24 ms·

Email Is Still the Best Thing on the Internet

435 points by plg 12y ago

jokoon 12y ago
and this, gentlemen, is why you should create actual protocols, not applications. applications die, protocols stay. if your software solution use the web protocol, you're already limited by it. that's why I hate 99% of the internet techs.
- lukeholder 12y ago
  tell that to app.net
  - coldpie 12y ago
    I got a free account and spent an evening or two trying to figure out what app.net was supposed to be, and I gave up. I get the feeling it was supposed to be something more than the ghost town Twitter-clone it appears to be, but I couldn't figure it out. Email's purpose, on the other hand, is pretty obvious.
byoung2 12y ago
Want to verify a bank account? Email. Amazon? Email. Forums? Email. Even Facebook in the early days? Email. This is a big part of why email continues to thrive. So many services have email baked in (e.g. a new WordPress install sends you an email). There are some services that let you choose between email and SMS, like plane reservations and banking alerts, but 95% of the time, any notification will come through email. Given that, there is no way you could eliminate email without cutting off all those services in the process. Any new protocol to replace email would have to be a drop-in replacement for anything that currently sends out email or at least coexist peacefully alongside it. You would think that if anyone could accomplish that it would be Facebook or Twitter, but I haven't seen any integration like that so far (e.g. get your plane reservation update or Amazon shipping confirmation by Twitter DM or Facebook message).
redtrackker 12y ago
It would probably only take one innovation in email, something that Gmail could probably pull off, to make email lovable again. I really think that if Google could help alleviate people's concerns with email (volume, spam etc), people would be quite happy with email again :)
- UweSchmidt 12y ago
  Maybe add a little bit of useful cryptography even. Spam is already fixed by Google, and volume? How could Google fix that?
specialp 12y ago
The main power for me in email is that I actually own it. I have my own domain. While I use Slack, Google Hangouts, Hipchat and a bunch of other services, none of them replace email. It is standardized and despite social media/chat services living and dying over time I have had my domain and email for 15 years now. I can't think of many other services I can say that about. It is also a good medium for non urgent communication that paper mail used to serve. The problem people see with email is actually not a problem at all with email, it is with how it is sometimes abused. My boss sometimes sends me an email and then prods me via Slack if I did not read it in 5 minutes. That is what these chat/message services are replacing... The short term action required requests that were formerly served with a phone call.
sarahkennedy 12y ago
Has anyone got an invite code for the new Email product Sortd.com?
- JamesWinter 12y ago
  I got an invite code from a coworker as I couldn't wait any longer to get in! I've been using it for two weeks now and I have to say it's a must have app for all Gmail users ... It's has completely changed the way I work.
nickhalfasleep 12y ago
Email is still inherently a conversation with a person or people, and that is why it has value.
shmerl 12y ago
An interesting post on this subject by Aaron Seigo: http://aseigo.blogspot.com/2014/07/one-singular-sensation-your-email.html http://aseigo.blogspot.com/2014/07/one-singular-sensation-yo...
- tatterdemalion 12y ago
  This article is good but it makes some comments that don't seem true to me. > It's a globally addressable system that does not require any centralized system, which means it works everywhere and for everyone no matter what choice in service provider the individual user (or their organization) makes. Isn't it the case that nearly all email is routed using DNS? Certainly all of mine is. While there are certainly arguments against centralized addressing systems, the advantage that email has isn't that its addressing system is uncentralized: it's that its addressing system is more libre than proprietary systems. >These "open social networks" don't pass messages to the end user. They pass messages to servers which the user then consults. How is this different from email? Most people don't have email addresses at a domain assigned to their normal computer; the vast majority of email is accessed over some internet protocol from a remote server, whether its IMAP, POP3, or HTTP. I've never used Diaspora, so maybe I just don't understand what functionality its missing.
  - shmerl 12y ago
    There are some designs for decentralization of the DNS. The decentralized nature of e-mail on the higher level still is valuable. > the advantage that email has isn't that its addressing system is uncentralized: it's that its addressing system is more libre than proprietary systems. I think that the biggest advantages of e-mail are its decentralization + federation based on open protocols. These make e-mail extremely useful despite all of its shortcomings. Consider for example IM services. They multiply like mushrooms these days, yet most of them completely lack federation and therefore are crippled if you look at them globally. You can't communicate with users of other services at all (unless you register there as well which defeats the purpose of decentralization). XMPP attempted to solve it, but unlike e-mail most participants on the IM scene were too selfish to fix the situation, including Google who deserted. > How is this different from email? Most people don't have email addresses at a domain assigned to their normal computer; the vast majority of email is accessed over some internet protocol from a remote server, whether its IMAP, POP3, or HTTP. I've never used Diaspora, so maybe I just don't understand what functionality its missing. I think his main point is, that in e-mail you can have real push mechanisms in theory. I.e. you send a message and the other participant receives it through the e-mail service. In social networks (even decentralized ones), the delivery of such notifications is delegated to... e-mail. Which shows their intrinsic deficiency. They aren't implementing the full scope of the communication process. I.e. if you envision a better social network, it should be decentralized but also take care of the delivery of the interactions in one coherent experience in order not to rely on other external tools for that. E-mail isn't fully decentralized most of the time, but it still can be (you can run your own e-mail server). You can run your own Diaspora pod the same way, but like above, it would still delegate notifications to another service.
dools 12y ago
I still use pine :) I use gmail so that I get good operation cross device but it's heavily filtered so I only see a fraction of total email on my phone, but I can search everything. I then pop everything off using fetchmail and process all emails down to zero once or twice a day using pine (either in Terminal or irssi connectbot on my xperia). This suits me not only from a day to day perspective but also because if gmail locks me out for some reason I can easily route around it and still have a full backup of my email history.
- keithpeter 12y ago
  Thanks very much for this post. I'm doing a full pop3 download of around 3 years of mostly email newsletters from my gmail account now. In order to enable pop3 though, I had to change a default gmail security setting. Have you had any issues at all since leaving pop enabled? Using Kmail, I'm having to fetch each month's worth of email at a time. Can't find a setting anywhere so assume that is a Google thing.
tatterdemalion 12y ago
Email and WWW provide everything proprietary services are providing people now, but with less flash. The problem is that so many people are moving to these proprietary services that it becomes very difficult to organize and communicate people without making that move. I needed to coordinate with multiple people, and one of them emailed me that we should start a group chat on Facebook; why not just cc them?
nchuhoai 12y ago
