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The issues we humans have with emails in the present time lay in the lack of modern PERSONAL email tools development. For modern and personal I mean NOT living

by kkfx 2y ago

The issues we humans have with emails in the present time lay in the lack of modern PERSONAL email tools development. For modern and personal I mean NOT living on someone else mailserver but easily download or sync remote IMAPs, or to use them directly (with some issues [1]) or via a personal homeserver IMAP, with a modern search-based client like notmuch-emacs/mu4e, and a built-in decent filtering tool (like MailDrop). We have essentially all the pieces (we can use IMAPFilter + OfflineIMAP to refile messages if we just sync them, or the old fetchmail + MailDrop if we download, using notmuch in Emacs or with also Aerc) but they are different software with different configs, styles, variable level of documentation and userfriendliness etc. There is NOTHING for less geek/expert users a thing that makes many considering email == webmails and so a webmail is a service by a third party (for such users) as is Slack, WhatsApp web and so on, a dangerous vision for the freedom of communication and the power emails offer. I hope some think about that enough to makes thing changes not only at geek levels... It's not that hard having a MailDrop rule that match an ISP regular bill launching a script that add the due date, amount to an agenda, than check the local accounting software for relevant transaction presence and warn if something it's not as expects, not that hard with text-based tools, like org-agenda, BeanCount, MailDrop, emails. VERY hard with modern software and that's a big loss for many potential power users who can't profit of such easy automation simply because for them it's too long to learn and implement and often even an unknown option. IT was born to simply life and augment human cognition, it's very sad almost all have forgotten that. [1] due to mail files naming syncing on multiple machines often create unread/tags annoyances, with duplicate messages generation and so on...

jjav 2y ago
> modern PERSONAL email tools The capitalized personal part there is so important! So few people today even realize what is possible, since they are captive in websites like gmail that have so very little functionality. email was always supposed to have a 100% customizable workflow, filtering, sorting, foldering, etc. We still have this of course, as all the old tools work. But there needs to be more awareness how great email is when used as originally intended. I'd despise email too if I believed gmail is email, but it's not. procmail and mutt still work just fine!
- kkfx 2y ago
  I still use fetchmail, while I prefer MailDrop over procmail :-) And, yes, I 110% agree about automation revolving around emails, or simply revolving around exchanging text between people asynchronously. I still have my ascii ribbon campaign in the signature [well, mostly because I very lazy]. One of the first kind of automation, it's just mere handling, I have auto-delete for some mails not flagged, to keep my maildirs of a human size, and having them on my iron I can choose both the size and how much allow to grow without having to pay extra subscription or experimenting many third party "old mails missing" issues. But also small potatoes automation from "the smart home", bills annotations and so on. If a sufficient mass of people know how much and how simply we can do certain things like extracting attachments (uudeview, ripmime etc) and archiving them we can easily imaging e-bills (now that most western countries have them, for those who do not know e-invoices, typically XML-based with signatures or not, sometimes pdfs with embedded XML/JSON) attached and automatically archived by our desktop for future access in a snap. Similar things about other "old tools" from usenet to RSS, just imaging your bank offering an authenticated feed of every transaction, markets changes etc with push notifications as well. With these tools the modern world could be automated 10x the actual level with 1/10 of the actual effort needed for just the actual level. Unfortunately those who know today are less and less and very unfortunately those teaching in academia seems to have lost any interest in teaching, maybe with some incentives by big tech...
  - jjav 2y ago
    > Similar things about other "old tools" from usenet to RSS, just imaging your bank offering an authenticated feed of every transaction, markets changes etc with push notifications as well. What a dream that would be! Agree with everything above. In the 90s everything was trivially easy to automate and customize in any way one wanted. As the world has moved to ever more isolated siloed webapps that barely have any functionality built-in (which makes sense since every feature has to be built as a one-off addition to that specific website) and don't hook into or interoperate with any tools, we keep moving ever backwards in functionality and automatability. This is not the future that was supposed to be.
    - 2y ago

by kkfx 2y ago

jjav 2y ago

> modern PERSONAL email tools The capitalized personal part there is so important! So few people today even realize what is possible, since they are captive in websites like gmail that have so very little functionality. email was always supposed to have a 100% customizable workflow, filtering, sorting, foldering, etc. We still have this of course, as all the old tools work. But there needs to be more awareness how great email is when used as originally intended. I'd despise email too if I believed gmail is email, but it's not. procmail and mutt still work just fine!

kkfx 2y ago
I still use fetchmail, while I prefer MailDrop over procmail :-) And, yes, I 110% agree about automation revolving around emails, or simply revolving around exchanging text between people asynchronously. I still have my ascii ribbon campaign in the signature [well, mostly because I very lazy]. One of the first kind of automation, it's just mere handling, I have auto-delete for some mails not flagged, to keep my maildirs of a human size, and having them on my iron I can choose both the size and how much allow to grow without having to pay extra subscription or experimenting many third party "old mails missing" issues. But also small potatoes automation from "the smart home", bills annotations and so on. If a sufficient mass of people know how much and how simply we can do certain things like extracting attachments (uudeview, ripmime etc) and archiving them we can easily imaging e-bills (now that most western countries have them, for those who do not know e-invoices, typically XML-based with signatures or not, sometimes pdfs with embedded XML/JSON) attached and automatically archived by our desktop for future access in a snap. Similar things about other "old tools" from usenet to RSS, just imaging your bank offering an authenticated feed of every transaction, markets changes etc with push notifications as well. With these tools the modern world could be automated 10x the actual level with 1/10 of the actual effort needed for just the actual level. Unfortunately those who know today are less and less and very unfortunately those teaching in academia seems to have lost any interest in teaching, maybe with some incentives by big tech...
- jjav 2y ago
  > Similar things about other "old tools" from usenet to RSS, just imaging your bank offering an authenticated feed of every transaction, markets changes etc with push notifications as well. What a dream that would be! Agree with everything above. In the 90s everything was trivially easy to automate and customize in any way one wanted. As the world has moved to ever more isolated siloed webapps that barely have any functionality built-in (which makes sense since every feature has to be built as a one-off addition to that specific website) and don't hook into or interoperate with any tools, we keep moving ever backwards in functionality and automatability. This is not the future that was supposed to be.
  - 2y ago