is their Service as a whole.
qbasic_forever 6y ago
Google Reader made RSS feel just like Gmail (which isn't the same as email in general I will agree, but close enough for many people). It was fast, dense, and easy to scan days and weeks of content in a single sitting. I'm _still_ mad they gave it the axe so Vic Gundotra could juice the numbers on failing Google+.
- atemerev 6y ago
  Well, RSS stands against the entire Google’s business model, so the Reader was doomed from the start. Google later went all in to discredit and eliminate the entire idea of feeds and aggregators, as it was dangerous for its business, which required maximizing users engagement and removing their ability to skip ads.
mbirth 6y ago
Sounds like you'll really like DeltaChat: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25893626 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25893626
loraxclient 6y ago
In the past I’ve felt the opposite of your sentiment. I’ve found my email to be unwieldy. I’ve felt like I have to apply constant hygiene and maintenance to keep it from becoming useless. Checking out on an e-commerce site, trying out a new tool, registering a free trial...these are things I guess I do frequently enough that it seems to doom me to sort and sift through noise. I know the common solutions are a good set of filtering rules or separate emails/aliases. I lean toward the latter and it’a definitely helped but I still find it all a bit of a pain and time sink. That said, you make a nice case for it and I can definitely identify with some of the ‘zen’ of email you’re describing. I feel like I’ve tried every email client out there, but is there some solution I haven’t thought of of where I get a friendly GUI but can configure mail filtering in code (i.e something I can keep in git) rather than clicking around? I’ve toyed with ideas of bundling by sender - or quietly placing new senders into their own ‘message requests’ type bin for me to approve or deny. Or some kind of intelligence for identifying, for example, a receipt or confirmation email (which I want indexed) vs a promotional email from the same vendor (which I do not).
- pudmaidai 6y ago
  1. Mark them all as spam. I never accept newsletters so I will consider every newsletter email as spam. They don't last much in my inbox. 2. Try inbox zero and just archive emails aggressively directly from your phone’s notification without even opening email. My inbox currently has 10 emails that one day I'll get to and the rest of spam and transactional email is just gone from view within the hour or day. I wish I could have an "important" and a "transactional" email view, but that's not going to happen without a lot of work, so email search still sucks.
  - jjav 6y ago
    > so email search still sucks Email is a standard set of protocols and wire formats. So it doesn't make sense to say email search sucks. If your email client doesn't support satisfactory search, switch clients. Which you can do because it's a standard, not a proprietary app.
    - 6y ago
jjav 6y ago
> Unlike just about every other thing I have loved, it will be there, and I will not have to think about it much. It is awful nice to have something be that way. Well said. Email is the universal killer app for perpetuity. And the lesson here is that it is so because nobody owns it, we all own it. It can't go bankrupt, it can't pivot to be something else, it can't lose all its best features when a new product manager is promoted and wants to make a statement. Things that every proprietary system will do and eventually disappear. I have all email I've wanted to preserve back into about 1990 and I can read it just the same as back then. I will, guaranteed, be able to continue to access it with no change for as long as I live. No proprietary app will ever come close to matching this longevity. Because it is an open standard I own my entire pipeline. I can receive, send, filter, script, trigger on content, automate.. there are no limits. It's my data. I centralize everything to email. RSS goes to email, sites I scrape go to email, signal goes to email. If I can't pipe it to email somehow, I don't really have the time to deal with that kind of special snowflake. Email me. Email is the unix pipe of communication, infinitely flexible to taste.
- jbverschoor 6y ago
  Email is async, distributed, offline first, nobody controls the complete platform. What is needed to fix email is to have structured messages, which can better be automated. Either on the MUA or MDA. But exactly this standardization of message structures is something that won't happen anymore... It's not the '90s anymore
  - ddingus 6y ago