This brings up a point I think about a lot: Is email our last success in popularizing an open and federated standard? Maybe you can count OAuth, but IMO i have low confidence that we'll in the near future be able to collaborate on an open protocol so that many benefits of email such as control without vendor lock-in can be enjoyed. We have too many entrenched interests by the main players. I have been working briefly on improving the exchange of trust/reputation data online, but it seemd for us that there was no alternative to a proprietary system if you wish to see widespread adoption. EDIT: I guess Bitcoin has good potential.
- dragonwriter 12y ago
  > Is email our last success in popularizing an open and federated standard? If you mean one with a distinct and separate S2S/federation protocol (SMTP) from the main C2S protocol(s) (POP/IMAP), probably. OTOH, it could just be that separate S2S protocols are less favored in the first place -- the web is newer than email, open, and federated (in that web servers -- but doesn't have a separate S2S protocol. A web server that needs information from another web server to do its job uses HTTP just like any other client.
- marcosdumay 12y ago
  > Is email our last success in popularizing an open and federated standard? Isn't the Web younger?
  - nchuhoai 12y ago
    You are right, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email quotes 1982, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Wide_Web https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Wide_Web 1989 Either way, my point still stands that besides the rapid development of the "internet", we have yet to see another standard emerge (besides OAuth and Bitcoin)
    - daigoba66 12y ago
      SOAP? It was almost a good idea.
oafitupa 12y ago
Bitcoin is better IMO. But I agree that email is a great thing. I hope someone creates a sick email client that turns back the flow from Facebook to the email. I'm fine with Thunderbird + Enigmail, but I don't see the average person using it any time soon (or ever if unchanged).
obilgic 12y ago
what if we limit email to 140 characters and make it the ultimate decentralized push notification system?
- chippy 12y ago
  Elevator pitch: "It's like email but for messages"
sytelus 12y ago
Slack is obviously not killing emails as they are advertising through lot of PR. They have 150K active users so far. However one thing that they are correctly going after is fantastic search abilities for our own data that would include all emails, chat, attachments etc. My feeling is that eventually communication client that excels in search would indeed surface to the top. This client would then drive communication standards of the future, including emails. So in essence, problem is not integration of desperate sources of communication, but ability to search them efficiently.
Fastidious 12y ago
I agree. I think there is more that can be done to enhance it, and make it a more enjoyable tool. Email clients --and I am not talking about third party services a la Mailbox, who rely yet in another server-- are still very primitive.
- 7952 12y ago
  I feel that gmail has held back development of good desktop clients (which is what we really need). My laptop has an almost empty 1TB hard drive yet I need to wait to download an image attachment every time I want to view it. Email should be built around abundant storage, not a dependency on bandwidth.
  - Fastidious 12y ago
    Indeed! One think --among others-- that Gmail has done very well is search, which is expected, as Google specializes on that.
  - thebokehwokeh2 12y ago
    > Email should be built around abundant storage, not a dependency on bandwidth. I'm sorry but this doesn't make sense to me. To cache all images you've ever received is sort of antithetical to the whole 'decentralized' nature of email, and the internet in a nutshell. The 'inconvenience' of having to re-download far surpasses the need to store every single trivial little thing on your mail client's cache. A few seconds is worth way more to me than taking up tens of gigs of images on my HD that I will never see again.
    - 7952 12y ago
      I disagree. A modern device is almost entirely composed of files downloaded from the internet. The binary for your web browser is just a local cache of an entity that exists in the cloud. You need a local cache because bandwidth and latency are too high to retrieve a new copy every single time you run the program unless you need an update. It seems a pity to not use storage to cache when it is available. Especially considering that to most people bandwidth is much more expensive than storage.
3pt14159 12y ago
Email will always be around, but I must say that "Email killers" are really going to be successful. For example, I don't remember the last time my team sent an internal email that wasn't a forward from a client. We use Slack. Exclusively. We organize projects around it, sales efforts, everything. It has the async nature of email, the separation of topics like email, and the search power of email. It also means that none of us ever feel like we're out of the loop.
- dsr_ 12y ago
  How disrupted will your company be if Slack is purchased by Yahoo and is EOL'd with 30 days notice? To do that to email, you'd have to dismantle DNS.
- Aqueous 12y ago
  Unfortunately, the "nobody owns" feature of EMail is something Slack lacks and probably always will. Email is a federated, decentralized protocol of distributed mail servers that anybody can set up. Any email server can participate with any other email server. That's something that Slack will never have (it does interface with XMPP and IRC, but the service itself is centralized.) It is hard to overstate how critical this fact is to Email's future. If you look at most of the canonical Internet protocols (SMTP, HTTP, DNS, XMPP, IRC, even BitCoin) - they have this fundamental feature in common. Even though they're part of the application layer of the Internet, they've become fundamental protocols that other technologies rely on. They are part of the infrastructure of the Internet. I say this is someone who just started using Slack and loves it. I still can't see it replacing email, though.
  - zmmmmm 12y ago
    > XMPP, IRC I actually think these guys are interesting exceptions. Yes, they are still around, but they've largely been eclipsed by proprietary solutions. Why? Why did Twitter storm to success XMPP was ostensibly the same thing but with all of these good qualities (open, federated, decentralised, etc.). Still to this day messaging is a battleground for new entrants touting completely opaque solutions. It seems like there's something more to success than just being open, federated and decentralised.
coldcode 12y ago
What if someone designed a new email protocol/etc from scratch without any reference to the existing one. Could it be made better? Can you even define what better is?
- Niten 12y ago
  That's what Google Wave was intended to be, among other initiatives.
- pinkyand 12y ago
  There are some cases when encouraging shorter messages is very beneficial.
- karellan126 12y ago
  Of course. Lots of ideas in this direction. But be warned, thinking about new protocols is the first place engineers like us go without thinking about what getting adoption would really look like (which would be near impossible + need a backwards compatible beachhead imo).
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- huntaub 12y ago
  Actually, that's exactly what we are trying to do with AirDispatch [1]. We started out intending to "fix" email with a better protocol, and ended up creating something much greater. The core problems that we tried to solve (to help define "better") were: - Security: encrypting and authenticating your messages - Control: the sender hosts the message, so they can edit or delete them before the receiver sees them - Flexibility: all messages are, in fact, just key-value stores, so any type of data can be sent on the protocol (whether it's Mail, IMs, Vines, Instagrams, or whatever the flavor of the week social network is) I think it's a great product, and we are going to start the developer release of the client (Melange [2]) tomorrow. [1] http://airdispat.ch http://airdispat.ch [2] http://github.com/melange-app/melange http://github.com/melange-app/melange
  - 12y ago
jabelk 12y ago
