9 ms·

All you need is e-mail, e-mail. E-mail is all you need.

139 points by thebdmethod 14y ago

shawnee_ 14y ago
All I was doing was avoiding doing the work, the real effort of producing the content that actually mattered. I was hiding from honest sharing with the conviction that the tools were not good enough yet. This is a great insight. Building the platform is sometimes only half the battle -- getting users to produce the content that makes the product interesting , valuable (and eventually profitable) seems like the challenge these days. Because the further entrenched people become to the platform that houses their "content", the more loyal they become. Facebook is the most obvious example, and a lot of Facebook communications read like watered-down email OK for public consumption.
honza 14y ago
I couldn't agree more. I deal with a large number of older people on a daily basis as part of my volunteer work. Getting these folk to use the Internet in any way is painful. For example, I send out these PDF reports once a week. It's the same template every time but for accounting purposes, it has to be done. I wrote a Python script to generate those for me and I stick them up on a simple website on S3. The script them emails everyone to let them know the report is available and that they can download it. It includes a link to the report and to the website with all the other reports. These guys absolutely cannot open a browser and view the PDF in the browser. If it's not an attachment to the email, they don't know what to do. TLDR --- Email is great. It's so simple that even non-techies get it.
pre 14y ago
Email is awesome, certainly. But if everyone actually started a mass-email to all their friends about every little topic they post to a Facebook status update, I'd call 'em pretty damned rude abusing my email inbox like that and my email client would need even better filters than it already has to fight the commercial spam. Experiments to find things better than email will mostly fail, but I think we still need more experiments. There must be something better than all that spam for a start.
- mbrock 14y ago
  You point to the #1 biggest wonderful feature of email. Sending email is an act that incurs responsibility. WHY are we sending all this shit around? Email makes it clear. I have made a decision that you should spend your time reading and understanding this text. If that's rude, tell me and I'll stop. This article strikes a chord because email is about communication instead of endless "sharing," broadcasting, forwarding, signalling. I'm awash in a sea of tweets and notifications but when I see a familiar name as the sender of an actual goddamn email, then I feel reality existing again. I have a friend who can't stop dreaming about hypothetical advances in social networking that will let us do all kinds of wonderful things, but it'll never be good enough, convenient enough — no technology will ever do the real work of social caring, no shiny app will ever let humans communicate in a way that's easy and non-messy. There's some kind of consumerism-type ideology around social networks and apps that works like that of beauty magazines and television. TV is boring so Facebook is the new Friends. It's all so happy, creative, wonderful. There should be a social network that says "fuck you" to all the cutesy glitter on the top of the Maslow pyramid — that's only about, say, "sharing" expressions of the dull lethargy that comes from exhausting oneself with work or work-seeking in a crisis economy. Sorry for ranting, but this deeply-rooted nausea w/r/t the social web is something that doesn't come out clearly for me all the time, and when it does I feel like I should channel it to get some affect going, because everything is so tediously pastel and we need to change shit up.
  - mdm_ 14y ago
    Hi. Long-time lurker here; I just created an HN account to reply to you. Your post expresses some of the things I've been feeling about social media that I haven't been able to express very well myself (I had to look up "Maslow pyramid"). The sort of unease and nausea, the whole thing just feels somehow creepy and wrong. I deactivated my Facebook account long ago because of this feeling. I think what it boils down to is that I don't think I should know so much stuff about my friends, family, co-workers, etc without having obtained that knowledge by directly interacting with them in meaningful ways over long periods of time. The Facebook model appears to let me know people better, but it's in a shallow, passive way and encourages me to conceptualize people as caricatures, assembled from a handful of their most obvious or outstanding personality traits. I realize this stuff has been around for a long time, but FB turbo-charges it, and I feel like it's an extremely poor way to "know" people. The really messed up part is that while the effects Facebook seems to have are often anti-social (think of how many times you've been out with someone and they're too busy checking status updates on their phone to carry on a real, actual conversation), people are labelled anti-social for not participating.
chaddyar 14y ago
+1 E-mail is incredibly underutilized as a technology. One could make an argument the majority of instagram's (of course not the filters) functionality could be handled by e-mail, but the "perceived need" to use apps on the smartphone that you purchased for a large percentage of your monthly income but the experience of using the app is difficult to discount. Another point worth considering is that much of the functionality associated with Path is available in Facebook if you want to play around with settings, but for some reason Path still seems relevant.
- erikpukinskis 14y ago
  It'd take a long time to type in those 20 email addresses every time you snap a photo on your vacation.
  - unimpressive 14y ago
    Any decent email client should do autocomplete. Even if that's not the case, this is something the client should handle.
    - chadyj 14y ago
      Or even better, use address book groups.
    - prostoalex 14y ago
      And then you remember you forgot the 21st one, and your choices are either to email the original 20 plus the added address, or email the 21st one separately, thus creating a one-off thread.
unimpressive 14y ago
It helps to remember that the first social networks (See: Usenet) were built out of email. EDIT: All email needs is the ability to display information like the web can. Properly formatted and threaded.
- vannevar 14y ago
  So are some of the later ones. Twitter built a multi-billion dollar business by duplicating the functionality of email and listserv in a proprietary service.
  - MichaelGG 14y ago
    Listserv had an SMS-oriented design? It automatically made every user their own independent channel that other users could choose to subscribe to? I don't use Twitter, but saying it's just email/listserv is rather silly. Also, it's only a mutli-billion dollar business by investment; it doesn't generate even 1bn in revenue.
    - vannevar 14y ago
      Email-to-SMS gateways have been around a long time. And sure, an email provider could set up a service that automatically gives every email account their own listserv. I'd agree that Twitter's valuation is arguable, but the investor consensus is that it's a multi-billion dollar business, whatever the revenue is.
- hollerith 14y ago
  in what sense was Usenet built out of email? only thing that comes to mind is re-using some of the syntax of RFC 822.
  - recoiledsnake 14y ago
    I think it was more at a conceptual level rather than technical. It's like sending a e-mail to a public mailing list that anyone can view, join or reply to.
kijin 14y ago
> Why build a new messaging product when the basic functionality of email combined with a little effort from the user can achieve the same result? Well, to begin with, users don't want to expend even a little bit of effort. Isn't that why everyone is trying to minimize friction in the sign-up process? I agree that e-mail, as a protocol, is a powerful tool that is often misunderstood. But we really need e-mail clients that allow us to keep track of a large number of threads without getting lost of feeling swamped. Gmail tries to do this to some extent, but it's far from perfect.
- tomrod 14y ago
  I logged on to say exactly this. If for a product, the benefit is overwhelmed by the cost, then the user is irrational to use such a product. Email is _difficult_ to share things appropriately. A hybrid client, like gmail, is IMHO much better.
- joe_the_user 14y ago
  You'd be surprised at the effort that users will and won't engage in. I know plenty of utterly non-technical users who have strong opinions about what are the uses of an email list versus the uses of a web forum versus the uses of a Facebook group page. Which means, to me, that on the one hand, these folks would be interested in a new messaging approach if it was strongly distinguished from the functionality of email and on the other hand, these users quite likely wouldn't bother with something that seem too much like email. Essential, it seems like average people are up for multiple communications mediums but treat each medium as kind of a given, not something that's going to evolve. I'd be interested in ways of dealing with this.
  - kijin 14y ago
