14 ms·

I'll give you an up-vote because I think a variety of different viewpoints is important, but I'm very much in the e-mail camp. My biggest reason is simply: it's

• peterpost2 5y ago
  You really can't run your on email server nowadays though, you need to have been running one for several decades otherwise the email common email providers(gmail, outlook) will automatically just assume its spam. Also due to the way extensions added to the email protocol configuring and learning how to properly configure it so it gets accepted will be a dayjob.
  • edmundsauto 5y ago
    This isn’t universally true, although your broader point (it could change at any time!) is a risk. As a data point, I have run my own email servers for years. Both professionally (couple million transactional emails per year) and for my personal. If you follow best practices (which is a pain to setup!), deliver ability is generally on par with other providers, unless you got unlucky and got a bad IP.
    • dqv 5y ago
      Mailinabox is a great package that makes the best practices very easy. I always recommend it or similar packages.
      • mcbishop 5y ago
        This looks awesome, thanks.
    • fiddlerwoaroof 5y ago
      This is my experience too: there are a couple providers that are more difficult (Verizon, iirc), but I’ve never found a personal email server much of a hassle to maintain.
      • boplicity 5y ago
        I run my own email server, and have for many years. More recently, Verizon/Aol/Yahoo have been a pain in the butt for our larger email lists, even though we run a very clean operation. Still, our deliverability is, on the whole, better than through the much more expensive providers, such as Mailchimp.
        • jesterson 5y ago
          I second that. Around 10 years ago it did consumed some time to set up everything, but since then I didn't touch it at all. Much better and more flexible than any proprietary mail system.
        • _blu 5y ago
          I've recently given up on running my own email server and changed to postmark. The deliverability has gone up, but most importantly I spend less time managing it.
          • boplicity 5y ago
            Postmark would cost us around $10k a year. I spend maybe 10 to 20 hours in a year dealing with the server and deliverability issues. It's not clear to me that Postmark could improve our deliverability much either, as it is already pretty good. How much did it improve for you?
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • gsich 5y ago
    You still can. The main and most important thing is to have a clean IP. So no major cloud provider who reuse IPs.
  • edoceo 5y ago
    I just switched my long running SMTP to a new IP. I've got SPF, DKIM and DMARC all dialed in. I'm not getting tagged as spam. Even when I add new domains to this host for sending - still gets through to G, Y and MS based services.
    • throwawayboise 5y ago
      As SPF, DKIM and DMARC have become more widely implemented, is IP reputation less of a factor than it used to be in spam detection algorithms? This is just my speculation, but it seems plausible.
      • edoceo 5y ago
        I don't know. But a) I'm low volume and no list services and b) I checked my IPs against the BL before setting up the VMs. I still believe the terror-tales of trying to get an IP off them. My own spam filters still use them.
      • megous 5y ago
        Why would it be less of a factor? These things don't prevent spam. I can create a proper mail server with all these and send billion messages from it wherever I like. These technologies prevent various kinds of forgeries. Quick look at my archive, of 37k spams only 7k fails SPF. (I accept all email no matter what.) So it's some signal, but not nearly enough.
        • habibur 5y ago
          SPF will pass if there is no SPF record in the domain. Which most probably is the case for most. Look for DKIM. Either it's signed and pass. Or spam if DKIM is missing. You can filter a lot more this way.
        • account42 5y ago
          > These technologies prevent various kinds of forgeries. Preventing forgeries is what allows the trust to be based on the domain/address rather than the IP.
  • rubatuga 5y ago
    If you want clean IPs for self-hosting a mail server, you can use a service we created called Hoppy Network: https://hoppy.network https://hoppy.network Our IP addresses are not on any blacklists, and we don't block SMTP or mail ports.
    • znpy 5y ago
      that's very interesting, thanks!
    • zelly 5y ago
      for now rubs hands
    • squiggleblaz 5y ago
      I also just found out about a service called Tailscale (maybe 30 mins ago). It's not a field I have investigated but both your services and theirs sounded vaguely useful for some problems I'm having. Are they somewhat similar? It sounds like I could solve the same problems in perhaps two different ways.
      • gilbertbw 5y ago
        I think they are pretty different, just both using the same underlying protocol. Tailscale (which we have been using to great effect over the last year or so) provides effectively a 'LAN' where the devices can be anywhere. It provides you with a second interface in the 100.x.x.x range. You can trust that any traffic from that range has been authenticated to connect to your Tailscale network. Hoppy (as I understand it, I've never used it) is more solving the issue of getting a static IP assigned, with the advantage of it following your device if it moves between networks. You get a second interface that is publicly visible, but can't trust traffic coming in from it.