Wholeheartedly agree with the article. I have absolute control of my inbox with filters, labels, and signing up for newsletters and/or updates on various subjects. There is no way a centralized end-to-end service is going to eclipse email for me, unless they radically change their business models. The value proposition is just really bad in all the services I've seen so far. "Oh, you want me to sign up for your service so that I can look at the content you think I should see alongside the ads you're making money off of? And what exactly is in it for me?" Something I would pay for: a rolodex social network. No centralized feed. No useless info. Your profile is 2-3 sentences and your current city (with some sort of maps integration for when you travel, to see who's near you). Two buttons, one to request to view resume, and another to request to view email. That's it. With the idea being, you use the site to enable you to keep up with people. You add people you know or have worked with to your network, and you can easily get their current email and catch up when you're in the same city. Simple, no obnoxious ads, no slimy tactics to increase time on the site. Probably will never come to pass, but I can dream...
- spullara 12y ago
  That was called Plaxo.
  - silverlake 12y ago
    It's still around and does exactly what this thread is asking for. http://plaxo.com http://plaxo.com
- verisimilidude 12y ago
  I recently gave serious thought to building something similar to a rolodex social network, but eventually poked too many holes in it to follow through. I'd just come back from a conference at which I'd been asked for business cards by lots of people, maybe a hundred. Of all those people, I only really cared to hear back from a few. Though it's nice to have my name out there and be cordial in the industry, I wanted to place some kind of filter on all the vendor spam that inevitably followed. If...I could easily provide "redacted" or "enriched" contact info, maybe via QR on a smartphone screen, for instance, it would be possible to meter who gets which contact info without hurting any future networking opportunities. If any of you can figure out how to make this work, I'd definitely pay for it.
inopinatus 12y ago
As this article alludes to: the heart of email's longevity, the thing that prevents it being closed by a single entity, is being a classical IETF protocol: federated, decentralized, open and interoperable. The first two of those properties arise from being based on the DNS for SMTP endpoint discovery. This is why every protocol needs to specify that it uses the DNS, and how. And that is why I get so worried that the draft HTTP/2 editors so steadfastly refuses to do so.
- walterbell 12y ago
  It would be useful to draw a dependency graph of IETF and W3C protocols that characterizes each one on their degree of divergence from classical IETF values. Identify the point(s) in time where history took a wrong turn, revert to that point, fork and start over with new protocols. It can't be any less disruptive than new protocols which have a non-classical values. Are there modern use cases for NNTP? Could UUCP be used for sneakernet or bluetooth intermittent mesh applications? What's the verdict on WebDAV, CalDAV and CardDAV as neutral protocols for sharing data, contacts & calendar?
  - rprospero 12y ago
    > Are there modern use cases for NNTP? After the death of Google Reader, I've switched to news.gwene.org, which operates a RSS to Usenet bridge. It solves a lot of the problems that other RSS readers are still dealing with, since the Usenet people figured this stuff out back in the 80s.
    - walterbell 12y ago
      Great. The main page looks exactly like gmane, but all was explained by http://gwene.org/about.php http://gwene.org/about.php. Sample web interface to NNTP messages, http://read.gwene.org/group/gwene.com.nytimes.nyt.rss.books http://read.gwene.org/group/gwene.com.nytimes.nyt.rss.books I wonder how long they keep articles? Could be useful for podcasts.
  - inopinatus 12y ago
gailees 12y ago
Facebook Messenger will eclipse email. Social network is the perfect spam filter.
- allegory 12y ago
  Like AIM, Trillian, IRC did? Wrong use case...
- mkal_tsr 12y ago
  But it is centralized and closed. It will not eclipse email for anything serious and long-term.
  - creeble 12y ago
    Would you like to play Farmville?
- noir_lord 12y ago
  Doesn't solve the "This order is wrong I need to send email to support@somerandomcompany.org" problem though.
  - pavel_lishin 12y ago
    I'm actually afraid that the internet is moving to this model, specifically with Facebook. How many times have you seen an ad that, instead of a URL, asks you to go to their Facebook page?
    - dragonwriter 12y ago
      > I'm actually afraid that the internet is moving to this model, specifically with Facebook. How many times have you seen an ad that, instead of a URL, asks you to go to their Facebook page? No more often than I used to see the same thing with an AOL Keyword instead of a URL. I don't think the internet is "moving to this model" so much as it is a model which periodically emerges when a particular portal is dominant enough with the commercially-relevant audience, and fades as the dominance of that single portal.
mjt0229 12y ago
That is, except for kittens.
footpath 12y ago
Email was one's passport and identity. Before Facebook became a true alternative for verifying one's identity on the web, the email address was how one accomplished serious things on the Internet. Want to verify a bank account? Email. Amazon? Email. Forums? Email. Even Facebook in the early days? Email. Looking at Facebook's sign up page right now, and it seems that email is still required for registering a new account. The thing is, almost every Internet service still requires an email address to sign up, and that ranges from mobile games to ecommerce shops. Some services provide the alternatives of allowing users to sign up via Facebook/Twitter/Google+; but in order for the users to get a Facebook/Twitter/Google+ account, they'll still need to sign up using an email address. Besides, almost all services that allow social network sign-in gives their users the option to sign up with email as well. The services that do not allow email signups are few and far between -- like Medium.com, for example, but as said before, in order to get a Facebook or Twitter account, the user would still need an email address. Even mobile only apps like Whatsapp still appear to require an email address to sign up for their online support site.
- yvsong 12y ago
  > Email was one's passport and identity. Email is not an identity. Most people have multiple email addresses, and some people share some addresses.
  - ejain 12y ago
    A person can have multiple identities, and not all identities are associated with specific people.
    - yvsong 12y ago
      Email is not a person's unique ID, although sometimes it's used to serve that purpose. The ID layer of internet is not established yet. I'm not sure if it's possible in a decentralized system. Centralized management may be necessary.
      - 12y ago
jeffreyrogers 12y ago
I don't understand the point about college students viewing email as stale. I'm in college and email is used more than ever. I used to get tens of emails a day from various student groups (now they get sent to spam), and it is pretty much the easiest/fastest way for groups to communicate with each other. Sure, email isn't "sexy" anymore, but that doesn't mean people of my generation don't appreciate it.
- rmrfrmrf 12y ago
  From the spammer's perspective, e-mail is stale because you're sending everything to the spam folder rather than clicking, sharing, and buying.
  - jeffreyrogers 12y ago
    Other people use it though and do click through. I just make a conscious effort to remove clutter from my life.
mpg33 12y ago
It's like a phone number or address.
eyeareque 12y ago
I tend to disagree. To me the WWW is the best thing on the internet. But I do use the heck out of email ever since I quit all social networks a couple of years ago.
bane 12y ago