    > average people are up for multiple communications mediums but treat each medium as kind of a given, not something that's going to evolve. People have been thinking like that for a long time about a lot of things. They have strong opinions about when to use a car vs. truck vs. minivan, or when to take the bus vs. the subway. They also have strong opinions about the purpose of each room in their home and each piece of furniture in their office. This is OK because most of these things don't change very often, and when they do (e.g. a new subway route or a major renovation), the change is obvious. Today's technology, on the other hand, changes very quickly and in subtle ways. It's hard to catch up with all of that, so the inertia becomes more noticeable. I shared a Dropbox folder with my father a while ago, but he still sends me large files as email attachments.
mrhonza 14y ago
I couldn't agree more. I deal with a large number of older people on a daily basis as part of my volunteer work. Getting these folk to use the Internet in any way is painful. For example, I send out these PDF reports once a week. It's the same template every time but for accounting purposes, it has to be done. I wrote a Python script to generate those for me and I stick them up on a simple website on S3. The script them emails everyone to let them know the report is available and that they can download it. It includes a link to the report and to the website with all the other reports. These guys absolutely cannot open a browser and view the PDF in the browser. If it's not an attachment to the email, they don't know what to do. TLDR --- Email is great. It's so simple that even non-techies get it.
- cdcarter 14y ago
  Lately my industry has hit a new trend that I've fallen in love. Basically, each night all the departments on a live performance receive performance reports, reports listing what went well and what went wrong in the performance, as well as start times, run times, audience size, etc... In the olden days, these were posted or hand distributed. Then over time they moved to being emailed out as PDF attachments, still formatted to perfect beauty as the old printed copies. Now more and more, the attachment is forgone and the data is just typed directly into the body of the email. Sure it doesn't have the glitz of a pristine PDF with the production font and header, but with one glance I can see the numbers I want to see from my iPhone. I find it funny that it took us until mobile devices to get to the point where we are using email as intended, instead of as a vector for attaching PDFs.
  - jasomill 14y ago
    Not to mention pointless Word documents, "templates" that include background images and difficult-to-read colors and fonts, signatures with embedded artwork, screensful of pointless legalese, and top-posted histories of conversations almost, if not entirely unrelated to the present message. In other words, it's not at all clear to me how additional features would help decrease email's signal-to-noise problems when users themselves choose to create the noise.
  - 14y ago
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TimPC 14y ago
E-mail has a culture around it that doesn't work for many tasks. It's called "inbox zero". Basically for most e-mail users they attempt to clear out their inbox to zero new messages every time they go to e-mail. This means if you want to do things that require thought over a period of time you'll almost always have someone using e-mail the wrong way for the task.
- monkeymace 14y ago
  I gave up on keeping on tidy inbox long ago. I have 16,794 unread emails in my Gmail account. I feel like keeping my email organized would easily become a full time job.
Aftershock21 14y ago
In social networks, companies are not trying to fix email or group communication because its broken. They are trying to produce users for their specific applications. If they use Email as a substrate for communication, they have no user. They end up being just a software vendor.
coderdude 14y ago
Email is not great. My biggest problem with email is that it's unreliable. There have been so many times where I'd send an email and have it never even reach its destination. I'm not talking about a legitimate message being marked as spam and tucked away in some folder, but not even delivered and my email server isn't notified of this shenanigans (I'm looking at you, mac.com and gmail.com). This is I'm sure because some server down the chain messed up somewhere. How can you track this down? There is no way to even know if your email made it to a person's inbox (like a kind of forced "received receipt" -- I don't care if they read it yet).
- neilkelty 14y ago
  It's been years since I've actually encountered this problem. Most of the time the person was lazy, forgetful, or lying to me.
  - coderdude 14y ago
    I want to believe in the best in people, I really do. But I do know better and that's all the more reason why we need a way to keep track of this without having to rely on humans telling you the truth.
    - baudehlo 14y ago
      But the protocol does keep track of it. Just because some end implementation is violating the protocol doesn't make the system broken. It makes their implementation broken.
- trimbo 14y ago
  > There have been so many times where I'd send an email and have it never even reach its destination This is easily explained if you were hosting your own Postfix or something. There are a significant number of hoops that legitimate email senders must jump through in order to ensure their email goes through properly. DKIM signing, SPF records, rDNS, etc. These are some of the ways for gmail and apple identify you as a legit sender as opposed to a spammer. > I'm not talking about a legitimate message being marked as spam and tucked away in some folder, but not even delivered and my email server isn't notified of this shenanigans In general, ISPs won't want to let spammers know they're are bulking email. That's why you aren't told.
mbesto 14y ago
I've thought about writing this post so many times. E-mail is not broken, but we'll continually try to convince ourselves that our inabilities to be collaborative and communicate properly is because we're not given the right medium to do so. This is bullshit. People who are terrible at communication will continue to be terrible at communication regardless of what tool they use. The hammer isn't broken, the carpenter is. Fix the carpenter. EDIT: I should add - I see many tools that try to replace e-mail aren't largely trying to fix the problems with communication, but rather they are trying to assign accountability. This is great for bosses (or "controllers"), but not necessarily great for everyone. I've simplified this too much and could go into way more detail if I had the time.
- thebdmethod 14y ago
  I agree with you here. My point of writing this post was the illustrate that in the pursuit of ultimate convenience we sometimes loose sight of the importance doing committing to new behaviors or overcoming our own laziness. And technology should not enable laziness, or replace effort, but rather elevate and extend and magnify existing effort.
  - jtheory 14y ago
    It's a very good point, and reminds of the "Confessions of a Recovering Lifehacker" post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4012852 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4012852 It's worth doing some approximate cost/gain math now & again.... E.g., my core goal is to better communicate about important things with family/friends. To that end I have... spent about 30 hours of my spare time this month implementing a solution to save me 30 seconds per email, and about 1 hour actually writing 5 actual emails. QED. Side note: in your message here (and twice in the blog post), you're using the verb "loose" (means "set free") when you mean "lose" (means "fail to retain").
    - monkeymace 14y ago
      I like the formula you invoke here. Looking back, if I spent the same amount of time messaging and communicating with people that I spent building an app to facilitating future communication I would be much better off, thought more thoughts, and grown closer to more people. (Also, thanks for keeping me honest with the "loose" typos, they've been corrected.
ChrisArchitect 14y ago
yeah yeah,email is the original great killer app of the internet. But as far as collaboration, it is full of problems and for the average user just causes problems and confusion and makes people bend over backwards to try and keep up. All the new developments are about taking it to a new level...beyond the original idea. Meaning less silos, easier many-to-many and one-to-many etc...
drivebyacct2 14y ago
NO. I want to scream. NO. I just began working at a company that uses "distribution groups" (mailing lists) as a "social network". It's awful as it's not threaded, it's not archived, it's not searchable. It's terrible.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- bgilroy26 14y ago
  This is a social problem, not a technology problem. There are many email lists wih searchable archives.
- TY 14y ago
  What if someone could create a new messaging system that works like previous messaging systems such as email and Usenet, but instead of sending a message along with its entire thread of previous messages, or requiring all responses to be stored in each user's inbox for context, message documents that contain complete threads of multimedia messages (blips) are perpetually stored on a central server. These documents are shared with collaborators who can be added or removed from the document at any point during a document's existence. And I could add much more to my wish list. If only someone, with lots of brains and financial resources would come up with something like this and push it to gain wide acceptance then we would forget about the horror that email is very quickly... For some more info: http://bit.ly/1aAMNd http://bit.ly/1aAMNd