    "Fix" Fix what again?
    - lucideer 6y ago
      Fix the constant desire of everyone to re-invent/move away from & generally denounce email as a platform. If you think email is perfect as it is, you're living in a bubble and are ignoring the pains of countless people. You may have an email setup that works perfectly for your needs, but if it was easy for everyone to have the same, no-one would be trying to re-invent it.
DyslexicAtheist 6y ago
second that. today I'm no longer integrated into the workflow of a "modern dev team" but the last time I was they forced us to communicate on Slack. If I'd have to work in such a distraction-tread-mill I'd be one very unhappy camper. It's not that Slack alone is terrible but how orgs these days expect devs to use it. Some companies I've been at they made their teams announce in the main channel whenever somebody went for a break or when they got back. That's fun with 3 people but god forbid you're working with bigger groups and end up forgetting to enter that you've gone for a dump. I first thought it was only one place that has jumped the shark on common sense, but no, it's every other company since 2016 that thinks it's a great way to communicate. email or nothing for me. Or pick up the phone (boomer!) or video call me if it's really that important. the 50 additional more ways to hassle me can F right off lol
- jjav 6y ago
  > If I'd have to work in such a distraction-tread-mill I'd be one very unhappy camper. Slack is quite the productivity destroyer if you let it. I turn of all notifications and let it forward any direct mentions to email. Fortunately that works. So if anyone calls on me I'll see it in email. Aside from that, I only read the slack channels twice a day, morning and evening and close the tab the rest of the day. If the world is on fire, email me. Otherwise I'll see your slack chat tonight.
- selfhoster11 6y ago
  Slack can be truly overwhelming within some companies (ask me about it, I can go on for hours about it), but the very idea of ignoring reams of email signatures and no proper threading in email makes me shudder about using it in a work setting. I'd rather take Slack than that.
mixcocam 6y ago
What email clients are using that produce all these rainbows and lollipops?! I need to get in on that!
herbst 6y ago
Email, as in the protocol, only appears robust because of all the qirks. Essentially you cant build email infrastructure 100% after RFC and expect it to work in the real world.
- twobitshifter 6y ago
  Is that because of RFC being incomplete or because other people started mangling messages?
pacifika 6y ago
>Ok, so what is there really to disrupt? Onboarding a new person into an existing discussion
- ddingus 6y ago
  I must say, that is a non problem in my experience. Worst case, I talk to them, done, next.
voisin 6y ago
> USENET is another one, but well out of favor. Fact is, someone could spiff USENET up and it could very easily come back. Reddit?
- KirillPanov 6y ago
  Usenet was decentralized. Usenet didn't fight you if you wanted to scrape all of it. In fact, it encouraged that. Usenet didn't require crappy "API tokens" in order to automate your interactions with it or bring your own user agent... in fact, you had to bring your own user agent; that was the only way to use it. The only thing Reddit has in common with Usenet is good support for threaded discussions.
  - selfhoster11 6y ago
    Reddit is not that bad with regards to scraping. You can append `.json` to any URL and it will return a JSON representation of this page: https://www.reddit.com/.json https://www.reddit.com/.json As for API tokens, that's unfortunately just the current trend of basically every other site with user-generated content. It's unfair to single out Reddit in particular when nearly everyone else does this too.
    - KirillPanov 6y ago
      > As for API tokens, that's unfortunately just the current trend of basically every other site with user-generated content. Totally hilarious that you posted this on a discussion site whose API doesn't require tokens. https://github.com/HackerNews/API https://github.com/HackerNews/API
e12e 6y ago
> USENET is another one, but well out of favor. Fact is, someone could spiff USENET up and it could very easily come back. Fwiw this does seem to work pretty well: https://forum.dlang.org/help https://forum.dlang.org/help > About > This website is powered by DFeed, an NNTP / mailing list web frontend / forum software, news aggregator and IRC bot. DFeed was written mostly by Vladimir Panteleev. The source code is available under the GNU Affero General Public License on GitHub: https://github.com/CyberShadow/DFeed https://github.com/CyberShadow/DFeed > This DFeed instance (forum.dlang.org) is a frontend to the DigitalMars NNTP server and mailing lists. Portions of the web interface (including style and graphics) are Copyright © by Digital Mars. I've looked at dfeed a couple of times, but it seems just a little bit convoluted to set up - and I wouldn't really want an irc integration. But the web forum is snappy and the NNTP integration seems like a great idea.