I'm pretty firm in my belief that one of the great marketing moves of the 21st century is convincing people that email is not a social network. It's almost on par with making people believe that diamonds are romantic and a necessary part of the marriage ritual. I think this has been helped by the general lack of innovation in the email space. From pretty basic mail, we ended up with a few (very surprisingly few) email clients and very little advancement on the original theme outside of html formatting and huge inboxes. Lots of people dump on Microsoft, but one of the huge upsides of exchange is the tight integration of mail and calendar. From a conversation you can immediately schedule actions. Invites are even sent out over SMTP if I'm not mistaken. Getting a calendar to integrate well with gmail was one of the major accomplishments of web-based email, yet it seems like repeating this anywhere else is an accomplishment comparable to discovering cold fusion. There's also been pitifully little work done in improving the experience of managing email and calendar servers. Managing spam is still a tremendous problem and all this adds up to most places, if they aren't using Exchange, just buying corporate Outlook.com or gmail accounts for their employees. The problem of course is that for any serious advancement to really work, everybody (both client and server) have to move to support the advancement. But one lesson to be learned from Facebook and G+ is that email can be replaced by an easier to use and friendlier system. There's a possibility of disruption, but it's obviously not in anybody's particular interest to keep reinventing email+otherstuff in this kind of highly centralized way. If Facebook goes down, there goes a huge chunk of the global communication system. At least with email I can be pretty sure my message is going to arrive at the destination at some point. Another lesson to be learned is that social networks like Facebook are actually just a combination and integration of two (or three) common things that used to be all over the web: a personal website and email. You get a profile (which does a good enough approximation of the personal homepages of the web 1.0 days but actually a bit more like ) and people can message you (and more recently IM you). Basically a global presence you don't have to put much effort into to manage and a way to contact you. More importantly Facebook offers you various levels of control over who can see your presence and who can message you. Spam is almost unknown in Facebook's version of email. So when I see distributed social network efforts like Diaspora, and all this talk of authentication and protocols and whatnot I wonder why we're not really using and extending the distributed infrastructure we already have. Even if we improve it in some way that makes it no longer work with the old email network, it won't be the first time a better internet service replaced a previous one (WWW replaced gopher for example) -- there's no reason two competing distributed messaging services can't run in parallel.
smaudet 12y ago
Fail HN, Fail. Article is great, don't get me wrong (the people who understand email know why its such an awesome idea. when was the last time you could just fire off a message to a random server on the network, and it would make its way to the right inbox on the other side?). The fact that you all decided to try to invent another social network is just atrocious. I like this "rolodex" network: email on your phone, which just talks to the other people you email. Yeah. Social networks are a fad.
tomphoolery 12y ago
I somewhat disagree with the background data this article cites as reasons for why everyone wants email dead. I do not believe people like Slack, Asana, et. al. are trying to kill email, rather, I believe they are trying to offer services that help to reduce email's dominance over communications. One thing that email does not provide for anyone is choice. The barrier to entry is running your own IMAP, SMTP, and possibly spam blocker servers, which almost no one wants to or even knows how to do anymore. It's also somewhat inefficient for conversations, just like regular snail mail is inefficient for conversations. You mail letters, not one-line replies. So I tend to think of IMs, chat rooms, and other methods of communication on the Internet as simply compliments to email, not replacements for it. Nothing will replace it, because nothing needs to. It's email. (sidenote: I'm pretty sure one big reason everyone uses email is because they were given an email account, and didn't have to search out the technology. You don't see people clamoring about the reduced use of Usenet in comparison to forums nowadays. Same can be said for texting, I personally got a phone one day and someone sent me a text message, that's how I started texting. Probably never would have thought getting text messages sent to a phone that I can just talk on would have been a useful enough communications platform to seek out and possibly pay for.)
- leni536 12y ago
  >You mail letters, not one-line replies. What stops you to send a one-line reply in email?
gjvc 12y ago
I'll rise to the bait. http://incubator.apache.org/wave/ http://incubator.apache.org/wave/ (first from Google, now Apache) was/is a brave try. The main problem with email is the lack of consistent formatting rules which means that it's difficult to keep track of structure. But hey, it's a massive success. Worse sometimes really is better.
kris_zhang 12y ago
Email is important, WWW is all
LeicaLatte 12y ago
Webmail was the first and continues to be the most successful implementation of cloud. Ever. I don't see cloud designs of now working on top of standards like email does. No wonder data tends to get stuck in silos these days.
blueskin_ 12y ago
What I find interesting about people who say email is bad is they they almost all have some vested interest in another communication method, especially something proprietary... Email will outlive everyone commenting here because it works. I run my own server so I know the NSA don't have direct access to content (although I always take note of any inbound messages that are flagged as not having used TLS, or where the other address is gmail etc.), I can make disposable addresses, addresses specific to websites (to identify sites that sell/leak your address), I can run my own spamfiltering that doesn't invade my privacy, I can DKIM sign my messages and have a provable way that only I sent the message, I can use PGP for any private information, I have a set of filters to classify email so I don't even need to spend that much time dealing with it, and I can access it from anywhere I can get an SSH client. No service does that.
erikb 12y ago
People who think that email can die are the people who don't understand technology. Email is simply sending text from one user to another. There is nothing more simple than that. Therefore it probably won't die as long as we use text interfaces to our machines. What cute interfaces you put on top or machine learning features, that's all up to the marketing department. But all cool social networks and chat Apps can't do better than simply sending text.
AnonJ 12y ago
I can never imagine how would a university/its various student organizations get their messages through to students, without email. I went on a full-year exchange to Chile, where the email service simply is useless and everybody(including university officials) seems to rely on Facebook, which to me was simply crazy. Why would something like FB be used for any serious business? How would they suppose that everybody has a FB account and likes to use it? That was a truly horrible experience, especially for a Social Network avoider like me.
AndrewKemendo 12y ago
I think the main thing keeping email as the baseline for communication on the internet is it's cost. There has been no other service that can provide such a varied yet simple medium of communication - text, images, video attachments with history and an audit-able trail - for free. The closest that anyone has come have been the big social providers with messaging applications which mimic email in many respects. Even then, they are copying the email model with a branded version - not replacing it. It will take an entirely new and different protocol that simplifies communication with the same or better capability scope to displace email.
nerdben 12y ago
Nice article! We totally agree and don't believe in those "we need to replace email with an app" approaches. For example, that's why we build our service StandupMail (http://standupmail.com http://standupmail.com) completly upon emails.

