Comment by chiefalchemist | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chiefalchemist | Hacker News Reader

re: "Email was not designed to be used the way we use it now. Email is not a messaging protocol. It's a todo list."

But I think it is an event protocol of sorts, with TODO being a subset. Subject, msg body, etc. are universal to a lot of things. For example, the difference between say email and SMS is more UI than the actual structure of the messages. The text transcript of a phone call could fit into the same bucket.

To point is, the "email" UI / UX is awful. It hasn't evolved. It might as well be a fax machine. (Goggle) Wave might have been a step in the right direction. The idea was right and solid, but Google (being Google) fucked up the launch / rollout. And now we're still stuck with the same shite email experience. And thus Graham's article is still relevant.

Note: We're all but stuck with the email protocol. The world isn't going to change en masse. That is my client experience can be improved without having to abandon the protocol. Come on. That's not risky, nor is it rocket science.

It's a protocol to send messages between two addresses, an electronic analog of mail. I really don't see why it is supposed to be "actually a todo list".

The great thing is email is easily extensible. Think of all the things that can be done on email!

Exactly. And I've grown so weary of all the disjointed UI/UX of the web that I've been shoe horning more and more of my daily workflow and information retrieval into email.

Understood. But it doesn't have to be this way. All that money and brainpower, and no one in SV can fix an obvious and known problem??

I see it differently. There are tons of things done on email that email (the application, not the msg protocol) wasn't designed for. For example, email is not a collaboration tool. Yet so much of human (team) productivity depends on collaboration.

Email doesn't tread well. That is, it's only good for focused single topic conversations.

Email keeps passing a copy of previous msgs back n forth, instead of centralizing a single copy.

Wave was a step in the right direction, and Google lost its nerve, and vision. Foolish.

Yes, it's being extended. But a screwdriver as hammer isn't typically a best practice.

Yup. Email the message is a protocol. Email the application tends to be more like a bad TODO.

Personally, Im like to have something that integrates email, SMS, social messages, etc into a single pro-sumrer friendly experience. A given conversation can, and often does, span the various mediums, but it's still a single conversation. When someone sends me a message with a link I shouldn't have to look in multiple places. It's 2017. Is that too much to ask?

I threw together something small that works for me if anyone wants to try it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com