5 ms·

Couldn't upvote this more. I am fed up with posts telling me email is broken and a new disruptive tech will be the cure. Email is an open protocol, decentraliz

by tferris 15y ago

Couldn't upvote this more. I am fed up with posts telling me email is broken and a new disruptive tech will be the cure. Email is an open protocol, decentralized, providing optional security. Shortcomings—or rather call them additional requirements—can be solved with tools keeping email focussed on async text-based communication. Want to send large files? Dropbox. Want more automation? Improve the client side and/or write scripts. Want less spam? Don't distribute your address or sign-up everywhere. If you don't like your inbox being a todo-list you should change something—maybe your job, profession or your work environment but it's definitely not email. I have got rarely todos in my inbox. For me, email is—if you mind a set of rules—an efficient way of communication which is documented. You can easily and asynchronously discuss and agree on topics in a transparent manner with one or more participants, again: with an open and decentralized technology, no middleman anywhere. Sometimes obviously it's better to meet folks face to face. Now tell me, which tool can do this? What do you want to improve? This whole email is broken thing is just done for the sake of getting attention, making a lame conference presentation "disruptive" or getting some crappy todo app funded.

defdac 15y ago
Thanks for this. I had a hard time articulating why email is not broken, and you pretty much sums it all up.
oskarth 15y ago
Email was not designed to be used the way we use it now. ...my inbox is a todo list, and email is the way things get onto it. But it is a disastrously bad todo list. ...it seems unlikely that people in 100 years will still be living in the same email hell we do now. And if email is going to get replaced eventually, why not now? ...some of the most powerful people are all at the mercy of email too. [1] Your posts reminds me of someone arguing to keep the oral tradition going instead of switching to writing. I am not saying anyone has suggested anything close to the equivalent of writing, but there is definitely a fundamental problem with email that can't just be solved by a couple of perl scripts and rules. I would also assume one's career choice is a premise for making better tools and protocols - anything else seems kind of backwards. If the president was forced to work in a public market space, would you tell him to change career if he remarked on how he couldn't get anything done? There is a difference in saying email should be killed forever and that it should be replaced by something else for certain usages, just as twitter and Facebook replaced portions of email. Incidentally though, such a replace could likely render email useless for many people. 1: http://paulgraham.com/ambitious.html http://paulgraham.com/ambitious.html
- skeptical 15y ago
  Facebook and twitter fill a niche were email was being used in a way that it was not supposed to. It's electronic mail, you want to send a message to a friend that he/she checks whenever he/she decides to check, emails does that flawlessly. It's not rocket science. Saying that email 'is broken' touches the hilarious. It's like saying a bycicle is 'broken' because it's not able to take you the same places a car can. I don't know why I even take part in such discussions. I guess I'm bored.
- vog 15y ago
  > Email was not designed to be used the way we use it now. ...my inbox is a todo list So we should not use email as a TODO list, but keep a separate TODO list. Email is not broken, it's just the wrong tool for keeping TODO lists. I would never have thought of (mis)using email for a TODO list, and I'm astonished to read from various famous people (not just pg) that they're seriously doing that. Maybe this is a typical mistake of Internet beginners, but why are so many experienced and very busy people doing such a huge organizational mistake, every day? There are lots of tools for keeping a TODO list. For my personal purposes, a plain text file works flawlessly. [1] Bigger organizations use various forms of issue trackers, or use a simple Wiki to simulate an issue tracker. [1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3830247 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3830247
  - cturner 15y ago
    If you get lots of emails, then you won't always have time to follow up on all of them. Somtimes the mere task of comprehending the email to create todos from it takes energy, and you don't always have energy to do that immediately. So the emails queue. Effectively the emails become tasks. After several weeks of high load you find your inbox is crammed with lots of things you mean to get around to but you're exhausted. This is a common problem for busy people and has no obvious solution. One way we try to tackle hard problems is by identifying them, and then having open discussion. > or use a simple Wiki to simulate an issue tracker. > For my personal purposes, a plain text file works > flawlessly. The mechanisms you're talking about don't scale to situations where you're being hit by a firehose of emails and calls, but where you have to have concentration periods as well. e.g. technical role that's customer-facing. My current solution is multi-layered, and starts with a text file. But it's not the simple problem that you make it out to be.
icefox 15y ago