435 points by plg 12y ago

and this, gentlemen, is why you should create actual protocols, not applications. applications die, protocols stay. if your software solution use the web protocol, you're already limited by it. that's why I hate 99% of the internet techs.

lukeholder 12y ago
tell that to app.net
- coldpie 12y ago
  I got a free account and spent an evening or two trying to figure out what app.net was supposed to be, and I gave up. I get the feeling it was supposed to be something more than the ghost town Twitter-clone it appears to be, but I couldn't figure it out. Email's purpose, on the other hand, is pretty obvious.

byoung2 12y ago

Want to verify a bank account? Email. Amazon? Email. Forums? Email. Even Facebook in the early days? Email. This is a big part of why email continues to thrive. So many services have email baked in (e.g. a new WordPress install sends you an email). There are some services that let you choose between email and SMS, like plane reservations and banking alerts, but 95% of the time, any notification will come through email. Given that, there is no way you could eliminate email without cutting off all those services in the process. Any new protocol to replace email would have to be a drop-in replacement for anything that currently sends out email or at least coexist peacefully alongside it. You would think that if anyone could accomplish that it would be Facebook or Twitter, but I haven't seen any integration like that so far (e.g. get your plane reservation update or Amazon shipping confirmation by Twitter DM or Facebook message).

redtrackker 12y ago

It would probably only take one innovation in email, something that Gmail could probably pull off, to make email lovable again. I really think that if Google could help alleviate people's concerns with email (volume, spam etc), people would be quite happy with email again :)

UweSchmidt 12y ago
Maybe add a little bit of useful cryptography even. Spam is already fixed by Google, and volume? How could Google fix that?

specialp 12y ago

The main power for me in email is that I actually own it. I have my own domain. While I use Slack, Google Hangouts, Hipchat and a bunch of other services, none of them replace email. It is standardized and despite social media/chat services living and dying over time I have had my domain and email for 15 years now. I can't think of many other services I can say that about. It is also a good medium for non urgent communication that paper mail used to serve. The problem people see with email is actually not a problem at all with email, it is with how it is sometimes abused. My boss sometimes sends me an email and then prods me via Slack if I did not read it in 5 minutes. That is what these chat/message services are replacing... The short term action required requests that were formerly served with a phone call.

sarahkennedy 12y ago

Has anyone got an invite code for the new Email product Sortd.com?

JamesWinter 12y ago
I got an invite code from a coworker as I couldn't wait any longer to get in! I've been using it for two weeks now and I have to say it's a must have app for all Gmail users ... It's has completely changed the way I work.

nickhalfasleep 12y ago

Email is still inherently a conversation with a person or people, and that is why it has value.

shmerl 12y ago

An interesting post on this subject by Aaron Seigo: http://aseigo.blogspot.com/2014/07/one-singular-sensation-your-email.html http://aseigo.blogspot.com/2014/07/one-singular-sensation-yo...

tatterdemalion 12y ago
This article is good but it makes some comments that don't seem true to me. > It's a globally addressable system that does not require any centralized system, which means it works everywhere and for everyone no matter what choice in service provider the individual user (or their organization) makes. Isn't it the case that nearly all email is routed using DNS? Certainly all of mine is. While there are certainly arguments against centralized addressing systems, the advantage that email has isn't that its addressing system is uncentralized: it's that its addressing system is more libre than proprietary systems. >These "open social networks" don't pass messages to the end user. They pass messages to servers which the user then consults. How is this different from email? Most people don't have email addresses at a domain assigned to their normal computer; the vast majority of email is accessed over some internet protocol from a remote server, whether its IMAP, POP3, or HTTP. I've never used Diaspora, so maybe I just don't understand what functionality its missing.
- shmerl 12y ago
  There are some designs for decentralization of the DNS. The decentralized nature of e-mail on the higher level still is valuable. > the advantage that email has isn't that its addressing system is uncentralized: it's that its addressing system is more libre than proprietary systems. I think that the biggest advantages of e-mail are its decentralization + federation based on open protocols. These make e-mail extremely useful despite all of its shortcomings. Consider for example IM services. They multiply like mushrooms these days, yet most of them completely lack federation and therefore are crippled if you look at them globally. You can't communicate with users of other services at all (unless you register there as well which defeats the purpose of decentralization). XMPP attempted to solve it, but unlike e-mail most participants on the IM scene were too selfish to fix the situation, including Google who deserted. > How is this different from email? Most people don't have email addresses at a domain assigned to their normal computer; the vast majority of email is accessed over some internet protocol from a remote server, whether its IMAP, POP3, or HTTP. I've never used Diaspora, so maybe I just don't understand what functionality its missing. I think his main point is, that in e-mail you can have real push mechanisms in theory. I.e. you send a message and the other participant receives it through the e-mail service. In social networks (even decentralized ones), the delivery of such notifications is delegated to... e-mail. Which shows their intrinsic deficiency. They aren't implementing the full scope of the communication process. I.e. if you envision a better social network, it should be decentralized but also take care of the delivery of the interactions in one coherent experience in order not to rely on other external tools for that. E-mail isn't fully decentralized most of the time, but it still can be (you can run your own e-mail server). You can run your own Diaspora pod the same way, but like above, it would still delegate notifications to another service.

dools 12y ago

I still use pine :) I use gmail so that I get good operation cross device but it's heavily filtered so I only see a fraction of total email on my phone, but I can search everything. I then pop everything off using fetchmail and process all emails down to zero once or twice a day using pine (either in Terminal or irssi connectbot on my xperia). This suits me not only from a day to day perspective but also because if gmail locks me out for some reason I can easily route around it and still have a full backup of my email history.

keithpeter 12y ago
Thanks very much for this post. I'm doing a full pop3 download of around 3 years of mostly email newsletters from my gmail account now. In order to enable pop3 though, I had to change a default gmail security setting. Have you had any issues at all since leaving pop enabled? Using Kmail, I'm having to fetch each month's worth of email at a time. Can't find a setting anywhere so assume that is a Google thing.

tatterdemalion 12y ago

Email and WWW provide everything proprietary services are providing people now, but with less flash. The problem is that so many people are moving to these proprietary services that it becomes very difficult to organize and communicate people without making that move. I needed to coordinate with multiple people, and one of them emailed me that we should start a group chat on Facebook; why not just cc them?

