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Likewise. So much for people saying email is broken and outdated. It's the one medium I've been using for 20 years now and keep coming back to.

• iffyuva 13y ago
  so true. i respect people who put an effort to compose an email to share something, rather than hitting share button. most of the time they dont even remember what they have shared over fb!
• lostlogin 13y ago
  If people didn't abuse the reply all button I might be able to come to terms with email usage. Reply all button abuse makes email almost Facebook bad for me.
  • bigiain 13y ago
    Seems to me that perhaps "reply all abuse" is indicative of poorly chosen recipient lists. (Which doesn't help if it wasn't you who sent the original mail…)
    • lostlogin 13y ago
      Yeah, I'm a recipient. Professional body that has god knows how many members who use the reply all to ask each other for coffee. I tried binning their emails but that caused havoc with bills/body requirements. It's awful.
      • gizzlon 13y ago
        Sounds more like a people problem than a email problem :)
      • lucian1900 13y ago
        Sounds like they need a non-work mailing list.
• lucian1900 13y ago
  Well, in addition to being very useful it is also broken and outdated. Sadly, the "alternatives" (facebook, google plus, etc.) fix almost none of the flaws and add some of their own (non-federated!)
  • jwdunne 13y ago
    What, exactly, are the flaws you are talking about? I'm interested because email is simple and there may be ways, inventive or not, of fixing it without protocol changes, or at most a layer written above email. I've been thinking about how to fix email as per YCs list of things they'd like to fund (just to get the juices flowing) and it might be cool to build on top of the email protocol rather than replace it - e.g it's trivial to format, say, todos in an email in a human readable format such that they can still be read and returned checked off by users who don't use this additional layer.
    • bradleyjg 13y ago
      There are two different sets of problems with email. The first, more concrete, set arises simply because of the age of the protocols. They were developed when the internet was a club of like minded people rather than a global public space. Things like: a lack of rock solid authentication, no guarantees of transit privacy (much less at rest privacy), clunky formatting, multimedia and hypermedia support, arcane attachment problems, and only hacked on support for anything beyond 1:N messaging (e.g. mailing lists). A lot of these problems have good, solid, proposed solutions but inertia and collective action problems mean that near universal support for protocol additions / changes take years if not decades. The second, more amorphous, set of problems have to do with how some people use email pervasively in their lives in a fashion that (inevitably) would be more efficiently accomplished with a tool specialized to their needs. So for example, people who spend a fair amount of time in a corporate enviorment with Exchange often bitterly miss the calendar management integration. They say that vanilla email is broken because it has no equivalent capability. Although the critique is legitamite I think the target is off, it's not email that's broken, it's federated calendaring in general. But because email can sort-of, kind-of substitute it gets the blame.