4 ms·

There have been a fair number of attempts to kill email, but I'd say there have been many more products aimed at enhancing it. Popular examples are gmail and sp

by dwg 11y ago

There have been a fair number of attempts to kill email, but I'd say there have been many more products aimed at enhancing it. Popular examples are gmail and spam filters. Neither of them are native "email" concepts and did not exist until email became tremendously popular, and both made e-mail considerably less paintful when they were introduced. For many more products that enhance email (and a few that try to kill it), check out this list: Email Apps - Things that make email less paintful": http://www.producthunt.com/e/email-apps http://www.producthunt.com/e/email-apps

e12e 11y ago
I'm not sure how gmail makes email "less painful"? I'm not even sure it makes webmail less painful.
- cdcarter 11y ago
  GMail was probably the first widely used client with threading and tagging instead of folders.
- yen223 11y ago
  Really? With Gmail, you set up an account, then you start sending email. It doesn't get easier than that. It's easy to take for granted the sheer number of things Gmail and similar services take care for you. I've recently set up my own email server for fun. Now that was painful. The number of settings I had to twiddle with is definitely way too much for the average user.
  - e12e 11y ago
    How is that any different from Hotmail or Yahoo? (Web)mail as a service is about as old as http, smtp and imap. Hotmail even was a cool startup runnning on all FreeBSD before MS bought them up... I don't think it makes sense to compare X as a service, to implementing X as a service. Of course it is a bit of a hassle to set up email. But it's not really that hard: the hardest part is probably setting up SSL certs. Now, if you want to complicate things with spf/dkim, anti-virus and greylisting -- things do get a little complicated. Personally I think spf is strange band-aid, and luckily I get bye quite well with just greylisting against spam (most spam I get is actually to a throw-away address that got leaked in the Adobe/Macromedia hack: yay site-specific email address!). This here, is an example of what I mean: https://scaron.info/technology/debian-mail-postfix-dovecot.html https://scaron.info/technology/debian-mail-postfix-dovecot.h... It's not exactly rocket science[1] for someone that is able to set up a secure server with password login disabled and only regular-user login via ssh keys -- which I consider the minimum for any internet-facing system unless you have a very special use-case, and a really good plan. Now, if you can't set up a server -- you can't set up a server. I'm not saying we shouldn't make it easer -- eg: https://blog.sandstorm.io/news/2014-07-07-mailpile.html https://blog.sandstorm.io/news/2014-07-07-mailpile.html or: https://blog.sandstorm.io/news/2014-08-11-roundcube.html https://blog.sandstorm.io/news/2014-08-11-roundcube.html (Note, these both rely on sandstorm.io handling incomming smtp, as far as I can tell. At least for now. Not sure if allowing stmp/imap in/out of a sandstorm.io-container is likely to be implemented -- but then again setting up a sandstorm cluster/cloud isn't likely to be as easy as using sandstorm to run apps... such is the nature of things). [1] https://scaron.info/technology/debian-mail-postfix-dovecot.html https://scaron.info/technology/debian-mail-postfix-dovecot.h... [ed: re: email and sandstorm.io -- I was both right and wrong it seems. When running sandstorm.io it is possible to set it up to send mail (requires a working smtp-server), and receive mail (requires some twiddling and ability to set up a (sub)domain with proper MX records, or a traditional smtp server set up to forward email into sandstorm.io. For more info see: https://github.com/sandstorm-io/sandstorm/wiki/Configuring-your-server-for-email https://github.com/sandstorm-io/sandstorm/wiki/Configuring-y... ]
    - dwg 11y ago
      To some Gmail may not been very different from Hotmail or Yahoo Mail, and email predates those products as well. All three were invented with hopes of attracting users by brining a better experience to email. That was precisely the point of my comment—that there have been a large number of products that have been introduced to enhance email. A few of these products have been very widely adopted. Some others have been adopted but to a lesser degrees. Some (e.g. spam filtering, which used to be completely independent of mail clients/services) have become so universal that they are now shipped as features of the clients themselves. Sometimes products are so successful that it's hard to remember what it was like before they came out. While every person has preferences for this or that service, there is a reason why so many people now use gmail instead of what they used previously, which was often their ISP provided address and a desktop client. Good clients are just one such example.