nchuhoai 12y ago

This brings up a point I think about a lot: Is email our last success in popularizing an open and federated standard? Maybe you can count OAuth, but IMO i have low confidence that we'll in the near future be able to collaborate on an open protocol so that many benefits of email such as control without vendor lock-in can be enjoyed. We have too many entrenched interests by the main players. I have been working briefly on improving the exchange of trust/reputation data online, but it seemd for us that there was no alternative to a proprietary system if you wish to see widespread adoption. EDIT: I guess Bitcoin has good potential.

dragonwriter 12y ago
> Is email our last success in popularizing an open and federated standard? If you mean one with a distinct and separate S2S/federation protocol (SMTP) from the main C2S protocol(s) (POP/IMAP), probably. OTOH, it could just be that separate S2S protocols are less favored in the first place -- the web is newer than email, open, and federated (in that web servers -- but doesn't have a separate S2S protocol. A web server that needs information from another web server to do its job uses HTTP just like any other client.
marcosdumay 12y ago
> Is email our last success in popularizing an open and federated standard? Isn't the Web younger?
- nchuhoai 12y ago
  You are right, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email quotes 1982, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Wide_Web https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Wide_Web 1989 Either way, my point still stands that besides the rapid development of the "internet", we have yet to see another standard emerge (besides OAuth and Bitcoin)
  - daigoba66 12y ago
    SOAP? It was almost a good idea.

oafitupa 12y ago

Bitcoin is better IMO. But I agree that email is a great thing. I hope someone creates a sick email client that turns back the flow from Facebook to the email. I'm fine with Thunderbird + Enigmail, but I don't see the average person using it any time soon (or ever if unchanged).

obilgic 12y ago

what if we limit email to 140 characters and make it the ultimate decentralized push notification system?

chippy 12y ago
Elevator pitch: "It's like email but for messages"

sytelus 12y ago

Slack is obviously not killing emails as they are advertising through lot of PR. They have 150K active users so far. However one thing that they are correctly going after is fantastic search abilities for our own data that would include all emails, chat, attachments etc. My feeling is that eventually communication client that excels in search would indeed surface to the top. This client would then drive communication standards of the future, including emails. So in essence, problem is not integration of desperate sources of communication, but ability to search them efficiently.

Fastidious 12y ago

I agree. I think there is more that can be done to enhance it, and make it a more enjoyable tool. Email clients --and I am not talking about third party services a la Mailbox, who rely yet in another server-- are still very primitive.

7952 12y ago
I feel that gmail has held back development of good desktop clients (which is what we really need). My laptop has an almost empty 1TB hard drive yet I need to wait to download an image attachment every time I want to view it. Email should be built around abundant storage, not a dependency on bandwidth.
- Fastidious 12y ago
  Indeed! One think --among others-- that Gmail has done very well is search, which is expected, as Google specializes on that.
- thebokehwokeh2 12y ago
  > Email should be built around abundant storage, not a dependency on bandwidth. I'm sorry but this doesn't make sense to me. To cache all images you've ever received is sort of antithetical to the whole 'decentralized' nature of email, and the internet in a nutshell. The 'inconvenience' of having to re-download far surpasses the need to store every single trivial little thing on your mail client's cache. A few seconds is worth way more to me than taking up tens of gigs of images on my HD that I will never see again.
  - 7952 12y ago
    I disagree. A modern device is almost entirely composed of files downloaded from the internet. The binary for your web browser is just a local cache of an entity that exists in the cloud. You need a local cache because bandwidth and latency are too high to retrieve a new copy every single time you run the program unless you need an update. It seems a pity to not use storage to cache when it is available. Especially considering that to most people bandwidth is much more expensive than storage.

3pt14159 12y ago

Email will always be around, but I must say that "Email killers" are really going to be successful. For example, I don't remember the last time my team sent an internal email that wasn't a forward from a client. We use Slack. Exclusively. We organize projects around it, sales efforts, everything. It has the async nature of email, the separation of topics like email, and the search power of email. It also means that none of us ever feel like we're out of the loop.

dsr_ 12y ago
How disrupted will your company be if Slack is purchased by Yahoo and is EOL'd with 30 days notice? To do that to email, you'd have to dismantle DNS.
Aqueous 12y ago
Unfortunately, the "nobody owns" feature of EMail is something Slack lacks and probably always will. Email is a federated, decentralized protocol of distributed mail servers that anybody can set up. Any email server can participate with any other email server. That's something that Slack will never have (it does interface with XMPP and IRC, but the service itself is centralized.) It is hard to overstate how critical this fact is to Email's future. If you look at most of the canonical Internet protocols (SMTP, HTTP, DNS, XMPP, IRC, even BitCoin) - they have this fundamental feature in common. Even though they're part of the application layer of the Internet, they've become fundamental protocols that other technologies rely on. They are part of the infrastructure of the Internet. I say this is someone who just started using Slack and loves it. I still can't see it replacing email, though.
- zmmmmm 12y ago
  > XMPP, IRC I actually think these guys are interesting exceptions. Yes, they are still around, but they've largely been eclipsed by proprietary solutions. Why? Why did Twitter storm to success XMPP was ostensibly the same thing but with all of these good qualities (open, federated, decentralised, etc.). Still to this day messaging is a battleground for new entrants touting completely opaque solutions. It seems like there's something more to success than just being open, federated and decentralised.

coldcode 12y ago

What if someone designed a new email protocol/etc from scratch without any reference to the existing one. Could it be made better? Can you even define what better is?

Niten 12y ago
That's what Google Wave was intended to be, among other initiatives.
pinkyand 12y ago
There are some cases when encouraging shorter messages is very beneficial.
karellan126 12y ago
Of course. Lots of ideas in this direction. But be warned, thinking about new protocols is the first place engineers like us go without thinking about what getting adoption would really look like (which would be near impossible + need a backwards compatible beachhead imo).
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
huntaub 12y ago
Actually, that's exactly what we are trying to do with AirDispatch [1]. We started out intending to "fix" email with a better protocol, and ended up creating something much greater. The core problems that we tried to solve (to help define "better") were: - Security: encrypting and authenticating your messages - Control: the sender hosts the message, so they can edit or delete them before the receiver sees them - Flexibility: all messages are, in fact, just key-value stores, so any type of data can be sent on the protocol (whether it's Mail, IMs, Vines, Instagrams, or whatever the flavor of the week social network is) I think it's a great product, and we are going to start the developer release of the client (Melange [2]) tomorrow. [1] http://airdispat.ch http://airdispat.ch [2] http://github.com/melange-app/melange http://github.com/melange-app/melange
- 12y ago

jabelk 12y ago

Wholeheartedly agree with the article. I have absolute control of my inbox with filters, labels, and signing up for newsletters and/or updates on various subjects. There is no way a centralized end-to-end service is going to eclipse email for me, unless they radically change their business models. The value proposition is just really bad in all the services I've seen so far. "Oh, you want me to sign up for your service so that I can look at the content you think I should see alongside the ads you're making money off of? And what exactly is in it for me?" Something I would pay for: a rolodex social network. No centralized feed. No useless info. Your profile is 2-3 sentences and your current city (with some sort of maps integration for when you travel, to see who's near you). Two buttons, one to request to view resume, and another to request to view email. That's it. With the idea being, you use the site to enable you to keep up with people. You add people you know or have worked with to your network, and you can easily get their current email and catch up when you're in the same city. Simple, no obnoxious ads, no slimy tactics to increase time on the site. Probably will never come to pass, but I can dream...