  - nickbarnwell 14y ago
    Doesn't that more or less describe Google Wave?
    - seabee 14y ago
      The link exactly describes (for it is) Google Wave.
      - 14y ago
drostie 14y ago
Email has a lot of warts besides its obvious graces, especially when you look at the back-end of how emails are actually stored and transferred and authenticated. So I think we as programmers are naturally drawn to the idea of developing the email-killer. The central problem with the dreamers seems to be that they're not dreaming deeply enough. Email is a communications multitool which leverages the whole human subconscious to effect its various uses: a human is supposed to know whether this is a "your boss demands that you do this" email or a "your friend wants you to look at her cute cat" email or "your uncle is ranting about fluoride in the water again" email. Most email killers do not and cannot eliminate this mental overhead. Graham only says "other people should be able to add to my todo list" -- he's not killing email, he's considering an email-aware todo list. That's very common. Skype is not an email killer precisely because it doesn't dream big enough: it is a realtime messaging protocol which hit it big because it worked with video. Trello is not an email killer precisely because it's for organizing groups. RSS is not an email killer because it only solves the limited problem of keeping aware of new content. Email does all of these tasks -- poorly, but it does them. If you want to really kill email, you need to offer the core functionality effortlessly. Email II would understand "circles" of friends automatically, so that there is only an "inbox" for those people who are contacting you for the very first time. Like syndication, Email II would host the content on the publisher's web server to be downloaded whenever the client wants -- this has spam-deterrent effects, since the network doesn't take responsibility for the content. It would hopefully allow us to unify mailing lists. We can protect privacy with automatic cryptography; "chris::example.com" can stand for a public key which is stored on the example.com machines. The email killer needs to be good at segmenting messages so that we can say "This is the text of my invitation to a wedding, but it also comes with a standard-appointment-form where I describe where and when it is, so that it can be rapidly added to your 'upcoming dates' in the relevant social circle." (Since this must merge with dates and todo-lists, presumably example.com contains its own list of stuff which chris::example.com has stored for his own use.) And I want to at this point admit defeat: because I think even those ideas are not daring enough. The email killer is probably going to have to do even more than all of that, and my own imagination becomes limited.
- gatlin 14y ago
  I'll be honest - XMPP fits this description pretty well, at least as far as I read it right now. Most clients don't seem to understand this but that seems tractable.
chadyj 14y ago
This is a timely article for me as I am just about to launch a email startup called Sendicate that adds tools to simplify and empower email-based communication. Another way of looking at it is like a content publishing app for email. For those interested here are some more thoughts on what I am building http://www.chadyj.com/tagged/sendicate http://www.chadyj.com/tagged/sendicate Email certainly has some issues but it is also infinitely flexible and powerful and drives a lot of our day to day interaction with the internet. I am surprised that there is such a drive to re-invent email when a few specialized tools that add value to email will solve many use cases without re-inventing the wheel.
thebdmethod 14y ago
I am curious about anyone currently trying to build a communication tool, and their argument for why it is a better solution than email.
- pfraze 14y ago
  I started linkjs[1] so I could create an extensible inbox/social app that supports multiple services and interfaces. The idea is to build tool environments around communication, much like the environments we already have around processing (e.g. the unix shell). Email will be one of the services the comm environment integrates, so it's more of an extension than a replacement. 1. https://github.com/pfraze/linkjs https://github.com/pfraze/linkjs
- yogo 14y ago
  For most users that just need to communicate regarding a specific item it is much quicker to comment on that and that alone with tools like http://postfrenzy.com http://postfrenzy.com. Having to deal with threads and multiple topics in single email messages for most users often results in a degradation of the conversation, quickly.
verganileonardo 14y ago
Email is OK as a communication tool. But companies use it as a task/to-do list and to work together on tasks. Email is terrible to achieve this. You will end up with lots of emails and multiple versions of the same documents... That is why I wish someone fix email! :)
- RyanMcGreal 14y ago
  If that's what you're using it for, someone has fixed email: http://trello.com http://trello.com
  - verganileonardo 14y ago
    I'm using Trello! :) It is great if you don't have lots of leads :)
- chaddyar 14y ago
  Maybe in outlook...aren't most of those problems solved by gmail? :)
  - verganileonardo 14y ago
    How does gmail solve this problem?
- kijin 14y ago
  I don't think that's a reason to "fix email". Rather, it's a reason to use the right tool for the job. If you need a to-do list, use an app that does to-do lists well. If you need to keep track of changes to documents, use a version control system. What's needed, of course, is a tool that integrates all these other tools into a manageable workflow. But that's not "fixing email", either, it's just another tool.
- gklitt 14y ago
  I agree with this. The business context is really the one where email is most broken. Tools like Basecamp and Trello do a good job with project management, but they aren't a 100% substitute for all the various functions of email. I sometimes think that a hybrid between email and a forum/bulletin board would be the best way to manage complex communication, instead of convoluted cc lists...
taliesinb 14y ago
This reminds me of something most new communication media seem not to realize: no matter how fancy your new thing is, not everyone will want to try it initially, so for God's sake make it bridge to email. Otherwise it will become a ghetto. I don't think the Wave people understood this; if they had, Wave might have turned out differently. Asana, on the other hand, made a big deal out of this.
- unimpressive 14y ago
  Making something bridge to email doesn't seem terribly difficult. SMTP is; as the name would imply, simple. (At least it seems simple.)
  - taliesinb 14y ago
    To be a true bridge you need to be bidirectional: to do that you'd need IMAP, not SMTP. IMAP is a bit of a stateful mess of a protocol, unfortunately.
ajdecon 14y ago
I've wondered a lot about why e-mail isn't used more as a backend for different services. But as far as I can tell, messaging products proliferate because their creators want to create profitable products rather than distributed protocols. E-mail is a pretty good group of protocols for distributing arbitrary messages between different locations on the Internet. It's easy to imagine how all sorts of messaging and social network products could be implemented as a specialized e-mail client with a good user experience. Their forms might be slightly different than they have now, but they'd serve approximately the same consumer purpose. For example, you could build a social networking "client" with e-mail as a backend. Status updates, photos, etc. would be distributed to all your contacts via email, and the client would produce a "timeline" based on the data in its mailbox, without ever showing the user the original messages. But you give up a lot of control that way, and it's harder to monetize. What developers want (and users too, to be honest) is a centralized service that they can control, mine data with, and sell products or show ads. A distributed protocol, while in some ways more powerful (and less dependent on a fallible central authority!), doesn't achieve the real business aims.
- antidoh 14y ago
  "messaging products proliferate because their creators want to create profitable products rather than distributed protocols." That's a bingo.
- MatthewPhillips 14y ago
  There's a chicken and egg problem to this. If you do what you suggest, you are going to flood the user's inbox and although you will clean it up in your client, the user is also going to have a standard email client that notifies them constantly about your messages. We need a transitory client that is better than the one we have today, but still is the only email client you use. It would do a better job of categorizing and prioritizing your messages. When the user gets used to this, they might be willing to accepting dropping general purpose email clients all together.
  - ajdecon 14y ago