by dwg 11y ago

e12e 11y ago

I'm not sure how gmail makes email "less painful"? I'm not even sure it makes webmail less painful.

cdcarter 11y ago
GMail was probably the first widely used client with threading and tagging instead of folders.
yen223 11y ago
Really? With Gmail, you set up an account, then you start sending email. It doesn't get easier than that. It's easy to take for granted the sheer number of things Gmail and similar services take care for you. I've recently set up my own email server for fun. Now that was painful. The number of settings I had to twiddle with is definitely way too much for the average user.
- e12e 11y ago
  How is that any different from Hotmail or Yahoo? (Web)mail as a service is about as old as http, smtp and imap. Hotmail even was a cool startup runnning on all FreeBSD before MS bought them up... I don't think it makes sense to compare X as a service, to implementing X as a service. Of course it is a bit of a hassle to set up email. But it's not really that hard: the hardest part is probably setting up SSL certs. Now, if you want to complicate things with spf/dkim, anti-virus and greylisting -- things do get a little complicated. Personally I think spf is strange band-aid, and luckily I get bye quite well with just greylisting against spam (most spam I get is actually to a throw-away address that got leaked in the Adobe/Macromedia hack: yay site-specific email address!). This here, is an example of what I mean: https://scaron.info/technology/debian-mail-postfix-dovecot.html https://scaron.info/technology/debian-mail-postfix-dovecot.h... It's not exactly rocket science[1] for someone that is able to set up a secure server with password login disabled and only regular-user login via ssh keys -- which I consider the minimum for any internet-facing system unless you have a very special use-case, and a really good plan. Now, if you can't set up a server -- you can't set up a server. I'm not saying we shouldn't make it easer -- eg: https://blog.sandstorm.io/news/2014-07-07-mailpile.html https://blog.sandstorm.io/news/2014-07-07-mailpile.html or: https://blog.sandstorm.io/news/2014-08-11-roundcube.html https://blog.sandstorm.io/news/2014-08-11-roundcube.html (Note, these both rely on sandstorm.io handling incomming smtp, as far as I can tell. At least for now. Not sure if allowing stmp/imap in/out of a sandstorm.io-container is likely to be implemented -- but then again setting up a sandstorm cluster/cloud isn't likely to be as easy as using sandstorm to run apps... such is the nature of things). [1] https://scaron.info/technology/debian-mail-postfix-dovecot.html https://scaron.info/technology/debian-mail-postfix-dovecot.h... [ed: re: email and sandstorm.io -- I was both right and wrong it seems. When running sandstorm.io it is possible to set it up to send mail (requires a working smtp-server), and receive mail (requires some twiddling and ability to set up a (sub)domain with proper MX records, or a traditional smtp server set up to forward email into sandstorm.io. For more info see: https://github.com/sandstorm-io/sandstorm/wiki/Configuring-your-server-for-email https://github.com/sandstorm-io/sandstorm/wiki/Configuring-y... ]
  - dwg 11y ago
    To some Gmail may not been very different from Hotmail or Yahoo Mail, and email predates those products as well. All three were invented with hopes of attracting users by brining a better experience to email. That was precisely the point of my comment—that there have been a large number of products that have been introduced to enhance email. A few of these products have been very widely adopted. Some others have been adopted but to a lesser degrees. Some (e.g. spam filtering, which used to be completely independent of mail clients/services) have become so universal that they are now shipped as features of the clients themselves. Sometimes products are so successful that it's hard to remember what it was like before they came out. While every person has preferences for this or that service, there is a reason why so many people now use gmail instead of what they used previously, which was often their ISP provided address and a desktop client. Good clients are just one such example.