spullara 12y ago
That was called Plaxo.
- silverlake 12y ago
  It's still around and does exactly what this thread is asking for. http://plaxo.com http://plaxo.com
verisimilidude 12y ago
I recently gave serious thought to building something similar to a rolodex social network, but eventually poked too many holes in it to follow through. I'd just come back from a conference at which I'd been asked for business cards by lots of people, maybe a hundred. Of all those people, I only really cared to hear back from a few. Though it's nice to have my name out there and be cordial in the industry, I wanted to place some kind of filter on all the vendor spam that inevitably followed. If...I could easily provide "redacted" or "enriched" contact info, maybe via QR on a smartphone screen, for instance, it would be possible to meter who gets which contact info without hurting any future networking opportunities. If any of you can figure out how to make this work, I'd definitely pay for it.

inopinatus 12y ago

As this article alludes to: the heart of email's longevity, the thing that prevents it being closed by a single entity, is being a classical IETF protocol: federated, decentralized, open and interoperable. The first two of those properties arise from being based on the DNS for SMTP endpoint discovery. This is why every protocol needs to specify that it uses the DNS, and how. And that is why I get so worried that the draft HTTP/2 editors so steadfastly refuses to do so.

walterbell 12y ago
It would be useful to draw a dependency graph of IETF and W3C protocols that characterizes each one on their degree of divergence from classical IETF values. Identify the point(s) in time where history took a wrong turn, revert to that point, fork and start over with new protocols. It can't be any less disruptive than new protocols which have a non-classical values. Are there modern use cases for NNTP? Could UUCP be used for sneakernet or bluetooth intermittent mesh applications? What's the verdict on WebDAV, CalDAV and CardDAV as neutral protocols for sharing data, contacts & calendar?
- rprospero 12y ago
  > Are there modern use cases for NNTP? After the death of Google Reader, I've switched to news.gwene.org, which operates a RSS to Usenet bridge. It solves a lot of the problems that other RSS readers are still dealing with, since the Usenet people figured this stuff out back in the 80s.
  - walterbell 12y ago
    Great. The main page looks exactly like gmane, but all was explained by http://gwene.org/about.php http://gwene.org/about.php. Sample web interface to NNTP messages, http://read.gwene.org/group/gwene.com.nytimes.nyt.rss.books http://read.gwene.org/group/gwene.com.nytimes.nyt.rss.books I wonder how long they keep articles? Could be useful for podcasts.
- inopinatus 12y ago

gailees 12y ago

Facebook Messenger will eclipse email. Social network is the perfect spam filter.

allegory 12y ago
Like AIM, Trillian, IRC did? Wrong use case...
mkal_tsr 12y ago
But it is centralized and closed. It will not eclipse email for anything serious and long-term.
- creeble 12y ago
  Would you like to play Farmville?
noir_lord 12y ago
Doesn't solve the "This order is wrong I need to send email to support@somerandomcompany.org" problem though.
- pavel_lishin 12y ago
  I'm actually afraid that the internet is moving to this model, specifically with Facebook. How many times have you seen an ad that, instead of a URL, asks you to go to their Facebook page?
  - dragonwriter 12y ago
    > I'm actually afraid that the internet is moving to this model, specifically with Facebook. How many times have you seen an ad that, instead of a URL, asks you to go to their Facebook page? No more often than I used to see the same thing with an AOL Keyword instead of a URL. I don't think the internet is "moving to this model" so much as it is a model which periodically emerges when a particular portal is dominant enough with the commercially-relevant audience, and fades as the dominance of that single portal.

mjt0229 12y ago

That is, except for kittens.

footpath 12y ago

Email was one's passport and identity. Before Facebook became a true alternative for verifying one's identity on the web, the email address was how one accomplished serious things on the Internet. Want to verify a bank account? Email. Amazon? Email. Forums? Email. Even Facebook in the early days? Email. Looking at Facebook's sign up page right now, and it seems that email is still required for registering a new account. The thing is, almost every Internet service still requires an email address to sign up, and that ranges from mobile games to ecommerce shops. Some services provide the alternatives of allowing users to sign up via Facebook/Twitter/Google+; but in order for the users to get a Facebook/Twitter/Google+ account, they'll still need to sign up using an email address. Besides, almost all services that allow social network sign-in gives their users the option to sign up with email as well. The services that do not allow email signups are few and far between -- like Medium.com, for example, but as said before, in order to get a Facebook or Twitter account, the user would still need an email address. Even mobile only apps like Whatsapp still appear to require an email address to sign up for their online support site.

yvsong 12y ago
> Email was one's passport and identity. Email is not an identity. Most people have multiple email addresses, and some people share some addresses.
- ejain 12y ago
  A person can have multiple identities, and not all identities are associated with specific people.
  - yvsong 12y ago
    Email is not a person's unique ID, although sometimes it's used to serve that purpose. The ID layer of internet is not established yet. I'm not sure if it's possible in a decentralized system. Centralized management may be necessary.
    - 12y ago

jeffreyrogers 12y ago

I don't understand the point about college students viewing email as stale. I'm in college and email is used more than ever. I used to get tens of emails a day from various student groups (now they get sent to spam), and it is pretty much the easiest/fastest way for groups to communicate with each other. Sure, email isn't "sexy" anymore, but that doesn't mean people of my generation don't appreciate it.

rmrfrmrf 12y ago
From the spammer's perspective, e-mail is stale because you're sending everything to the spam folder rather than clicking, sharing, and buying.
- jeffreyrogers 12y ago
  Other people use it though and do click through. I just make a conscious effort to remove clutter from my life.

mpg33 12y ago

It's like a phone number or address.

eyeareque 12y ago

I tend to disagree. To me the WWW is the best thing on the internet. But I do use the heck out of email ever since I quit all social networks a couple of years ago.