> Want less spam? Don't distribute your address or sign-up everywhere. Around 1999 or so I noticed someone trying to send spam to every common name on my mail server. I had never given out my email address and yet here I was getting spam just because I had a server. Even if I heavily obfuscate my email address on my website such as with this hack http://icefox.github.com/js_email_link_hack/ http://icefox.github.com/js_email_link_hack/ I would still get spam because this attack vector.
- ams6110 15y ago
  Something like fail2ban could deal with this.
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
- flogic 15y ago
  Yeah you can't really avoid spammers getting your address. That said, it's pretty much a solved problem.
TheCondor 15y ago
Documented? Email is a good asynchronous messaging protocol, it's not a great one though. I'd say authentication would be a requirement for such a protocol to be great. I think the next logical step of content protection (encryption) is free if you have authentication and most would want it too. You also don't know if a message has been received, ignored, or blocked by a spam filter. It's good, it does manage to work and deliver billions of messages a day. And it works pretty well. It's infuriating when it doesn't though.
- EvilTerran 15y ago
  What's wrong with layering, say, GPG on top of email if you want authentication or encryption?
  - steeleduncan 15y ago
    Indeed. A great protocol is a flexible protocol, and restricting email to one authentication and/or encryption protocol would prevent it from adapting to advances in cryptography.
sbov 15y ago
Agreed: Anyone who claims "email is a bad TODO list" is an email problem is missing the forest for the trees. This isn't an email problem. It's a problem inherit in any communication medium. If you sit in an IRC channel that can become a TODO list too. For snail mail, the coffee table you throw everything onto is a TODO list. For people who receive a lot of phone calls, their voicemail is a TODO list.
steeleduncan 15y ago
A glut of "email is broken" posts just before the YC decision day and just after Paul Graham's "Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas" essay smacks of insincerity. I can imagine email software that does exciting things with JSON data in emails, but I wouldn't alter the underlying protocol.
- fluorid 15y ago
  Great post and we found the hidden agenda of this "email is broken" propaganda. It's sad that the VC/startup business heavily relies on hype to drive interest and valuation. Nethertheless, I welcome that seemingly a lot do not blindly follow this BS.
Jamiecon 15y ago
This. Only partially related, but I'm sick of people coming up with more, 'better' ways to communicate which are then embraced by a subset of my friends and colleagues. My email arrives on my phone, on my laptop, on my (and any) PC, in an easy to read, indexable, exportable and simple format, wherever I am in the world, in near real time. I have had the same email address for ~ 12 years and with Google's spam filter I get zero spam. I actively manage mailing list subscriptions and have no problems there either. Seriously, for people asking where their jet pack is - take a step back and think about all of that. It's infuriating for me that my friends choose to use Facebook, Twitter DMs, any number of 'groundbreaking' proprietary messaging apps and a million other message transports (don't get me started on iMessage). Email is a message, in text format (with optional binary attachments), between a number of people. Nothing more, nothing less. The world has bigger problems to solve.
ams6110 15y ago
I agree with the entire sentiment as well, but would point out one flaw: You send a message and it either goes where it’s supposed to, or you get an error message back. Generally yes, assuming everything between you and the recipient is properly configured, but it's not guaranteed. It's possible to send an email had it just disappears. No bounce, no delivery. It doesn't happen often, and as far as I know it's never happened to me, but there's nothing in the protocol that guarantees delivery or guarantees notification of delivery failure. That said, this is not a big enough problem to require a new protocol or a change to the existing protocol, or in any other way be worth "fixing." If you are building something that requires guaranteed delivery of messages, don't build it on SMTP.
- gnaffle 15y ago
  Nothing on the internet is guaranteed. Everything is at some point a leaky abstraction. While it's possible for a mail to just disappear (or more often, automatically be sorted into a spam folder) the protocol is designed to be quite robust in how responsibilities for delivery are passed on to servers delivering the message.
- raintrees 15y ago
  Doesn't this argue for a TCP-type implementation of "Did you get that or shall I resend?" ala Read Receipts? (On top of SMTP, that is...)
protomyth 15y ago
> Want less spam? Don't distribute your address or sign-up everywhere. Quite a lot of spam isn't my e-mail address on mailing lists or sign-ups, it is people I know getting a virus or downloading an app that uploads their address book. I have an e-mail only used with friends that gets an amazing amount of spam (not a common name). E-mail has problems because it isn't one thing. E-Mail is SMTP, IMAP, POP3, and whatever weird thing Exchange is doing. I really don't see a replacement since we seem to be in the "closed system" stage of social media much like we once were in the same stage with e-mail (e.g. MCI could not send e-mail to AOL). Variants of IM might have worked but the open versions really didn't make it to everyone.

