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TBH, I've never understood why more people didn't explore the multipart content type feature of email to extend email. It's typical to have plaintext and html i

TBH, I've never understood why more people didn't explore the multipart content type feature of email to extend email. It's typical to have plaintext and html in the same email, but why no JSON using a well defined and published JSON-schema.

alex_duf 12y ago
I've seen an application in production using e-mails as a message broker. It worked pretty well.
- iLoch 12y ago
  Isn't there a lot more overhead with the headers? Neat idea though.
  - vidarh 12y ago
    Depends on your messaging volume and typical message size. For some types of apps it won't matter because the volume is small; for others it won't matter because the payload is huge. But you get battle-tested federation, scaling, server discovery etc. nearly free.
- jlgaddis 12y ago
  You can still replicate Active Directory over SMTP.
- vidarh 12y ago
  I've done that twice: First time was when we built a demo registrar platform for ".name". We used Qmail with some custom bits and pieces to distribute messages that were used for things like live updates of the primary DNS server, live updates for a web forwarding service etc. A couple of the guys took the idea much further, and implemented a small library to do things like queue browsing via POP3. The nice thing was all the existing tools that works well with various aspects of e-mail, and the great ease of introspection and testing. The second time I did it was at Edgeio, where I initially used it to get a prototype of our blog feed retrieval / indexing pipeline up and running quickly. Though we relatively soon replaced it with a homegrown Stomp server, mostly because a lot of the stuff we were doing didn't need the delivery guarantees of e-mail, so we used in-memory queues for a lot of stuff. It works great for some workloads, and it's a very easy way of prototyping things that makes it easy to debug message flows etc.. The state of open source message brokers have drastically improved since the times I did it, though - the first time we did it was back in 2002 or 2003.
LunaSea 12y ago
Serious question: What is the use-case for email as a server communication protocol rather than say HTTP/s ? Is it to bypass firewalls in some way ?
- jtmoulia 12y ago
  Email allows someone to send me data, as opposed to HTTP/S which targets servers. Adding structured data to emails could allow natural language communication to have a machine readable view of the communication. And there's probably a lot more uses.
  - LunaSea 12y ago
    You'd still have the option to use WebSockets or Ajax-polling.
mtdewcmu 12y ago
I'm pretty sure that absolutely nothing is preventing this, and you could start sending emails with JSON inside right now. The hard part is probably finding something meaningful for it to do.

alex_duf 12y ago

I've seen an application in production using e-mails as a message broker. It worked pretty well.

iLoch 12y ago
Isn't there a lot more overhead with the headers? Neat idea though.
- vidarh 12y ago
  Depends on your messaging volume and typical message size. For some types of apps it won't matter because the volume is small; for others it won't matter because the payload is huge. But you get battle-tested federation, scaling, server discovery etc. nearly free.
jlgaddis 12y ago
You can still replicate Active Directory over SMTP.
vidarh 12y ago
I've done that twice: First time was when we built a demo registrar platform for ".name". We used Qmail with some custom bits and pieces to distribute messages that were used for things like live updates of the primary DNS server, live updates for a web forwarding service etc. A couple of the guys took the idea much further, and implemented a small library to do things like queue browsing via POP3. The nice thing was all the existing tools that works well with various aspects of e-mail, and the great ease of introspection and testing. The second time I did it was at Edgeio, where I initially used it to get a prototype of our blog feed retrieval / indexing pipeline up and running quickly. Though we relatively soon replaced it with a homegrown Stomp server, mostly because a lot of the stuff we were doing didn't need the delivery guarantees of e-mail, so we used in-memory queues for a lot of stuff. It works great for some workloads, and it's a very easy way of prototyping things that makes it easy to debug message flows etc.. The state of open source message brokers have drastically improved since the times I did it, though - the first time we did it was back in 2002 or 2003.

LunaSea 12y ago

Serious question: What is the use-case for email as a server communication protocol rather than say HTTP/s ? Is it to bypass firewalls in some way ?

jtmoulia 12y ago
Email allows someone to send me data, as opposed to HTTP/S which targets servers. Adding structured data to emails could allow natural language communication to have a machine readable view of the communication. And there's probably a lot more uses.
- LunaSea 12y ago
  You'd still have the option to use WebSockets or Ajax-polling.

mtdewcmu 12y ago

I'm pretty sure that absolutely nothing is preventing this, and you could start sending emails with JSON inside right now. The hard part is probably finding something meaningful for it to do.