- criddell 6y ago
  I think sites like Reddit are the modern version of Usenet. The subreddits aren't hierarchical, but I'm not sure that matters. The clear problem with that is the lack of federation, but I don't think users generally care about that.
  - e12e 6y ago
    > I think sites like Reddit are the modern version of Usenet. Closed, propiatary, with separate ux/client for every silo? They are not usenet in any meaningful way. They're more like bbs forums in a world were there was no improvements made, and the internet never happened. The only thing (most) have, is that for traffic purposes they allow spiders like Google and Bing to enable federated search. But there are variants like Instagram that allow search, but force login - and things like Facebook groups, that are opaque. The ux of most forums (including hn) is terrible. HNs one saving grâce is that it's simple (as it should be). I don't mean to jump on you; I get that things like reddit is a place were all people can exchange messages - but I don't think that makes it modern usenet. Just like mailing lists were/are not usenet.
    - ddingus 6y ago
lucideer 6y ago
Out of interest, what email client(s) do you use? I want to love email (I do love the platform) but I've just struggled to find a UI that I don't battle with. Especially one/some that work similarly across different devices.
- ddingus 6y ago
  I use outlook and the gmail web interface mostly. Having used so damn many UX'es, I do not generally struggle. They work how they work. Basics are not hard. I rarely use more than basics anyway. I quit trying for that perfect fit years ago. Thing is it will get changed. So why bother? Much easier to adapt and become quick to grok whatever paradigm, flow is there and get back to whatever else I am thinking about. I have used Thunderbird and would again in a pinch. Like that one.
  - lucideer 6y ago
    I haven't used Outlook, and it was my next port of call. I've used Thunderbird but I've been frustrated by it's "core" handling of mail threading (there's an extension but it doesn't integrate well with any of Thunderbird's other features, largely because it's trying to do things not envisaged by Thunderbird's addons APIs). > They work how they work. Basics are not hard. I rarely use more than basics anyway. I would normally agree but I'm using macOS Mail currently and it brings new definition to the word "basics". It's missing some pretty obvious things. > the gmail web interface I'm in web interfaces pretty often and I really like Fastmail's: strongly considering switching to use it's web UI everywhere and forgo local clients completely. I've found Gmail's usable but sluggish, which gets painful if you receive a lot of mail.
    - ddingus 6y ago
      I agree with gmail now sluggish. At one time, 800ms! Today? Seconds. I use it for personal and to search my body of pro emails forwarded to an account for that purpose. Too bad about macOS mail. I need to look at FastMail. Outlook, like the rest of the Microsoft Office programs, is craptastic! It will do what you want. You will enjoy doing it less than you want, and it will generally remain worth it to do what you want. Web only email is killer. I did that for many years. The big thing with Outlook and exchange is business calendar integration. MS has a good solution. Forward to gmail and I get Android calendar copies for essentially free and low hassle. I do enough sales related work to justify Outlook. I do not like Microsoft mobile apps much at all. On Android at least. Edit: I fought with / against Outlook for years. When I finally said, "fuck it" and used it for business, I found when I do not invest much, I do not risk much and have been happy ever since. I just don't want to think about it all that much. The contents of those emails are what I want to think about and so that's where my focus is.
tofukid 6y ago
I agree, and I think there’s only one thing email lacks: end-to-end encryption. I’m unsettled by an unknown sysadmin accessing my life’s emails.
habibur 6y ago
Decentralization was the key. There was no central server then. It was all data sync from one server to another on request and it worked well.