    I don't even want to make the user drop general-purpose email clients; I just think that email, as a back-end distributed messaging protocol, is more understood and battle-tested than just about anything a startup is likely to invent. Two possibilities that occurred to me: 1) Your service just uses email as a backend messaging protocol, and provides a new "user@myservice.com" mailbox to all users. Advantage is that you can put all your logic in the client, and just run a mail server. 2) Better: include an email header along the lines of "Intended-For-Application: MyService", and encourage general-purpose email clients to auto-archive these messages out of the inbox. But yeah, it's just the kernel of an idea, and there are tons of problems with it.
benblodgett 14y ago
I think the broken part of email exists in business communication, in my experience it's grossly overused. It becomes an endless todo list that requires processing (eg, response, forward, assign, done, etc). This is inefficient and distracts us from our primary functions.
baby 14y ago
I don't agree, even if Gmail brought a lot to emails (threads and antispam) it's still a problem that, in my opinion, facebook message tackles.
jasonjei 14y ago
I know all the people pushing for social networks will disagree, but I think email can be fixed, just like static web pages have been fixed to do asynchronous JavaScript to provide dynamic web experiences. I think the problem is the cure is much worse than the disease. The cures of using social network tools is often an enclosed, controlled network such as Twitter or Facebook, which puts control of the network in the hands of few. Instead of trying to replace email, I think we should "fix" it rather than trying to replace it. Some advocate using Web/REST/HTTP to replace email; I think email isn't that doomed. Remember, the popularity of email is because anybody can start an email service. Nobody can just use Facebook or Twitter; you have to have the approval of an inner circle authority. Imagine if every Web site required MPAA or RIAA control, and they prevented even non-infringing material online using SOPA!
- slowpoke 14y ago
  >just like static web pages have been fixed to do asynchronous JavaScript to provide dynamic web experiences If by that you are trying to imply that email needs more awful HTML junk and other "features", stop. Now. That would finally destroy email, not fix it.
zuikan 14y ago
Pretty clear why both your apps failed if you actually believe any of the drabble..
rythie 14y ago
The problem is that email is so broken, you could sort of fix it, but people have been trying for years and it's easier to start again. For example we still have these problems: - No proof that people are who they say they are, we have PGP/GPG but no one uses it. - Related to the above, I can't control who can send me email, people use different email addresses and any address can be faked anyway. - No accepted way to post short messages, people still post long email with big disclaimers and/or adverts at the bottom - Poor email client support for sending/receiving large numbers of pictures, with thumbnails and full versions - Lack of any real semantic support tags, share a single link, geo information etc. - No way to public display of your timeline (i.e. twitter) - No obvious way to have all contact's photos against emails [seems to be coming in now somehow, not sure how really] - Inability to remove content you accidentally sent - User expectations that email works in a certain way and doesn't need to change.
- cdcarter 14y ago
  Of these issues, I only see #1 and #4 as real. Some of them perhaps you could elaborate on? What do you mean by #3? I send short messages all the time. I just write a short message and hit send. Why would you even want #6? Email is designed as a private mechanism, this seems to go against the very reason I use email...
  - rythie 14y ago
    Most people don't do #3 and without tools either limiting (twitter) or coaxing you (facebook) you get big run on messages, which you don't want to read. You want #6 because many people are trying to share you thoughts with everyone, and the post is titled "All you need is e-mail, e-mail. E-mail is all you need."
    - Zak 14y ago
      I may be in the minority, but I don't understand why most people on twitter wish to consume most tweets. Outside of a synchronous or semi-synchronous (e.g. IRC) conversation, It's pretty hard to say anything worth saying in 140 characters. I hate twitter and I hate tl;dr as a meme. HN as a community tends to encourage longer posts for the same reason; they're more likely to be interesting. It works better for sharing content, but I don't usually want to see all content that a particular person wants to share. Other mechanisms work better for getting a list of content to consume: RSS offers all the content from a particular source, and sites like HN and reddit show recent content that a particular community finds interesting. The only thing I see twitter as good for is disseminating facts to a large audience when a non-internet-capable phone is the the only communication tool available. It has served that function a number of times during war, natural disasters and other breakdowns of civil infrastructure. Even so, I'd rather consume someone else's aggregation of the facts rather than track down which users to follow myself and unfollow them after the event is over. That's what reporters (including bloggers) are for.
chmike 14y ago
Mail is broken in many ways. Because there is no authentication and thus forged from addresses, error messages can't be returned. Relays are allowed to modify mails which invalidates hashes and signatures. Attached and included documents are encoded in base64. ... The main usage problem is abuse of this communication channel. While our email addresses should be public so that anyone in the world may contact us, we are forced to use hidden emails to protect ourselves. This Is the reason of the success of messaging system limited to friends. There is much less abuse. The problem was known with fax, and will happen with phones if the phone call price drops to zero.
AznHisoka 14y ago
Email, as well as IRC. Because email doesn't handle real-time spontaneous casual online conversations. Twitter is a poor way of doing it, and Facebook is just email + shallow egotistical dopamine hacks.
h84ru3a 14y ago
Email is a bootstrap that no "next-generation" communications solution can do without. Every startup, whether focused on communications or not, wants your email address. That is not a coincidence. From a marketing perspective, email also has the greatest reach, greater than the web. The majority of the still relatively small percentage of the world's pop. that is connected to the internet are more likely to use email than the web, and they spend more time using email than they do the web. If you do the research I believe you will find that these are the facts. Email needs to be improved (e.g. cut out the middlemen -- "email providers" -- somehow, perhaps run email servers within trusted peer-to-peer groups: groups that are established using only the internet and without the need for a web browser, javascript, etc.). Email does not need to be "replaced". Email is a simple and effective concept and as such, it is not going to "go away". So let's work on trying to improve it, architecturally. The "walled garden" approach to communications, maybe using different gardens for different types of contacts to whom you provide your mail address, makes sense. Maybe it wouldn't stop spam, but it might contain it, e.g. to certain gardens. But any solution dubbed an "email killer" that based on the public web is not truly walled. It relies on a complex web browser. There will be ways to get in. And it's the same old story: people want to get in to spam you or scan your email for hints they can give to advertisers. Imagine if the post office scanned every letter for hints they could give to advertisers, like the ones who fill your physical mailbox with junk postal mail. Why do we accept this with email? Improvements on email need to start at a lower level: the IP layer. Peer-to-peer. Move away from "calf-cow". Take back control of our mail.
nazar 14y ago
I can't help thinking about Google Wave :)
waldr 14y ago
I agree with a lot of the points here, Email in itself isn't broken. I've spent the last 2 months studying users email habits, who sends what?, what do they receive?, what are the conversations like?, how is the platform being used? etc.. the conclusion is simple email is incredibly personal each single users works in their own way. The problem is where these habits collide, the way I receive an email from you doesn't match how I'd construct and send an email, therefore whatever I receive is going to cause me a problem.
aufreak3 14y ago
I guess the author forgot to add "... and oh yeah, blogs too" to the title.
arthurrr 14y ago
I met a nice girl who went back to her home country and we exchanged email addresses. But the emails we sent each other ended up in the spam folder. This is unacceptable. Email is unreliable. As much as I hate Facebook, it actually works for these situations. Email is ok as a secondary communications tool, but I would never build anything that relies on it.
- acuozzo 14y ago
  > This is unacceptable. Email is unreliable. Isn't this a spam-filter problem? How does a bad spam-filter imply that e-mail's unreliable? Did you even __attempt__ to configure your spam-filter(s)?

