A big difference is that email has slowly been developed over a period of decades, and so a lot of great software (both libs and GUIs) were built on top of it, and “perfected” over the time.
Maybe what prevented RSS from reaching the same level of development is that RSS is only composed by “creators”, while email has no target audience.
When there is an update about a previous notification, I send an email with the in-reply-to header. Oh wait, gmail doesn't use that.
Alright, I'll just make sure that the subject line is exactly the same as the original notification (as gmail says to do). This works for a bit, but if someone hits reply-all, suddenly the subject line for the thread is now "Re: <the original subject>" and my followups no longer thread.
I'll just make sure that my followups always have "Re: " in them, so they thread whether or not people have been communicating on the thread. This mostly works, but if the update is a week or two later, gmail just decides they shouldn't thread.
This is on top of the fact that emails with similar subject lines occasionally thread together. This gets really annoying when you send automated emails where the subjects are the same except for an identifier of some sort (specifically to prevent threading).
And there's no way to give feedback to gmail about this. No way to forcefully thread or de-thread emails. You are just given the choice of gmail's threading or no threading at all.
Some automated emails get threaded together when I'd prefer them separately (error notifications and other alerts) but it's minor enough that I've never even looked into whether there's a workaround.
* A decent bulk actions interface.
* Threading
* Filter on email headers
* Apply rules based on message age (e.g. twitch "is now live" messages are irrelevant after 1 day.
SPF, DKIM and DMARC seem to be making a real dent here though. DKIM is the most complicated to implement and manage since ideally you want to periodically rotate the keys and it has to be implemented at the sending server level instead of the DNS.
I blame social media. It's basically their agenda to offer everything within there walled garden. And so it was only natural that FB at some point disabled RSS.
Fortunately, wordpress generates RSS per default so many will keep providing rss feeds (without even knowing about it)
How ever TCP/IP protocols won the standards war which on balance is better - other wise you'd have what your PTT wanted to have sub :-)
https://cr.yp.to/immhf/header.html
That's got to be a sitter of a security hole for something, right?
Any time you try to make things work without a single central point it makes the whole thing harder to grasp and explain. Open ID was another example. End-user contact points try to simplify things by "productizing" the offering and hiding the implementation details, with various degrees of success.