joshspankit 6y ago

Slack exploded on the scene with a refresh of IRC. USENET could come back with a proper refresh.

ddingus 6y ago
I hate Slack. Unlike IRC, it is too much. And it is thick. Many do not though, your point is good. I love email because I rarely have to think about it. Thought is action. Same with IRC.
- joshspankit 6y ago
  Like, to be fair: Many people don’t know how lean and thin IRC is, they are just happy that they get flexible channels for group communication. But those who know, know. I also feel like I dug in to the original code for Slack and it literally was an IRC client.
  - ddingus 6y ago
    Totally.
qbasic_forever 6y ago
Aren't Slack's threaded conversations basically a new take on usenet? It's not distributed, and silo'ed of course.. but it's the same idea if you squint.
- ddingus 6y ago
  Same sort of flow, sort of. Not distributed and siloed are very big differences.
- jjav 6y ago
  > It's not distributed, and silo'ed of course.. But that's the key. Can I write my own slack client to automate everything just the way I want to, relying only on standard APIs that cannot go away?
saberdancer 6y ago
Wouldn't USENET be Reddit? Various subreddits, async communication, sharing of stuff. User accounts. Only major difference (and it is a big one) is voting. I must admit I never realized Slack is IRC. It makes perfect sense.
- LinuxBender 6y ago
  In my opinion there is no need for voting on usenet. You can reply to anyone or ignore anyone. No global echo chambers, no global moderation beyond removing illegal content on a specific provider or filtering a usenet group on a specific provider. If you had a group of like-minded friends that wanted to ignore specific ways of thinking, then you could all contribute to your own group specific ignore-list. Corporations have no financial incentive to build around usenet for this reason, as they have zero control over the client.
krageon 6y ago
> proper refresh. If it gets a "refresh" the way slack murdered IRC for work, I hope it never does. While were at it, slack can go straight into a volcano. Any value it adds over IRC is A. marginal and B. not work-relevant (because you can't upload anything containing sensitive data there, bearing in mind what it is...).
- encryptluks2 6y ago
  Usenet is more similar to a group mailing list, so hopefully they aren't talking about "refreshing" it to be like Slack.
- herbst 6y ago
  How would work related IRC work in practice? Everyone running their own bots so you dont miss messages? You also need a bot for push notifications, as well as one for mirroring. Also a custom solution for file sharing. I know its part of the fun. However it does not sound suitable for a work environment.
  - krageon 6y ago
    We used to have a centralised bouncer that both fixed push notifications as well as transparent history and presence (i.e. automatic away). File sharing has been part of literally every client for so long I don't know what you want me to say about that. It works, it's p2p. What more is there?
    - c0l0 6y ago
      $oldjob had that too, and it worked really well for most people - tech and business alike. I like IRC because it makes you focus on what really matters instead of some sort of seamless Giphy or Wikipedia "rich"-content integration. It's sufficiently async to not bother me at all times, and I can interact with it programmatically very, very easily. Also, due to its rigidly ephemeral nature (ultimately depending on your personal preference of course, but the default for most clients these days - and opposed to something like Teams, which seems to store everything forever), it nudges its users to use a more suitable, more permanent medium to capture information that is to be persisted. It's clearly a different kind of animal than a wiki or an email archive/mailing list, whereas new "alternatives to email"-tools like Slack, Teams and their ilk are anything and everything in-between, which causes "now where the hell did I read that thing about that other thing..."-syndrome for me.
encryptluks2 6y ago
The biggest issue with Usenet was spam. NNTP is an open protocol. It is supported in quite a few email clients. Have you tried Pan?
swiley 6y ago
If the Usenet refresh is anything like slack I certainly won't use it.

ROARosen 6y ago

DISCLAIMER: To all chat-app haters, my point is that the user experience of these newfangled services is just much better, o course I'm not taking into acct all the very real concerns stemming rom these apps. Since your talking about user experience, (not mentioning privacy, security, etc.). How is email better in terms of usability than say Telegram or any other app. Which keep every chat you've ever had. You can "Save" chats for yourself for later. You can have usenet-style conversations in huge mega-groups. You can follow the latest news from channels just like RSS. All without needing to keep the data downloaded on your device, and backed up in the cloud. Basically all those separate services you mention (with separate software required to be downloaded to view them) are rolled into in any one-stop-shop chat app. Oh, and it also has phone and video calls too.