139 points by thebdmethod 14y ago

All I was doing was avoiding doing the work, the real effort of producing the content that actually mattered. I was hiding from honest sharing with the conviction that the tools were not good enough yet. This is a great insight. Building the platform is sometimes only half the battle -- getting users to produce the content that makes the product interesting , valuable (and eventually profitable) seems like the challenge these days. Because the further entrenched people become to the platform that houses their "content", the more loyal they become. Facebook is the most obvious example, and a lot of Facebook communications read like watered-down email OK for public consumption.

honza 14y ago

I couldn't agree more. I deal with a large number of older people on a daily basis as part of my volunteer work. Getting these folk to use the Internet in any way is painful. For example, I send out these PDF reports once a week. It's the same template every time but for accounting purposes, it has to be done. I wrote a Python script to generate those for me and I stick them up on a simple website on S3. The script them emails everyone to let them know the report is available and that they can download it. It includes a link to the report and to the website with all the other reports. These guys absolutely cannot open a browser and view the PDF in the browser. If it's not an attachment to the email, they don't know what to do. TLDR --- Email is great. It's so simple that even non-techies get it.

pre 14y ago

Email is awesome, certainly. But if everyone actually started a mass-email to all their friends about every little topic they post to a Facebook status update, I'd call 'em pretty damned rude abusing my email inbox like that and my email client would need even better filters than it already has to fight the commercial spam. Experiments to find things better than email will mostly fail, but I think we still need more experiments. There must be something better than all that spam for a start.

mbrock 14y ago
You point to the #1 biggest wonderful feature of email. Sending email is an act that incurs responsibility. WHY are we sending all this shit around? Email makes it clear. I have made a decision that you should spend your time reading and understanding this text. If that's rude, tell me and I'll stop. This article strikes a chord because email is about communication instead of endless "sharing," broadcasting, forwarding, signalling. I'm awash in a sea of tweets and notifications but when I see a familiar name as the sender of an actual goddamn email, then I feel reality existing again. I have a friend who can't stop dreaming about hypothetical advances in social networking that will let us do all kinds of wonderful things, but it'll never be good enough, convenient enough — no technology will ever do the real work of social caring, no shiny app will ever let humans communicate in a way that's easy and non-messy. There's some kind of consumerism-type ideology around social networks and apps that works like that of beauty magazines and television. TV is boring so Facebook is the new Friends. It's all so happy, creative, wonderful. There should be a social network that says "fuck you" to all the cutesy glitter on the top of the Maslow pyramid — that's only about, say, "sharing" expressions of the dull lethargy that comes from exhausting oneself with work or work-seeking in a crisis economy. Sorry for ranting, but this deeply-rooted nausea w/r/t the social web is something that doesn't come out clearly for me all the time, and when it does I feel like I should channel it to get some affect going, because everything is so tediously pastel and we need to change shit up.
- mdm_ 14y ago
  Hi. Long-time lurker here; I just created an HN account to reply to you. Your post expresses some of the things I've been feeling about social media that I haven't been able to express very well myself (I had to look up "Maslow pyramid"). The sort of unease and nausea, the whole thing just feels somehow creepy and wrong. I deactivated my Facebook account long ago because of this feeling. I think what it boils down to is that I don't think I should know so much stuff about my friends, family, co-workers, etc without having obtained that knowledge by directly interacting with them in meaningful ways over long periods of time. The Facebook model appears to let me know people better, but it's in a shallow, passive way and encourages me to conceptualize people as caricatures, assembled from a handful of their most obvious or outstanding personality traits. I realize this stuff has been around for a long time, but FB turbo-charges it, and I feel like it's an extremely poor way to "know" people. The really messed up part is that while the effects Facebook seems to have are often anti-social (think of how many times you've been out with someone and they're too busy checking status updates on their phone to carry on a real, actual conversation), people are labelled anti-social for not participating.

chaddyar 14y ago

+1 E-mail is incredibly underutilized as a technology. One could make an argument the majority of instagram's (of course not the filters) functionality could be handled by e-mail, but the "perceived need" to use apps on the smartphone that you purchased for a large percentage of your monthly income but the experience of using the app is difficult to discount. Another point worth considering is that much of the functionality associated with Path is available in Facebook if you want to play around with settings, but for some reason Path still seems relevant.

erikpukinskis 14y ago
It'd take a long time to type in those 20 email addresses every time you snap a photo on your vacation.
- unimpressive 14y ago
  Any decent email client should do autocomplete. Even if that's not the case, this is something the client should handle.
  - chadyj 14y ago
    Or even better, use address book groups.
  - prostoalex 14y ago
    And then you remember you forgot the 21st one, and your choices are either to email the original 20 plus the added address, or email the 21st one separately, thus creating a one-off thread.

unimpressive 14y ago

It helps to remember that the first social networks (See: Usenet) were built out of email. EDIT: All email needs is the ability to display information like the web can. Properly formatted and threaded.

vannevar 14y ago
So are some of the later ones. Twitter built a multi-billion dollar business by duplicating the functionality of email and listserv in a proprietary service.
- MichaelGG 14y ago
  Listserv had an SMS-oriented design? It automatically made every user their own independent channel that other users could choose to subscribe to? I don't use Twitter, but saying it's just email/listserv is rather silly. Also, it's only a mutli-billion dollar business by investment; it doesn't generate even 1bn in revenue.
  - vannevar 14y ago
    Email-to-SMS gateways have been around a long time. And sure, an email provider could set up a service that automatically gives every email account their own listserv. I'd agree that Twitter's valuation is arguable, but the investor consensus is that it's a multi-billion dollar business, whatever the revenue is.
hollerith 14y ago
in what sense was Usenet built out of email? only thing that comes to mind is re-using some of the syntax of RFC 822.
- recoiledsnake 14y ago
  I think it was more at a conceptual level rather than technical. It's like sending a e-mail to a public mailing list that anyone can view, join or reply to.

kijin 14y ago

> Why build a new messaging product when the basic functionality of email combined with a little effort from the user can achieve the same result? Well, to begin with, users don't want to expend even a little bit of effort. Isn't that why everyone is trying to minimize friction in the sign-up process? I agree that e-mail, as a protocol, is a powerful tool that is often misunderstood. But we really need e-mail clients that allow us to keep track of a large number of threads without getting lost of feeling swamped. Gmail tries to do this to some extent, but it's far from perfect.

