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Email issues; - spam spam spam of the utterly firehose type - spam spam spam of the corporate "unsubscribe in these easy 10 steps" - attachment viruses (some

Email issues; - spam spam spam of the utterly firehose type - spam spam spam of the corporate "unsubscribe in these easy 10 steps" - attachment viruses (sometimes without you opening it!) - even conversation organization is inferior to searchable chat where it's just a history stream - email addresses obscure the users, chat apps are far better at this - email addresses are a PITA in general - no indication of being online - emoticons are still a bit iffy, certainly worse than chat - smartphone experience is far worse (could be bad clients... but...) - legally it's a paper trail, chat is... not? - attachments are not as smooth as chat, although it's a lot better than it used to be (drag n drop to browsers/clients are a LOT better) - chat clients can support "undeliver" a bit more easily That said, email is: - open standard - ubiquitous Email seems fundamentally broken because of lack of regulation, just like the POTS (plain old telephone) system is utterly overridden. And it would really really be nice if governments would make official email addresses for citizens for official communication and delivery. Or some means for me making money from incoming spam by charging a delivery fee. The fact there are so many email campaign startups still to this day is depressing. There is zero chance they aren't effectively keeping email unusable. So I guess that's another annoying aspect of email: it will always be attacked by corporations, ceaselessly. At least chat apps have corporate defenders (while they make you the product) but life is about choosing among non-ideal options.

Semaphor 4y ago
> - no indication of being online > - chat clients can support "undeliver" a bit more easily Features, not problems. > - email addresses obscure the users, chat apps are far better at this What? Funnily enough, my XMPP ID and main E-Mail happen to be exactly the same. > - even conversation organization is inferior to searchable chat where it's just a history stream That is the only one out of the list I actually agree with, though I think that could be fixed by clients.
raxxorraxor 4y ago
The lack of regulation and federated style is a huge plus. It provides a lot of advantages that people now just take for granted.
- AtlasBarfed 4y ago
  I agree, but for verifiable idenitity/formal comms with government, if they have a Postal Service, they should have an email service. Of course it would be swamped with spam, just like the snail mail is. Which is an absolute travesty.
  - account42 4y ago
    > Of course it would be swamped with spam, just like the snail mail is. Which is an absolute travesty. Snail mail is not swamped by spam everywhere BTW - that is just a regulation issue. The difference with E-Mail is that you can cheaply send them internationally (so from outside any regulation you control) but even then I think the spam problem is overblown.
account42 4y ago
> spam spam spam of the utterly firehose type I have > 5 domains on my mailserver, all with wildcard email going to my inbox and two addresses publicly on my website and in numerous git repositories and bug trackers. I do not have any server side spam filter except a manual subject regexp to filter reject the most lazy spam at submission time. Even that only means about 40-50 trashed mails per day (most of which are moved there automatically by Thunderbird's spam filter), which includes legit mail that I don't want to keep like notifications that I have subscribed to. It takes about no time to double check the subjects to look for false positives. Either your definition of firehose is vastly different from mine or you somehow get vastly more spam than me. Perhaps one factor might be that I don't have notifications for new mails at all since I check often enough and anyone who deserves my immediate attention has my phone number and/or jabber ID. > spam spam spam of the corporate "unsubscribe in these easy 10 steps" These are not a problem since they will keep using the same sender address. Reject at submission if you run the server, filter automatically to trash otherwise. Most will eventually get the hint if you never load their tracking pixels. If you want, report them to their host/mail provider. Corporate spam is only annoying if you do nothing at all about it. > attachment viruses (sometimes without you opening it!) Meh, the web has the same "problem". > email addresses obscure the users, chat apps are far better at this Good. Central identities suck. > email addresses are a PITA in general How so? They are globally unique identifies that you can almost completely customize and therefor easily rememberable. They can be as short as 6 characters including the @ and . for the domain (if you have too much money). > emoticons are still a bit iffy, certainly worse than chat What more than unicode + embedded images do you need? > legally it's a paper trail, chat is... not? Really depends on the server(s) in both cases. > chat clients can support "undeliver" a bit more easily Not having that is a feature. You can do delayed delivery and then cancel that if you are prone to make mistakes but once someone has your message why should you be able to pretend that you never sent it. For all you know they made a screenshot anyway. And if you meen the paper trail then you can bet that most chat networks don't actually delete the message from the database.

Semaphor 4y ago

> - no indication of being online > - chat clients can support "undeliver" a bit more easily Features, not problems. > - email addresses obscure the users, chat apps are far better at this What? Funnily enough, my XMPP ID and main E-Mail happen to be exactly the same. > - even conversation organization is inferior to searchable chat where it's just a history stream That is the only one out of the list I actually agree with, though I think that could be fixed by clients.

raxxorraxor 4y ago

The lack of regulation and federated style is a huge plus. It provides a lot of advantages that people now just take for granted.

AtlasBarfed 4y ago
I agree, but for verifiable idenitity/formal comms with government, if they have a Postal Service, they should have an email service. Of course it would be swamped with spam, just like the snail mail is. Which is an absolute travesty.
- account42 4y ago
  > Of course it would be swamped with spam, just like the snail mail is. Which is an absolute travesty. Snail mail is not swamped by spam everywhere BTW - that is just a regulation issue. The difference with E-Mail is that you can cheaply send them internationally (so from outside any regulation you control) but even then I think the spam problem is overblown.

account42 4y ago

> spam spam spam of the utterly firehose type I have > 5 domains on my mailserver, all with wildcard email going to my inbox and two addresses publicly on my website and in numerous git repositories and bug trackers. I do not have any server side spam filter except a manual subject regexp to filter reject the most lazy spam at submission time. Even that only means about 40-50 trashed mails per day (most of which are moved there automatically by Thunderbird's spam filter), which includes legit mail that I don't want to keep like notifications that I have subscribed to. It takes about no time to double check the subjects to look for false positives. Either your definition of firehose is vastly different from mine or you somehow get vastly more spam than me. Perhaps one factor might be that I don't have notifications for new mails at all since I check often enough and anyone who deserves my immediate attention has my phone number and/or jabber ID. > spam spam spam of the corporate "unsubscribe in these easy 10 steps" These are not a problem since they will keep using the same sender address. Reject at submission if you run the server, filter automatically to trash otherwise. Most will eventually get the hint if you never load their tracking pixels. If you want, report them to their host/mail provider. Corporate spam is only annoying if you do nothing at all about it. > attachment viruses (sometimes without you opening it!) Meh, the web has the same "problem". > email addresses obscure the users, chat apps are far better at this Good. Central identities suck. > email addresses are a PITA in general How so? They are globally unique identifies that you can almost completely customize and therefor easily rememberable. They can be as short as 6 characters including the @ and . for the domain (if you have too much money). > emoticons are still a bit iffy, certainly worse than chat What more than unicode + embedded images do you need? > legally it's a paper trail, chat is... not? Really depends on the server(s) in both cases. > chat clients can support "undeliver" a bit more easily Not having that is a feature. You can do delayed delivery and then cancel that if you are prone to make mistakes but once someone has your message why should you be able to pretend that you never sent it. For all you know they made a screenshot anyway. And if you meen the paper trail then you can bet that most chat networks don't actually delete the message from the database.