ddingus 6y ago
I like Telegram a lot. Has merit in the ways you mention, and it is pretty lean, not too much going on, not pushy either. None of this replaces email. A big one is I am not sure I will have every Telegram chat I received a decade or two from now, and I will have all my email. Another is everyone uses email. Not everyone uses other apps. So far Telegram is entertainment only. That is fine. Email can act like chat, chat is not email. I very strongly disagree with better. Different? Yup. More experiences possible? Yup. But not better. Email is killer. And it is not hard, is time tested, production proven, near ubiquitous. UX is bang on simple, and I hardly ever think about it. "Better" needs some reevaluation to be frank. I see a general failure to understand why email is great. That means a claim of better UX may make very little sense.
- leephillips 6y ago
  I agree about email. And the main thing, and what distinguishes it from Telegram, etc., is that it is a protocol, not an app. You can use any client you want, or write your own.
  - Jiocus 6y ago
    Telegram is one of the few messengers that actually enables you to use any Telegram client available, or write your own[1]. The protocol that is de facto Telegram is called MProto[2], and is publicly available. § [1]: https://telegram.org/apps https://telegram.org/apps [2]: https://core.telegram.org/mtproto https://core.telegram.org/mtproto § edit: The main difference between email and Telegram, is that anyone can host email servers, while Telegram manages theirs. edit2: MProto being widely available to study, one could perhaps reverse-engineer their own server - but that hasn't been a desire to accomplish this from what I can see. Much of the value-proposal of Telegram is their Service as a whole.

qbasic_forever 6y ago

Google Reader made RSS feel just like Gmail (which isn't the same as email in general I will agree, but close enough for many people). It was fast, dense, and easy to scan days and weeks of content in a single sitting. I'm _still_ mad they gave it the axe so Vic Gundotra could juice the numbers on failing Google+.

atemerev 6y ago
Well, RSS stands against the entire Google’s business model, so the Reader was doomed from the start. Google later went all in to discredit and eliminate the entire idea of feeds and aggregators, as it was dangerous for its business, which required maximizing users engagement and removing their ability to skip ads.

mbirth 6y ago

Sounds like you'll really like DeltaChat: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25893626 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25893626

loraxclient 6y ago

In the past I’ve felt the opposite of your sentiment. I’ve found my email to be unwieldy. I’ve felt like I have to apply constant hygiene and maintenance to keep it from becoming useless. Checking out on an e-commerce site, trying out a new tool, registering a free trial...these are things I guess I do frequently enough that it seems to doom me to sort and sift through noise. I know the common solutions are a good set of filtering rules or separate emails/aliases. I lean toward the latter and it’a definitely helped but I still find it all a bit of a pain and time sink. That said, you make a nice case for it and I can definitely identify with some of the ‘zen’ of email you’re describing. I feel like I’ve tried every email client out there, but is there some solution I haven’t thought of of where I get a friendly GUI but can configure mail filtering in code (i.e something I can keep in git) rather than clicking around? I’ve toyed with ideas of bundling by sender - or quietly placing new senders into their own ‘message requests’ type bin for me to approve or deny. Or some kind of intelligence for identifying, for example, a receipt or confirmation email (which I want indexed) vs a promotional email from the same vendor (which I do not).

pudmaidai 6y ago
1. Mark them all as spam. I never accept newsletters so I will consider every newsletter email as spam. They don't last much in my inbox. 2. Try inbox zero and just archive emails aggressively directly from your phone’s notification without even opening email. My inbox currently has 10 emails that one day I'll get to and the rest of spam and transactional email is just gone from view within the hour or day. I wish I could have an "important" and a "transactional" email view, but that's not going to happen without a lot of work, so email search still sucks.
- jjav 6y ago
  > so email search still sucks Email is a standard set of protocols and wire formats. So it doesn't make sense to say email search sucks. If your email client doesn't support satisfactory search, switch clients. Which you can do because it's a standard, not a proprietary app.
  - 6y ago

jjav 6y ago

> Unlike just about every other thing I have loved, it will be there, and I will not have to think about it much. It is awful nice to have something be that way. Well said. Email is the universal killer app for perpetuity. And the lesson here is that it is so because nobody owns it, we all own it. It can't go bankrupt, it can't pivot to be something else, it can't lose all its best features when a new product manager is promoted and wants to make a statement. Things that every proprietary system will do and eventually disappear. I have all email I've wanted to preserve back into about 1990 and I can read it just the same as back then. I will, guaranteed, be able to continue to access it with no change for as long as I live. No proprietary app will ever come close to matching this longevity. Because it is an open standard I own my entire pipeline. I can receive, send, filter, script, trigger on content, automate.. there are no limits. It's my data. I centralize everything to email. RSS goes to email, sites I scrape go to email, signal goes to email. If I can't pipe it to email somehow, I don't really have the time to deal with that kind of special snowflake. Email me. Email is the unix pipe of communication, infinitely flexible to taste.