tomrod 14y ago
I logged on to say exactly this. If for a product, the benefit is overwhelmed by the cost, then the user is irrational to use such a product. Email is _difficult_ to share things appropriately. A hybrid client, like gmail, is IMHO much better.
joe_the_user 14y ago
You'd be surprised at the effort that users will and won't engage in. I know plenty of utterly non-technical users who have strong opinions about what are the uses of an email list versus the uses of a web forum versus the uses of a Facebook group page. Which means, to me, that on the one hand, these folks would be interested in a new messaging approach if it was strongly distinguished from the functionality of email and on the other hand, these users quite likely wouldn't bother with something that seem too much like email. Essential, it seems like average people are up for multiple communications mediums but treat each medium as kind of a given, not something that's going to evolve. I'd be interested in ways of dealing with this.
- kijin 14y ago
  > average people are up for multiple communications mediums but treat each medium as kind of a given, not something that's going to evolve. People have been thinking like that for a long time about a lot of things. They have strong opinions about when to use a car vs. truck vs. minivan, or when to take the bus vs. the subway. They also have strong opinions about the purpose of each room in their home and each piece of furniture in their office. This is OK because most of these things don't change very often, and when they do (e.g. a new subway route or a major renovation), the change is obvious. Today's technology, on the other hand, changes very quickly and in subtle ways. It's hard to catch up with all of that, so the inertia becomes more noticeable. I shared a Dropbox folder with my father a while ago, but he still sends me large files as email attachments.

mrhonza 14y ago

cdcarter 14y ago
Lately my industry has hit a new trend that I've fallen in love. Basically, each night all the departments on a live performance receive performance reports, reports listing what went well and what went wrong in the performance, as well as start times, run times, audience size, etc... In the olden days, these were posted or hand distributed. Then over time they moved to being emailed out as PDF attachments, still formatted to perfect beauty as the old printed copies. Now more and more, the attachment is forgone and the data is just typed directly into the body of the email. Sure it doesn't have the glitz of a pristine PDF with the production font and header, but with one glance I can see the numbers I want to see from my iPhone. I find it funny that it took us until mobile devices to get to the point where we are using email as intended, instead of as a vector for attaching PDFs.
- jasomill 14y ago
  Not to mention pointless Word documents, "templates" that include background images and difficult-to-read colors and fonts, signatures with embedded artwork, screensful of pointless legalese, and top-posted histories of conversations almost, if not entirely unrelated to the present message. In other words, it's not at all clear to me how additional features would help decrease email's signal-to-noise problems when users themselves choose to create the noise.
- 14y ago

deleted 14y ago

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TimPC 14y ago

E-mail has a culture around it that doesn't work for many tasks. It's called "inbox zero". Basically for most e-mail users they attempt to clear out their inbox to zero new messages every time they go to e-mail. This means if you want to do things that require thought over a period of time you'll almost always have someone using e-mail the wrong way for the task.

monkeymace 14y ago
I gave up on keeping on tidy inbox long ago. I have 16,794 unread emails in my Gmail account. I feel like keeping my email organized would easily become a full time job.

Aftershock21 14y ago

In social networks, companies are not trying to fix email or group communication because its broken. They are trying to produce users for their specific applications. If they use Email as a substrate for communication, they have no user. They end up being just a software vendor.

coderdude 14y ago

Email is not great. My biggest problem with email is that it's unreliable. There have been so many times where I'd send an email and have it never even reach its destination. I'm not talking about a legitimate message being marked as spam and tucked away in some folder, but not even delivered and my email server isn't notified of this shenanigans (I'm looking at you, mac.com and gmail.com). This is I'm sure because some server down the chain messed up somewhere. How can you track this down? There is no way to even know if your email made it to a person's inbox (like a kind of forced "received receipt" -- I don't care if they read it yet).

neilkelty 14y ago
It's been years since I've actually encountered this problem. Most of the time the person was lazy, forgetful, or lying to me.
- coderdude 14y ago
  I want to believe in the best in people, I really do. But I do know better and that's all the more reason why we need a way to keep track of this without having to rely on humans telling you the truth.
  - baudehlo 14y ago
    But the protocol does keep track of it. Just because some end implementation is violating the protocol doesn't make the system broken. It makes their implementation broken.
trimbo 14y ago
> There have been so many times where I'd send an email and have it never even reach its destination This is easily explained if you were hosting your own Postfix or something. There are a significant number of hoops that legitimate email senders must jump through in order to ensure their email goes through properly. DKIM signing, SPF records, rDNS, etc. These are some of the ways for gmail and apple identify you as a legit sender as opposed to a spammer. > I'm not talking about a legitimate message being marked as spam and tucked away in some folder, but not even delivered and my email server isn't notified of this shenanigans In general, ISPs won't want to let spammers know they're are bulking email. That's why you aren't told.

mbesto 14y ago

I've thought about writing this post so many times. E-mail is not broken, but we'll continually try to convince ourselves that our inabilities to be collaborative and communicate properly is because we're not given the right medium to do so. This is bullshit. People who are terrible at communication will continue to be terrible at communication regardless of what tool they use. The hammer isn't broken, the carpenter is. Fix the carpenter. EDIT: I should add - I see many tools that try to replace e-mail aren't largely trying to fix the problems with communication, but rather they are trying to assign accountability. This is great for bosses (or "controllers"), but not necessarily great for everyone. I've simplified this too much and could go into way more detail if I had the time.

thebdmethod 14y ago
I agree with you here. My point of writing this post was the illustrate that in the pursuit of ultimate convenience we sometimes loose sight of the importance doing committing to new behaviors or overcoming our own laziness. And technology should not enable laziness, or replace effort, but rather elevate and extend and magnify existing effort.
- jtheory 14y ago
  It's a very good point, and reminds of the "Confessions of a Recovering Lifehacker" post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4012852 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4012852 It's worth doing some approximate cost/gain math now & again.... E.g., my core goal is to better communicate about important things with family/friends. To that end I have... spent about 30 hours of my spare time this month implementing a solution to save me 30 seconds per email, and about 1 hour actually writing 5 actual emails. QED. Side note: in your message here (and twice in the blog post), you're using the verb "loose" (means "set free") when you mean "lose" (means "fail to retain").
  - monkeymace 14y ago
    I like the formula you invoke here. Looking back, if I spent the same amount of time messaging and communicating with people that I spent building an app to facilitating future communication I would be much better off, thought more thoughts, and grown closer to more people. (Also, thanks for keeping me honest with the "loose" typos, they've been corrected.

ChrisArchitect 14y ago

yeah yeah,email is the original great killer app of the internet. But as far as collaboration, it is full of problems and for the average user just causes problems and confusion and makes people bend over backwards to try and keep up. All the new developments are about taking it to a new level...beyond the original idea. Meaning less silos, easier many-to-many and one-to-many etc...

drivebyacct2 14y ago

NO. I want to scream. NO. I just began working at a company that uses "distribution groups" (mailing lists) as a "social network". It's awful as it's not threaded, it's not archived, it's not searchable. It's terrible.

