Show HN: NSMTP Monolith – Full-stack email-compatible communication | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: NSMTP Monolith – Full-stack email-compatible communication

github.com

3 pointszombition3 comments

Hello world! I've been reading HN frequently for the past few years, and a recurring theme I noticed was frustration regarding email (intriguingly, it's only the people on HN who seem to dislike email; everyone else seems to universally adore it). So at the start of this year I decided to fix email by creating a new protocol that overcomes some of email's shortcomings while remaining backwards-compatible with email. Anything short of a new protocol struck me as lipstick on a pig, and anything that failed to maintain compatibility with email struck me as Google Wave.

This repository contains a full-stack implementation of the new protocol, so you can clone the repository, start up a vagrant machine and immediately connect via your web browser to try it out (though if you actually want to use it for sending and receiving emails, you won't get far by running it on a network with port 22 blocked). At the moment I don't have instructions for setting it up outside of Vagrant, but I'm also not sure how many people would actually be interested in running it themselves in a production environment. It's still quite rough around the edges, so it's not quite production-ready anyway, but most of the roughness is in the UI and edge cases in protocol handling which I've worked out logically but haven't yet implemented.

Protocol ambitions aside, I wanted to learn a lot from this experience--previously I had done some PHP and WordPress development, and I just wanted to try using Node and React to mash a Trello-like app together with email somehow, and things started happening so fast... Mainly I wanted to see how far I could go with one of my "crazy" ideas, because up until now I had always assumed that there would have to be something besides running out of time and money that would fundamentally stop me. Among the many things I learned, I discovered that it really does just boil down to the time and money! :) So now I'm looking for work.

That said, I am planning to continue development on this for my personal use (and possible work use later), so I'm open to suggestions, feedback, pull requests.... I know an open demo would be the bees knees. I'm planning to make such a demo in the near future, but for announcing this I did not want to. If you're interested in trying it out in a live environment rather than in Vagrant, I'm running this stack on zombition.com, and you can contact me at "tom" at the aforementioned domain for an invitation. Assuming nothing blows up :)

Very interesting! What kind of use cases are you envisioning that this opens up?

I'd love to see a screencast or some screenshots.

Thank you! I'm envisioning a future where email is a web application framework, so that the internet as a network of machines becomes a background detail, and application development happens at a higher level--on a protocol for a network of people. For example, if you're a developer and you want to be able to do something in your email conversations that you can't already do, you could write a plugin that performs that task (assuming you couldn't find a pre-existing plugin that did what you want), and then you could use it with everyone that you can communicate with via email because it would be directly integrated into your conversations. No server-side coding would be necessary, and you wouldn't have to bother with getting people to use your application because it would already be in a convenient place for them.

Coming back to your question: I see the potential use cases for this as primarily a superset of the current use cases for email. For bulk mailing and automated notifications, SMTP remains superior by nature of its simplicity (mostly... though this application edits self-generated notification messages to append notifications when there are multiple in a short time period). Email clients for personal use tend to have an immense number of bells and whistles, but if you assume that those will inevitably creep into this application as well over time, it should eventually be wholly practical for personal email.

Business emailing needs can be significantly more specialized, but they're also more likely to want advanced capabilities from their communication software. Assuming that some additional plugins offering desirable features are created, this could be very useful in a business setting.

I've added some gifs to the README that show editing, adding an inline reply, and adding a plugin. I know the flow to add a plugin is pretty gnarly at this point. I'm planning to pull them more directly into message content in the near future, because I tend to forget they're there when I have to click a button to even see that area. :)

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