jbverschoor 6y ago
Email is async, distributed, offline first, nobody controls the complete platform. What is needed to fix email is to have structured messages, which can better be automated. Either on the MUA or MDA. But exactly this standardization of message structures is something that won't happen anymore... It's not the '90s anymore
- ddingus 6y ago
  "Fix" Fix what again?
  - lucideer 6y ago
    Fix the constant desire of everyone to re-invent/move away from & generally denounce email as a platform. If you think email is perfect as it is, you're living in a bubble and are ignoring the pains of countless people. You may have an email setup that works perfectly for your needs, but if it was easy for everyone to have the same, no-one would be trying to re-invent it.

DyslexicAtheist 6y ago

second that. today I'm no longer integrated into the workflow of a "modern dev team" but the last time I was they forced us to communicate on Slack. If I'd have to work in such a distraction-tread-mill I'd be one very unhappy camper. It's not that Slack alone is terrible but how orgs these days expect devs to use it. Some companies I've been at they made their teams announce in the main channel whenever somebody went for a break or when they got back. That's fun with 3 people but god forbid you're working with bigger groups and end up forgetting to enter that you've gone for a dump. I first thought it was only one place that has jumped the shark on common sense, but no, it's every other company since 2016 that thinks it's a great way to communicate. email or nothing for me. Or pick up the phone (boomer!) or video call me if it's really that important. the 50 additional more ways to hassle me can F right off lol

jjav 6y ago
> If I'd have to work in such a distraction-tread-mill I'd be one very unhappy camper. Slack is quite the productivity destroyer if you let it. I turn of all notifications and let it forward any direct mentions to email. Fortunately that works. So if anyone calls on me I'll see it in email. Aside from that, I only read the slack channels twice a day, morning and evening and close the tab the rest of the day. If the world is on fire, email me. Otherwise I'll see your slack chat tonight.
selfhoster11 6y ago
Slack can be truly overwhelming within some companies (ask me about it, I can go on for hours about it), but the very idea of ignoring reams of email signatures and no proper threading in email makes me shudder about using it in a work setting. I'd rather take Slack than that.

mixcocam 6y ago

What email clients are using that produce all these rainbows and lollipops?! I need to get in on that!

herbst 6y ago

Email, as in the protocol, only appears robust because of all the qirks. Essentially you cant build email infrastructure 100% after RFC and expect it to work in the real world.

twobitshifter 6y ago
Is that because of RFC being incomplete or because other people started mangling messages?

pacifika 6y ago

>Ok, so what is there really to disrupt? Onboarding a new person into an existing discussion

ddingus 6y ago
I must say, that is a non problem in my experience. Worst case, I talk to them, done, next.

voisin 6y ago

> USENET is another one, but well out of favor. Fact is, someone could spiff USENET up and it could very easily come back. Reddit?

KirillPanov 6y ago
Usenet was decentralized. Usenet didn't fight you if you wanted to scrape all of it. In fact, it encouraged that. Usenet didn't require crappy "API tokens" in order to automate your interactions with it or bring your own user agent... in fact, you had to bring your own user agent; that was the only way to use it. The only thing Reddit has in common with Usenet is good support for threaded discussions.
- selfhoster11 6y ago
  Reddit is not that bad with regards to scraping. You can append `.json` to any URL and it will return a JSON representation of this page: https://www.reddit.com/.json https://www.reddit.com/.json As for API tokens, that's unfortunately just the current trend of basically every other site with user-generated content. It's unfair to single out Reddit in particular when nearly everyone else does this too.
  - KirillPanov 6y ago
    > As for API tokens, that's unfortunately just the current trend of basically every other site with user-generated content. Totally hilarious that you posted this on a discussion site whose API doesn't require tokens. https://github.com/HackerNews/API https://github.com/HackerNews/API