  • dqv 5y ago
    The only “common” email provider that has given me problems is Zoho. They’re annoying and do not respond on their mailer daemon email or whatever. I tell people we can’t correspond if they use Zoho and no one has had a problem with that yet.
  • leephillips 5y ago
    This is a recurrent FUD dropping. I’ve run my own for about 15 years and it works. Occasional mails get sent to spam by Gmail, but that can happen if you use a big provider, too. Take an hour to set up DKIM, etc., and you should be OK.
    • jjav 5y ago
      > Occasional mails get sent to spam by Gmail, but that can happen if you use a big provider, too. In fact it'll happen even when you send from gmail to gmail itself! My deliverability from my own email server to gmail feels better than from my company account (on gmail) to gmail users.
  • bradjohnson 5y ago
    I want to throw my hat in here because there are plenty of the "works for me" crowd. I've run a personal mail server for the last 5 or so years and I have SPF, DKIM, DMARC setup correctly, get 10/10 for mail-tester.com and get graded "not spam" for all the other spam tester sites. Spam Assassin loves me and I have a .com mail server. I can land more or less into personal emails (occasionally I get filtered into spam), but when it comes to corporate emails I pretty much get /dev/nulled each time and can't even land into a spam folder. I can't give out my personal email as a point of contact and have to use my gmail or protonmail instead. I've all but given up on owning my own email because the protocol has effectively made it impossible to reliably land mail in a mailbox if you don't have a certain amount of outbound mail traffic.
    • kureikain 5y ago
      did you send to gmail/hotmail/icloud? hotmail and icloud are very sensitive and if IP isn't reach a certain reputation(mail volume+age) it's easiser to land on spam even SPF/DKIM/DMARC are passed. But if the recipient interact with sender(mark as non spam, send a reply) then moving forward email send from that won't be flag as spam anymore. So their spam filtering is kind of weak and they used previous interaction as a signal. gmail, on other hand is rock solid. They have their own false positive obviously but they are rock solid in term of not relying on IP reputation(or less). They are smarte and righfully land your legitimate email on inbox even an email come from a spammy IP.
      • bradjohnson 5y ago
        I've not tried icloud, but for personal email addresses that I have tried (gmail, outlook, hotmail, protonmail) I've not had many problems landing in inboxes. For corporate mailservers I almost always have trouble even getting beyond the mail filtering solution. Microsoft EOP (which seems to be the most ubiquitous) will basically blackhole any mail I send without telling me.
  • selfhoster11 5y ago
    Not true. With some effort, it's possible to set up a pre-made email server script like Mail-in-a-Box or Mailcow and make sure its reputation is clean enough to send and receive email from the big providers like Outlook, Gmail and Yahoo. It's much easier these days. The ecosystem has gotten more complicated, but the community has put in a lot of effort into automating that complexity away.
• tkzed49 5y ago
  That makes sense in principle, but in practice I think this is a case where the technology is eventually going to have to meet the real world needs and not the other way around; email just doesn't match typical patterns of personal communication in my experience.
• babypuncher 5y ago
  It's fine to want all your communication on an open protocol, but email is just plain clunky and not good at all for the types of online communication people have grown accustomed to. It literally is just an electronic equivalent of sending a letter, and inherits most of the limitations that implies. If any of us are ever going to convince friends and family to leave proprietary platforms like Messenger and Discord, we are going to need an open protocol that allows for the same features and level of polish. Trying to get everyone to just use email is a complete non-starter.
  • addicted 5y ago
    Both Google and MS created excellent IM systems based on email. It can be done. It isn’t because there is no billion dollar exit possible on an email based system.
    • atatatat 5y ago
      What IM systems are you referring to..?
      • stephenhuey 5y ago
        Pretty sure he's talking about the original chat embedded in the Gmail interface. The earliest records I can find in my logs are from February 2006. For at least 7 years I used it, and for many years my usage was quite extensive. Either due to changed preferences when I got older or iMessage or other things, it looks like I generally stopped chatting in there around May 2013. From my perspective, Google was sitting on a gold mine because so many people I knew in the USA and across the ocean were using it and it worked very well until they started fiddling with the product in ways that made it more clunky.
  • chii 5y ago
    > It literally is just an electronic equivalent of sending a letter, and inherits most of the limitations that implies that's not giving email enough credit. Email has zero limitations unlike real snail mail - the email client is the limitation, and that's "just" software. The fact that gmail client was so successful is evidence that email could've been _the_ premiere platform for open communication. Instead, we now have many separate walled gardens vying for dominance. Imagine how the world would've been if snail mail back in the 20th century needed different stamps for different recipients!
• paxys 5y ago
  Signal is an open protocol and supports E2E encrypted text, voice and video.
  • znpy 5y ago
    wasn't signal shutting down alternative clients or something?