bane 12y ago

I'm pretty firm in my belief that one of the great marketing moves of the 21st century is convincing people that email is not a social network. It's almost on par with making people believe that diamonds are romantic and a necessary part of the marriage ritual. I think this has been helped by the general lack of innovation in the email space. From pretty basic mail, we ended up with a few (very surprisingly few) email clients and very little advancement on the original theme outside of html formatting and huge inboxes. Lots of people dump on Microsoft, but one of the huge upsides of exchange is the tight integration of mail and calendar. From a conversation you can immediately schedule actions. Invites are even sent out over SMTP if I'm not mistaken. Getting a calendar to integrate well with gmail was one of the major accomplishments of web-based email, yet it seems like repeating this anywhere else is an accomplishment comparable to discovering cold fusion. There's also been pitifully little work done in improving the experience of managing email and calendar servers. Managing spam is still a tremendous problem and all this adds up to most places, if they aren't using Exchange, just buying corporate Outlook.com or gmail accounts for their employees. The problem of course is that for any serious advancement to really work, everybody (both client and server) have to move to support the advancement. But one lesson to be learned from Facebook and G+ is that email can be replaced by an easier to use and friendlier system. There's a possibility of disruption, but it's obviously not in anybody's particular interest to keep reinventing email+otherstuff in this kind of highly centralized way. If Facebook goes down, there goes a huge chunk of the global communication system. At least with email I can be pretty sure my message is going to arrive at the destination at some point. Another lesson to be learned is that social networks like Facebook are actually just a combination and integration of two (or three) common things that used to be all over the web: a personal website and email. You get a profile (which does a good enough approximation of the personal homepages of the web 1.0 days but actually a bit more like ) and people can message you (and more recently IM you). Basically a global presence you don't have to put much effort into to manage and a way to contact you. More importantly Facebook offers you various levels of control over who can see your presence and who can message you. Spam is almost unknown in Facebook's version of email. So when I see distributed social network efforts like Diaspora, and all this talk of authentication and protocols and whatnot I wonder why we're not really using and extending the distributed infrastructure we already have. Even if we improve it in some way that makes it no longer work with the old email network, it won't be the first time a better internet service replaced a previous one (WWW replaced gopher for example) -- there's no reason two competing distributed messaging services can't run in parallel.

smaudet 12y ago

Fail HN, Fail. Article is great, don't get me wrong (the people who understand email know why its such an awesome idea. when was the last time you could just fire off a message to a random server on the network, and it would make its way to the right inbox on the other side?). The fact that you all decided to try to invent another social network is just atrocious. I like this "rolodex" network: email on your phone, which just talks to the other people you email. Yeah. Social networks are a fad.

tomphoolery 12y ago

I somewhat disagree with the background data this article cites as reasons for why everyone wants email dead. I do not believe people like Slack, Asana, et. al. are trying to kill email, rather, I believe they are trying to offer services that help to reduce email's dominance over communications. One thing that email does not provide for anyone is choice. The barrier to entry is running your own IMAP, SMTP, and possibly spam blocker servers, which almost no one wants to or even knows how to do anymore. It's also somewhat inefficient for conversations, just like regular snail mail is inefficient for conversations. You mail letters, not one-line replies. So I tend to think of IMs, chat rooms, and other methods of communication on the Internet as simply compliments to email, not replacements for it. Nothing will replace it, because nothing needs to. It's email. (sidenote: I'm pretty sure one big reason everyone uses email is because they were given an email account, and didn't have to search out the technology. You don't see people clamoring about the reduced use of Usenet in comparison to forums nowadays. Same can be said for texting, I personally got a phone one day and someone sent me a text message, that's how I started texting. Probably never would have thought getting text messages sent to a phone that I can just talk on would have been a useful enough communications platform to seek out and possibly pay for.)

leni536 12y ago
>You mail letters, not one-line replies. What stops you to send a one-line reply in email?

gjvc 12y ago

I'll rise to the bait. http://incubator.apache.org/wave/ http://incubator.apache.org/wave/ (first from Google, now Apache) was/is a brave try. The main problem with email is the lack of consistent formatting rules which means that it's difficult to keep track of structure. But hey, it's a massive success. Worse sometimes really is better.

kris_zhang 12y ago

Email is important, WWW is all

LeicaLatte 12y ago

Webmail was the first and continues to be the most successful implementation of cloud. Ever. I don't see cloud designs of now working on top of standards like email does. No wonder data tends to get stuck in silos these days.

blueskin_ 12y ago

What I find interesting about people who say email is bad is they they almost all have some vested interest in another communication method, especially something proprietary... Email will outlive everyone commenting here because it works. I run my own server so I know the NSA don't have direct access to content (although I always take note of any inbound messages that are flagged as not having used TLS, or where the other address is gmail etc.), I can make disposable addresses, addresses specific to websites (to identify sites that sell/leak your address), I can run my own spamfiltering that doesn't invade my privacy, I can DKIM sign my messages and have a provable way that only I sent the message, I can use PGP for any private information, I have a set of filters to classify email so I don't even need to spend that much time dealing with it, and I can access it from anywhere I can get an SSH client. No service does that.

erikb 12y ago

People who think that email can die are the people who don't understand technology. Email is simply sending text from one user to another. There is nothing more simple than that. Therefore it probably won't die as long as we use text interfaces to our machines. What cute interfaces you put on top or machine learning features, that's all up to the marketing department. But all cool social networks and chat Apps can't do better than simply sending text.

AnonJ 12y ago

I can never imagine how would a university/its various student organizations get their messages through to students, without email. I went on a full-year exchange to Chile, where the email service simply is useless and everybody(including university officials) seems to rely on Facebook, which to me was simply crazy. Why would something like FB be used for any serious business? How would they suppose that everybody has a FB account and likes to use it? That was a truly horrible experience, especially for a Social Network avoider like me.

AndrewKemendo 12y ago

I think the main thing keeping email as the baseline for communication on the internet is it's cost. There has been no other service that can provide such a varied yet simple medium of communication - text, images, video attachments with history and an audit-able trail - for free. The closest that anyone has come have been the big social providers with messaging applications which mimic email in many respects. Even then, they are copying the email model with a branded version - not replacing it. It will take an entirely new and different protocol that simplifies communication with the same or better capability scope to displace email.

nerdben 12y ago

Nice article! We totally agree and don't believe in those "we need to replace email with an app" approaches. For example, that's why we build our service StandupMail (http://standupmail.com http://standupmail.com) completly upon emails.