e12e 6y ago

> USENET is another one, but well out of favor. Fact is, someone could spiff USENET up and it could very easily come back. Fwiw this does seem to work pretty well: https://forum.dlang.org/help https://forum.dlang.org/help > About > This website is powered by DFeed, an NNTP / mailing list web frontend / forum software, news aggregator and IRC bot. DFeed was written mostly by Vladimir Panteleev. The source code is available under the GNU Affero General Public License on GitHub: https://github.com/CyberShadow/DFeed https://github.com/CyberShadow/DFeed > This DFeed instance (forum.dlang.org) is a frontend to the DigitalMars NNTP server and mailing lists. Portions of the web interface (including style and graphics) are Copyright © by Digital Mars. I've looked at dfeed a couple of times, but it seems just a little bit convoluted to set up - and I wouldn't really want an irc integration. But the web forum is snappy and the NNTP integration seems like a great idea.

criddell 6y ago
I think sites like Reddit are the modern version of Usenet. The subreddits aren't hierarchical, but I'm not sure that matters. The clear problem with that is the lack of federation, but I don't think users generally care about that.
- e12e 6y ago
  > I think sites like Reddit are the modern version of Usenet. Closed, propiatary, with separate ux/client for every silo? They are not usenet in any meaningful way. They're more like bbs forums in a world were there was no improvements made, and the internet never happened. The only thing (most) have, is that for traffic purposes they allow spiders like Google and Bing to enable federated search. But there are variants like Instagram that allow search, but force login - and things like Facebook groups, that are opaque. The ux of most forums (including hn) is terrible. HNs one saving grâce is that it's simple (as it should be). I don't mean to jump on you; I get that things like reddit is a place were all people can exchange messages - but I don't think that makes it modern usenet. Just like mailing lists were/are not usenet.
  - ddingus 6y ago

lucideer 6y ago

Out of interest, what email client(s) do you use? I want to love email (I do love the platform) but I've just struggled to find a UI that I don't battle with. Especially one/some that work similarly across different devices.

ddingus 6y ago
I use outlook and the gmail web interface mostly. Having used so damn many UX'es, I do not generally struggle. They work how they work. Basics are not hard. I rarely use more than basics anyway. I quit trying for that perfect fit years ago. Thing is it will get changed. So why bother? Much easier to adapt and become quick to grok whatever paradigm, flow is there and get back to whatever else I am thinking about. I have used Thunderbird and would again in a pinch. Like that one.
- lucideer 6y ago
  I haven't used Outlook, and it was my next port of call. I've used Thunderbird but I've been frustrated by it's "core" handling of mail threading (there's an extension but it doesn't integrate well with any of Thunderbird's other features, largely because it's trying to do things not envisaged by Thunderbird's addons APIs). > They work how they work. Basics are not hard. I rarely use more than basics anyway. I would normally agree but I'm using macOS Mail currently and it brings new definition to the word "basics". It's missing some pretty obvious things. > the gmail web interface I'm in web interfaces pretty often and I really like Fastmail's: strongly considering switching to use it's web UI everywhere and forgo local clients completely. I've found Gmail's usable but sluggish, which gets painful if you receive a lot of mail.
  - ddingus 6y ago
    I agree with gmail now sluggish. At one time, 800ms! Today? Seconds. I use it for personal and to search my body of pro emails forwarded to an account for that purpose. Too bad about macOS mail. I need to look at FastMail. Outlook, like the rest of the Microsoft Office programs, is craptastic! It will do what you want. You will enjoy doing it less than you want, and it will generally remain worth it to do what you want. Web only email is killer. I did that for many years. The big thing with Outlook and exchange is business calendar integration. MS has a good solution. Forward to gmail and I get Android calendar copies for essentially free and low hassle. I do enough sales related work to justify Outlook. I do not like Microsoft mobile apps much at all. On Android at least. Edit: I fought with / against Outlook for years. When I finally said, "fuck it" and used it for business, I found when I do not invest much, I do not risk much and have been happy ever since. I just don't want to think about it all that much. The contents of those emails are what I want to think about and so that's where my focus is.

tofukid 6y ago

I agree, and I think there’s only one thing email lacks: end-to-end encryption. I’m unsettled by an unknown sysadmin accessing my life’s emails.

habibur 6y ago

Decentralization was the key. There was no central server then. It was all data sync from one server to another on request and it worked well.