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
bgilroy26 14y ago
This is a social problem, not a technology problem. There are many email lists wih searchable archives.
TY 14y ago
What if someone could create a new messaging system that works like previous messaging systems such as email and Usenet, but instead of sending a message along with its entire thread of previous messages, or requiring all responses to be stored in each user's inbox for context, message documents that contain complete threads of multimedia messages (blips) are perpetually stored on a central server. These documents are shared with collaborators who can be added or removed from the document at any point during a document's existence. And I could add much more to my wish list. If only someone, with lots of brains and financial resources would come up with something like this and push it to gain wide acceptance then we would forget about the horror that email is very quickly... For some more info: http://bit.ly/1aAMNd http://bit.ly/1aAMNd
- nickbarnwell 14y ago
  Doesn't that more or less describe Google Wave?
  - seabee 14y ago
    The link exactly describes (for it is) Google Wave.
    - 14y ago

drostie 14y ago

Email has a lot of warts besides its obvious graces, especially when you look at the back-end of how emails are actually stored and transferred and authenticated. So I think we as programmers are naturally drawn to the idea of developing the email-killer. The central problem with the dreamers seems to be that they're not dreaming deeply enough. Email is a communications multitool which leverages the whole human subconscious to effect its various uses: a human is supposed to know whether this is a "your boss demands that you do this" email or a "your friend wants you to look at her cute cat" email or "your uncle is ranting about fluoride in the water again" email. Most email killers do not and cannot eliminate this mental overhead. Graham only says "other people should be able to add to my todo list" -- he's not killing email, he's considering an email-aware todo list. That's very common. Skype is not an email killer precisely because it doesn't dream big enough: it is a realtime messaging protocol which hit it big because it worked with video. Trello is not an email killer precisely because it's for organizing groups. RSS is not an email killer because it only solves the limited problem of keeping aware of new content. Email does all of these tasks -- poorly, but it does them. If you want to really kill email, you need to offer the core functionality effortlessly. Email II would understand "circles" of friends automatically, so that there is only an "inbox" for those people who are contacting you for the very first time. Like syndication, Email II would host the content on the publisher's web server to be downloaded whenever the client wants -- this has spam-deterrent effects, since the network doesn't take responsibility for the content. It would hopefully allow us to unify mailing lists. We can protect privacy with automatic cryptography; "chris::example.com" can stand for a public key which is stored on the example.com machines. The email killer needs to be good at segmenting messages so that we can say "This is the text of my invitation to a wedding, but it also comes with a standard-appointment-form where I describe where and when it is, so that it can be rapidly added to your 'upcoming dates' in the relevant social circle." (Since this must merge with dates and todo-lists, presumably example.com contains its own list of stuff which chris::example.com has stored for his own use.) And I want to at this point admit defeat: because I think even those ideas are not daring enough. The email killer is probably going to have to do even more than all of that, and my own imagination becomes limited.

gatlin 14y ago
I'll be honest - XMPP fits this description pretty well, at least as far as I read it right now. Most clients don't seem to understand this but that seems tractable.

chadyj 14y ago

This is a timely article for me as I am just about to launch a email startup called Sendicate that adds tools to simplify and empower email-based communication. Another way of looking at it is like a content publishing app for email. For those interested here are some more thoughts on what I am building http://www.chadyj.com/tagged/sendicate http://www.chadyj.com/tagged/sendicate Email certainly has some issues but it is also infinitely flexible and powerful and drives a lot of our day to day interaction with the internet. I am surprised that there is such a drive to re-invent email when a few specialized tools that add value to email will solve many use cases without re-inventing the wheel.

thebdmethod 14y ago

I am curious about anyone currently trying to build a communication tool, and their argument for why it is a better solution than email.

pfraze 14y ago
I started linkjs[1] so I could create an extensible inbox/social app that supports multiple services and interfaces. The idea is to build tool environments around communication, much like the environments we already have around processing (e.g. the unix shell). Email will be one of the services the comm environment integrates, so it's more of an extension than a replacement. 1. https://github.com/pfraze/linkjs https://github.com/pfraze/linkjs
yogo 14y ago
For most users that just need to communicate regarding a specific item it is much quicker to comment on that and that alone with tools like http://postfrenzy.com http://postfrenzy.com. Having to deal with threads and multiple topics in single email messages for most users often results in a degradation of the conversation, quickly.

verganileonardo 14y ago

Email is OK as a communication tool. But companies use it as a task/to-do list and to work together on tasks. Email is terrible to achieve this. You will end up with lots of emails and multiple versions of the same documents... That is why I wish someone fix email! :)

RyanMcGreal 14y ago
If that's what you're using it for, someone has fixed email: http://trello.com http://trello.com
- verganileonardo 14y ago
  I'm using Trello! :) It is great if you don't have lots of leads :)
chaddyar 14y ago
Maybe in outlook...aren't most of those problems solved by gmail? :)
- verganileonardo 14y ago
  How does gmail solve this problem?
kijin 14y ago
I don't think that's a reason to "fix email". Rather, it's a reason to use the right tool for the job. If you need a to-do list, use an app that does to-do lists well. If you need to keep track of changes to documents, use a version control system. What's needed, of course, is a tool that integrates all these other tools into a manageable workflow. But that's not "fixing email", either, it's just another tool.
gklitt 14y ago
I agree with this. The business context is really the one where email is most broken. Tools like Basecamp and Trello do a good job with project management, but they aren't a 100% substitute for all the various functions of email. I sometimes think that a hybrid between email and a forum/bulletin board would be the best way to manage complex communication, instead of convoluted cc lists...

taliesinb 14y ago

This reminds me of something most new communication media seem not to realize: no matter how fancy your new thing is, not everyone will want to try it initially, so for God's sake make it bridge to email. Otherwise it will become a ghetto. I don't think the Wave people understood this; if they had, Wave might have turned out differently. Asana, on the other hand, made a big deal out of this.

unimpressive 14y ago
Making something bridge to email doesn't seem terribly difficult. SMTP is; as the name would imply, simple. (At least it seems simple.)
- taliesinb 14y ago
  To be a true bridge you need to be bidirectional: to do that you'd need IMAP, not SMTP. IMAP is a bit of a stateful mess of a protocol, unfortunately.

ajdecon 14y ago

I've wondered a lot about why e-mail isn't used more as a backend for different services. But as far as I can tell, messaging products proliferate because their creators want to create profitable products rather than distributed protocols. E-mail is a pretty good group of protocols for distributing arbitrary messages between different locations on the Internet. It's easy to imagine how all sorts of messaging and social network products could be implemented as a specialized e-mail client with a good user experience. Their forms might be slightly different than they have now, but they'd serve approximately the same consumer purpose. For example, you could build a social networking "client" with e-mail as a backend. Status updates, photos, etc. would be distributed to all your contacts via email, and the client would produce a "timeline" based on the data in its mailbox, without ever showing the user the original messages. But you give up a lot of control that way, and it's harder to monetize. What developers want (and users too, to be honest) is a centralized service that they can control, mine data with, and sell products or show ads. A distributed protocol, while in some ways more powerful (and less dependent on a fallible central authority!), doesn't achieve the real business aims.

antidoh 14y ago
"messaging products proliferate because their creators want to create profitable products rather than distributed protocols." That's a bingo.
MatthewPhillips 14y ago
There's a chicken and egg problem to this. If you do what you suggest, you are going to flood the user's inbox and although you will clean it up in your client, the user is also going to have a standard email client that notifies them constantly about your messages. We need a transitory client that is better than the one we have today, but still is the only email client you use. It would do a better job of categorizing and prioritizing your messages. When the user gets used to this, they might be willing to accepting dropping general purpose email clients all together.
- ajdecon 14y ago
  I don't even want to make the user drop general-purpose email clients; I just think that email, as a back-end distributed messaging protocol, is more understood and battle-tested than just about anything a startup is likely to invent. Two possibilities that occurred to me: 1) Your service just uses email as a backend messaging protocol, and provides a new "user@myservice.com" mailbox to all users. Advantage is that you can put all your logic in the client, and just run a mail server. 2) Better: include an email header along the lines of "Intended-For-Application: MyService", and encourage general-purpose email clients to auto-archive these messages out of the inbox. But yeah, it's just the kernel of an idea, and there are tons of problems with it.