    • atatatat 5y ago
      Just the ones connecting to their servers.
      • deadbunny 5y ago
        The servers the vast majority of other users connect to.
  • pseudalopex 5y ago
    There were 2 important adjectives before open.
    • paxys 5y ago
      What about secure and encrypted, which I feel are even more important adjectives?
      • pseudalopex 5y ago
        I think they're important too. But it isn't responsive to what they said.
  • jjav 5y ago
    > Signal is an open protocol and supports E2E encrypted text, voice and video. It's open in name but proprietary. How many competing open source clients exist? Right. Also, it's extremely limited like every other proprietary system, by the fact that the client is proprietary and thus can only do what they feel like supporting. How do I pipe incoming signal messages to a script which will process it in ways I like? How do I programmatically send messages based on the output of other scripts? And so on. All this is trivially easy functionality with email because it is an open protocol.
• nonameiguess 5y ago
  Old-school snail mail and voice telephony are just as open, distributed, and ubiquitous. The delivery channel providers are centralized, but that is just as true of email. Hosting your own server means nothing without an ISP. That said, I think all three methods of communication feel obsolete and useless to me for the same reason, they're drowned out by marketing chatter. The one nice effect of the recent real estate bubble is I've effectively divorced from even using a phone. I don't even move it from the counter most of the time and don't take it with me when I leave the house. It's like 1995 all over again, but if I have it with me, it's a non-stop cacophony of people claiming to have heard from a friend of a friend that I want to unload a house. Email is no better. Every single company I have ever conducted even the slighest and smallest transaction with suddenly thinks I want to know everything that ever happens with their products and offers. Regular mail is 99% re-fi offers from obscure mortgage providers I've never heard of. Massive scale direct marketing is probably the worst thing to ever happen to remote communication between parties actually interested in communicating with each other, as the only practical way to do it now is pseudonymously through closed systems you never use to conduct real business with your real identity, to avoid being hounded by everyone who shares a constant contact account with someone you once gave a dollar to. Maybe it'll force us to actually interact in person again.
  • ticviking 5y ago
    I really want a way to take an old eve online thing of charging people who aren't a contact for the ability to ensure delivery. If I have a business relationship with someone I'll add them to my contact list. I assume they can do the same. Otherwise gimme see BAT or something for the spam
    • irowe 5y ago
      For a brief moment, there was a service (Earn.com/21.co) that did this. It was a company that had previously made a SoC mining rig for crypto and the pivoted to this thing where people would pay you to open their messages. Eventually it was overrun by spam messages from scammy crypto ICOs and there were conditions on payouts where you had to sign up for an external email list or register for an airdrop. I think they were bought and shut down by Coinbase.
• lhorie 5y ago
  If anything, I like email now because these days people in my circles only use it for informational purposes, which means no annoying chain messages, empty inspirational videos, Facebook conspiracies and their ilk. Also, unlike the unfiltered stream model of chat, you can organize emails into folders, delete useless ones and actually have a decent chance at finding past things via keyword search (because email subject lines). Paradoxically, email also has really good convo threading. In other words, email has high signal to noise ratio.
  • SubiculumCode 5y ago
    I agree. My work has both an unofficial slack and official email. Email is for the serious, no nonsense posts. Slack can have a mix, but with the understanding that it is more informal. We do not pay for slack, so this informality is enforced by the message/content being unavailable as we go on.
  • atatatat 5y ago
    conspiracy theories**
  • Siira 5y ago
    The last paragraph can be done with a good IM, such as Telegram, as it has not crippled itself to virtue signal E2E, and has functional cloud sync and search. I even forward my emails to it as it’s easier to organize them there.
    • warrenm 5y ago
      How do you forward email to Telegram?
      • kureikain 5y ago
        You can use a system like https://hanami.run https://hanami.run. It support forward to Telegram. FULL DISCLOSURE: I'm the founder
      • teitoklien 5y ago
• tempestn 5y ago
  Those are great aspects of email, and I certainly wouldn't want it to go away. But that doesn't mean it's the most effective or efficient tool for all use cases. Like the GP, our team switched to Slack some years back, and our email volume dropped to near zero, while quality of communication went way up.
• darau1 5y ago
  I really think all email needs is a fresh coat of paint. I believe the ruby on rails team worked on something like this, but I forget the name of the service
  • cwmartin 5y ago
    You’re probably thinking about Hey https://www.hey.com https://www.hey.com. The issue I see with it is that it goes beyond a refreshed interface and breaks IMAP compatibility.
    • darau1 5y ago
      Yes, that's what I was thinking of. What does it do wrong? I was actually thinking of signing up, but it is too expensive.
      • tomjen3 5y ago
        I considered it two, here are the things I think it gets wrong: * Can't use your own domain * Have to use their client * Can't add your old email The last one is a deal breaker. I have 10+ years of email that I still want to be able to search.