by tferris 15y ago

defdac 15y ago

Thanks for this. I had a hard time articulating why email is not broken, and you pretty much sums it all up.

oskarth 15y ago

Email was not designed to be used the way we use it now. ...my inbox is a todo list, and email is the way things get onto it. But it is a disastrously bad todo list. ...it seems unlikely that people in 100 years will still be living in the same email hell we do now. And if email is going to get replaced eventually, why not now? ...some of the most powerful people are all at the mercy of email too. [1] Your posts reminds me of someone arguing to keep the oral tradition going instead of switching to writing. I am not saying anyone has suggested anything close to the equivalent of writing, but there is definitely a fundamental problem with email that can't just be solved by a couple of perl scripts and rules. I would also assume one's career choice is a premise for making better tools and protocols - anything else seems kind of backwards. If the president was forced to work in a public market space, would you tell him to change career if he remarked on how he couldn't get anything done? There is a difference in saying email should be killed forever and that it should be replaced by something else for certain usages, just as twitter and Facebook replaced portions of email. Incidentally though, such a replace could likely render email useless for many people. 1: http://paulgraham.com/ambitious.html http://paulgraham.com/ambitious.html

skeptical 15y ago
Facebook and twitter fill a niche were email was being used in a way that it was not supposed to. It's electronic mail, you want to send a message to a friend that he/she checks whenever he/she decides to check, emails does that flawlessly. It's not rocket science. Saying that email 'is broken' touches the hilarious. It's like saying a bycicle is 'broken' because it's not able to take you the same places a car can. I don't know why I even take part in such discussions. I guess I'm bored.
vog 15y ago
> Email was not designed to be used the way we use it now. ...my inbox is a todo list So we should not use email as a TODO list, but keep a separate TODO list. Email is not broken, it's just the wrong tool for keeping TODO lists. I would never have thought of (mis)using email for a TODO list, and I'm astonished to read from various famous people (not just pg) that they're seriously doing that. Maybe this is a typical mistake of Internet beginners, but why are so many experienced and very busy people doing such a huge organizational mistake, every day? There are lots of tools for keeping a TODO list. For my personal purposes, a plain text file works flawlessly. [1] Bigger organizations use various forms of issue trackers, or use a simple Wiki to simulate an issue tracker. [1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3830247 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3830247
- cturner 15y ago
  If you get lots of emails, then you won't always have time to follow up on all of them. Somtimes the mere task of comprehending the email to create todos from it takes energy, and you don't always have energy to do that immediately. So the emails queue. Effectively the emails become tasks. After several weeks of high load you find your inbox is crammed with lots of things you mean to get around to but you're exhausted. This is a common problem for busy people and has no obvious solution. One way we try to tackle hard problems is by identifying them, and then having open discussion. > or use a simple Wiki to simulate an issue tracker. > For my personal purposes, a plain text file works > flawlessly. The mechanisms you're talking about don't scale to situations where you're being hit by a firehose of emails and calls, but where you have to have concentration periods as well. e.g. technical role that's customer-facing. My current solution is multi-layered, and starts with a text file. But it's not the simple problem that you make it out to be.

icefox 15y ago

> Want less spam? Don't distribute your address or sign-up everywhere. Around 1999 or so I noticed someone trying to send spam to every common name on my mail server. I had never given out my email address and yet here I was getting spam just because I had a server. Even if I heavily obfuscate my email address on my website such as with this hack http://icefox.github.com/js_email_link_hack/ http://icefox.github.com/js_email_link_hack/ I would still get spam because this attack vector.

ams6110 15y ago
Something like fail2ban could deal with this.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
flogic 15y ago
Yeah you can't really avoid spammers getting your address. That said, it's pretty much a solved problem.