benblodgett 14y ago

I think the broken part of email exists in business communication, in my experience it's grossly overused. It becomes an endless todo list that requires processing (eg, response, forward, assign, done, etc). This is inefficient and distracts us from our primary functions.

baby 14y ago

I don't agree, even if Gmail brought a lot to emails (threads and antispam) it's still a problem that, in my opinion, facebook message tackles.

jasonjei 14y ago

I know all the people pushing for social networks will disagree, but I think email can be fixed, just like static web pages have been fixed to do asynchronous JavaScript to provide dynamic web experiences. I think the problem is the cure is much worse than the disease. The cures of using social network tools is often an enclosed, controlled network such as Twitter or Facebook, which puts control of the network in the hands of few. Instead of trying to replace email, I think we should "fix" it rather than trying to replace it. Some advocate using Web/REST/HTTP to replace email; I think email isn't that doomed. Remember, the popularity of email is because anybody can start an email service. Nobody can just use Facebook or Twitter; you have to have the approval of an inner circle authority. Imagine if every Web site required MPAA or RIAA control, and they prevented even non-infringing material online using SOPA!

slowpoke 14y ago
>just like static web pages have been fixed to do asynchronous JavaScript to provide dynamic web experiences If by that you are trying to imply that email needs more awful HTML junk and other "features", stop. Now. That would finally destroy email, not fix it.

zuikan 14y ago

Pretty clear why both your apps failed if you actually believe any of the drabble..

rythie 14y ago

The problem is that email is so broken, you could sort of fix it, but people have been trying for years and it's easier to start again. For example we still have these problems: - No proof that people are who they say they are, we have PGP/GPG but no one uses it. - Related to the above, I can't control who can send me email, people use different email addresses and any address can be faked anyway. - No accepted way to post short messages, people still post long email with big disclaimers and/or adverts at the bottom - Poor email client support for sending/receiving large numbers of pictures, with thumbnails and full versions - Lack of any real semantic support tags, share a single link, geo information etc. - No way to public display of your timeline (i.e. twitter) - No obvious way to have all contact's photos against emails [seems to be coming in now somehow, not sure how really] - Inability to remove content you accidentally sent - User expectations that email works in a certain way and doesn't need to change.

cdcarter 14y ago
Of these issues, I only see #1 and #4 as real. Some of them perhaps you could elaborate on? What do you mean by #3? I send short messages all the time. I just write a short message and hit send. Why would you even want #6? Email is designed as a private mechanism, this seems to go against the very reason I use email...
- rythie 14y ago
  Most people don't do #3 and without tools either limiting (twitter) or coaxing you (facebook) you get big run on messages, which you don't want to read. You want #6 because many people are trying to share you thoughts with everyone, and the post is titled "All you need is e-mail, e-mail. E-mail is all you need."
  - Zak 14y ago
    I may be in the minority, but I don't understand why most people on twitter wish to consume most tweets. Outside of a synchronous or semi-synchronous (e.g. IRC) conversation, It's pretty hard to say anything worth saying in 140 characters. I hate twitter and I hate tl;dr as a meme. HN as a community tends to encourage longer posts for the same reason; they're more likely to be interesting. It works better for sharing content, but I don't usually want to see all content that a particular person wants to share. Other mechanisms work better for getting a list of content to consume: RSS offers all the content from a particular source, and sites like HN and reddit show recent content that a particular community finds interesting. The only thing I see twitter as good for is disseminating facts to a large audience when a non-internet-capable phone is the the only communication tool available. It has served that function a number of times during war, natural disasters and other breakdowns of civil infrastructure. Even so, I'd rather consume someone else's aggregation of the facts rather than track down which users to follow myself and unfollow them after the event is over. That's what reporters (including bloggers) are for.

chmike 14y ago

Mail is broken in many ways. Because there is no authentication and thus forged from addresses, error messages can't be returned. Relays are allowed to modify mails which invalidates hashes and signatures. Attached and included documents are encoded in base64. ... The main usage problem is abuse of this communication channel. While our email addresses should be public so that anyone in the world may contact us, we are forced to use hidden emails to protect ourselves. This Is the reason of the success of messaging system limited to friends. There is much less abuse. The problem was known with fax, and will happen with phones if the phone call price drops to zero.

AznHisoka 14y ago

Email, as well as IRC. Because email doesn't handle real-time spontaneous casual online conversations. Twitter is a poor way of doing it, and Facebook is just email + shallow egotistical dopamine hacks.

h84ru3a 14y ago

Email is a bootstrap that no "next-generation" communications solution can do without. Every startup, whether focused on communications or not, wants your email address. That is not a coincidence. From a marketing perspective, email also has the greatest reach, greater than the web. The majority of the still relatively small percentage of the world's pop. that is connected to the internet are more likely to use email than the web, and they spend more time using email than they do the web. If you do the research I believe you will find that these are the facts. Email needs to be improved (e.g. cut out the middlemen -- "email providers" -- somehow, perhaps run email servers within trusted peer-to-peer groups: groups that are established using only the internet and without the need for a web browser, javascript, etc.). Email does not need to be "replaced". Email is a simple and effective concept and as such, it is not going to "go away". So let's work on trying to improve it, architecturally. The "walled garden" approach to communications, maybe using different gardens for different types of contacts to whom you provide your mail address, makes sense. Maybe it wouldn't stop spam, but it might contain it, e.g. to certain gardens. But any solution dubbed an "email killer" that based on the public web is not truly walled. It relies on a complex web browser. There will be ways to get in. And it's the same old story: people want to get in to spam you or scan your email for hints they can give to advertisers. Imagine if the post office scanned every letter for hints they could give to advertisers, like the ones who fill your physical mailbox with junk postal mail. Why do we accept this with email? Improvements on email need to start at a lower level: the IP layer. Peer-to-peer. Move away from "calf-cow". Take back control of our mail.

nazar 14y ago

I can't help thinking about Google Wave :)

waldr 14y ago

I agree with a lot of the points here, Email in itself isn't broken. I've spent the last 2 months studying users email habits, who sends what?, what do they receive?, what are the conversations like?, how is the platform being used? etc.. the conclusion is simple email is incredibly personal each single users works in their own way. The problem is where these habits collide, the way I receive an email from you doesn't match how I'd construct and send an email, therefore whatever I receive is going to cause me a problem.

aufreak3 14y ago

I guess the author forgot to add "... and oh yeah, blogs too" to the title.

arthurrr 14y ago

I met a nice girl who went back to her home country and we exchanged email addresses. But the emails we sent each other ended up in the spam folder. This is unacceptable. Email is unreliable. As much as I hate Facebook, it actually works for these situations. Email is ok as a secondary communications tool, but I would never build anything that relies on it.

acuozzo 14y ago
> This is unacceptable. Email is unreliable. Isn't this a spam-filter problem? How does a bad spam-filter imply that e-mail's unreliable? Did you even __attempt__ to configure your spam-filter(s)?