        • sswezey 5y ago
          As of a few weeks ago, you can use custom domains with Hey.
• solidasparagus 5y ago
  > I can interact with anybody with an e-mail address Why is that a good thing? My email is full of spam both literal and mundane (email notification from stuff I only occasionally care about like CI or products). My Messenger account has zero noise because I can't be contacted by companies - only friends I've chosen to let in.
  • waheoo 5y ago
    You can very, very easily filter email in the same way to get the same result. Just because companies haven't invaded WhatsApp yet doesn't mean they aren't trying, they are, and they already invaded everywhere else. Hell Facebook and Instagram is an advertisers wet dream.
    • solidasparagus 5y ago
      Not as easily as just using a tool that doesn't need any configuration to avoid spam. And it's disingenuous to say that email spam can just be filtered out to get an experience that is as spam-free as Messenger.
  • andrewzah 5y ago
    There’s nothing preventing you from automatically filtering those emails. All of my GitHub / CI emails go straight to a subfolder. All spam gets added to filters, etc. Depending on the registrar you use, you can set up a 2nd inbox or aliases for junk mail and filter anything that goes to those, etc.
    • solidasparagus 5y ago
      You're coming from a position that email is good and it's worth configuring it to work well. But I don't particularly like email. I have zero interest in setting up aliases or filters when the problem simply doesn't exist when I use a better tool.
      • vlunkr 5y ago
• mjgs 5y ago
  Your points are even more valid when you start to move to different counties. You quickly realise that people in other countries often don’t use the apps you are using, in fact you most likely won’t have heard of the apps they are using. But “everyone is using X” they will tell you, but you’ll have no way to know for sure. Are you really going to install every piece of software people say to install? At least with email, it just works and there are minimal security issues, and it’s an open protocol etc etc, even if it’s a bit old fashioned.
  • netheril96 5y ago
    > At least with email, it just works and there are minimal security issues, and it’s an open protocol etc etc, even if it’s a bit old fashioned. Here in China, most people only use email at work.
    • mjgs 5y ago
      In the countries I’ve been, people use all sorts of apps and each person is very shocked when you don’t have “the app” that everyone is using. And of course the fashions change over time, so app X is popular for a few years, then it’s app Y. It’s impossible to keep up with all these trends. Mostly people are able to email, even if it’s a bit unusual, and perhaps, like you say, mostly a work thing.
  • benhurmarcel 5y ago
    When you move to a new country that has a dominant messaging app, you can't avoid installing it without making your life a lot more difficult. And moving already makes your life difficult enough.
    • mjgs 5y ago
      The real question though is how you determine the “dominant app”, that’s really not that obvious, especially when you don’t speak the local language. Long term you might be right, installing an app would be beneficial, but in the short term it’s a lot safer to just use email.
• opan 5y ago
  XMPP is having a resurgence with OMEMO being added to clients and some new clients (Dino) being made. However, I'm not sure if it will ever be the popular thing even among the free software options. We have Matrix now, and although most clients are lacking and it can be laggy, in 5 years it will probably be pretty good. I'm especially excited about their P2P work which sounds like it'll allow account migrations, offline messages to nearby people via bluetooth or LAN, etc. I switched from primarily using a matrix.org account to using one on a smaller server after the big matrix.org hack a few years back. However, my main server is now incredibly bad. I get messages out of order, it goes offline a lot, etc. I don't want to lose my contact list and history again, so I'm kind of holding out for the option to change homeservers/have multiple/have none. It's also annoying how incredibly few Matrix clients support multiple accounts. I know of Quaternion and Neochat, but that's about it. Every XMPP client I've ever used supports multiple accounts. Dino did from version 0.1. I still use XMPP and IRC at the same time, but I have most IRL contacts only on Matrix. I think it'd be hard to get them all on XMPP as well, so I'm just enduring.
  • MattJ100 5y ago
    > However, I'm not sure if it will ever be the popular thing even among the free software options. I'm one of the many people actively working on XMPP projects. Is there something in particular that makes you think this? People often talk about XMPP in the past tense on HN. It's understandable, XMPP had a peak of popularity with the adoption of Google Talk, but Google being Google and shutting that down did not end XMPP. It continues to be active and growing.
    • kitkat_new 5y ago
      Check out Google Trends with XMPP
      • MattJ100 5y ago
        Can that predict the future? ;) I feel it's right that a protocol doesn't need to be in the general consciousness. See the even worse Google trend for SMTP, for example, despite email still being considered a growing network. I wrote a bit about protocols being for developers and not users at https://snikket.org/blog/products-vs-protocols/ https://snikket.org/blog/products-vs-protocols/
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]