TheCondor 15y ago

Documented? Email is a good asynchronous messaging protocol, it's not a great one though. I'd say authentication would be a requirement for such a protocol to be great. I think the next logical step of content protection (encryption) is free if you have authentication and most would want it too. You also don't know if a message has been received, ignored, or blocked by a spam filter. It's good, it does manage to work and deliver billions of messages a day. And it works pretty well. It's infuriating when it doesn't though.

EvilTerran 15y ago
What's wrong with layering, say, GPG on top of email if you want authentication or encryption?
- steeleduncan 15y ago
  Indeed. A great protocol is a flexible protocol, and restricting email to one authentication and/or encryption protocol would prevent it from adapting to advances in cryptography.

sbov 15y ago

Agreed: Anyone who claims "email is a bad TODO list" is an email problem is missing the forest for the trees. This isn't an email problem. It's a problem inherit in any communication medium. If you sit in an IRC channel that can become a TODO list too. For snail mail, the coffee table you throw everything onto is a TODO list. For people who receive a lot of phone calls, their voicemail is a TODO list.

steeleduncan 15y ago

A glut of "email is broken" posts just before the YC decision day and just after Paul Graham's "Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas" essay smacks of insincerity. I can imagine email software that does exciting things with JSON data in emails, but I wouldn't alter the underlying protocol.

fluorid 15y ago
Great post and we found the hidden agenda of this "email is broken" propaganda. It's sad that the VC/startup business heavily relies on hype to drive interest and valuation. Nethertheless, I welcome that seemingly a lot do not blindly follow this BS.

Jamiecon 15y ago

This. Only partially related, but I'm sick of people coming up with more, 'better' ways to communicate which are then embraced by a subset of my friends and colleagues. My email arrives on my phone, on my laptop, on my (and any) PC, in an easy to read, indexable, exportable and simple format, wherever I am in the world, in near real time. I have had the same email address for ~ 12 years and with Google's spam filter I get zero spam. I actively manage mailing list subscriptions and have no problems there either. Seriously, for people asking where their jet pack is - take a step back and think about all of that. It's infuriating for me that my friends choose to use Facebook, Twitter DMs, any number of 'groundbreaking' proprietary messaging apps and a million other message transports (don't get me started on iMessage). Email is a message, in text format (with optional binary attachments), between a number of people. Nothing more, nothing less. The world has bigger problems to solve.

ams6110 15y ago

I agree with the entire sentiment as well, but would point out one flaw: You send a message and it either goes where it’s supposed to, or you get an error message back. Generally yes, assuming everything between you and the recipient is properly configured, but it's not guaranteed. It's possible to send an email had it just disappears. No bounce, no delivery. It doesn't happen often, and as far as I know it's never happened to me, but there's nothing in the protocol that guarantees delivery or guarantees notification of delivery failure. That said, this is not a big enough problem to require a new protocol or a change to the existing protocol, or in any other way be worth "fixing." If you are building something that requires guaranteed delivery of messages, don't build it on SMTP.

gnaffle 15y ago
Nothing on the internet is guaranteed. Everything is at some point a leaky abstraction. While it's possible for a mail to just disappear (or more often, automatically be sorted into a spam folder) the protocol is designed to be quite robust in how responsibilities for delivery are passed on to servers delivering the message.
raintrees 15y ago
Doesn't this argue for a TCP-type implementation of "Did you get that or shall I resend?" ala Read Receipts? (On top of SMTP, that is...)

protomyth 15y ago

> Want less spam? Don't distribute your address or sign-up everywhere. Quite a lot of spam isn't my e-mail address on mailing lists or sign-ups, it is people I know getting a virus or downloading an app that uploads their address book. I have an e-mail only used with friends that gets an amazing amount of spam (not a common name). E-mail has problems because it isn't one thing. E-Mail is SMTP, IMAP, POP3, and whatever weird thing Exchange is doing. I really don't see a replacement since we seem to be in the "closed system" stage of social media much like we once were in the same stage with e-mail (e.g. MCI could not send e-mail to AOL). Variants of IM might have worked but the open versions really didn't make it to everyone.