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I completely disagree 100%. I think the mail system is exceptionally well-functioning. It's a massively-scalable, decentralized, asynchronous messaging system t

I completely disagree 100%. I think the mail system is exceptionally well-functioning. It's a massively-scalable, decentralized, asynchronous messaging system that supports large file attachments. At this, it excels. There's not one big evil company controlling all messages and unless you're sending massive amounts of emails every day, your messages almost always end up exactly where they're supposed to. I'd challenge anybody to do better. The author's main gripe is Mailer Daemon messages. It's not email's fault that people write shitty clients that don't display a pretty failure message. If your car doesn't have anti-lock breaks, it's not the road's fault when you hit a patch of ice and slam into a tree. Email is great not only because it works simply and beautifully, but because it's so extendable. People think it's broken. It's not. It's just simple...and it's this same simplicity that makes it easy to build on top of. Look at Gmail or Xobni. Both have incredible features that "email" doesn't have because they took the time to build extras on top that make it work nicely. Email is NOT broken. There's nothing to fix. Whatever fixes you think it needs you can make yourself. The underlying platform works great. If you have a problem, write/patch a client.

Niten 15y ago
Exactly. It would be no small matter to come up with an alternative system that has the simplicity, flexibility (including flexibility of archival), and most of all the freedom of email – and have it work anywhere near as well in practice as email does already. (Google Wave showed promise... but it also introduced a ton of new complexity, and given the pattern of messages "living" on the sender's server, it wasn't clear how archival should actually work.) It seems most people who advocate this notion that email is "broken" would rather us all use some centralized, proprietary system akin to Facebook messaging. This would be an unimaginable step backward for reasons that I hope do not require elaboration.
- zokier 15y ago
  Federated XMPP seems rather nice alternative if it were extended to support asynchronous communications (eg servers would store messages when clients are offline). Yes, it is XML based and XML is not fashionable these days. But still I think it has potential if it were developed further. btw Facebook messaging is partly based on XMPP so it's not completely proprietary.
Sujan 15y ago
He isn't critizizing the mail technology. He is critizizing how we choose to present the most barebones stuff to the user, where some layer on top in the client would be much better. So you're basically totally in agreement to what he writes.
4ydx 15y ago
Agreed.
rlpb 15y ago
There is one email "client" that does display a pretty failure message. It's Exchange. Email administrators hate it because when a user forwards the failure message so that a problem might be fixed, the message turns out to be useless.

Niten 15y ago

Exactly. It would be no small matter to come up with an alternative system that has the simplicity, flexibility (including flexibility of archival), and most of all the freedom of email – and have it work anywhere near as well in practice as email does already. (Google Wave showed promise... but it also introduced a ton of new complexity, and given the pattern of messages "living" on the sender's server, it wasn't clear how archival should actually work.) It seems most people who advocate this notion that email is "broken" would rather us all use some centralized, proprietary system akin to Facebook messaging. This would be an unimaginable step backward for reasons that I hope do not require elaboration.

zokier 15y ago
Federated XMPP seems rather nice alternative if it were extended to support asynchronous communications (eg servers would store messages when clients are offline). Yes, it is XML based and XML is not fashionable these days. But still I think it has potential if it were developed further. btw Facebook messaging is partly based on XMPP so it's not completely proprietary.

Sujan 15y ago

He isn't critizizing the mail technology. He is critizizing how we choose to present the most barebones stuff to the user, where some layer on top in the client would be much better. So you're basically totally in agreement to what he writes.

4ydx 15y ago

Agreed.

rlpb 15y ago

There is one email "client" that does display a pretty failure message. It's Exchange. Email administrators hate it because when a user forwards the failure message so that a problem might be fixed, the message turns out to be useless.