Consider: Email 2.0
consider.co
consider.co
Centralized walled garden, bound to fail, or worse, acquired by some super-evil corp at any moment ("our wonderful journey"), packed with emojis, real-time information on who is looking at what worse than the Stasi and loss of control of your timeline is what EVERYONE ELSE ALREADY PEDDLES. These things are part of the problem, not part of the solution. For fuck's sake, leave email alone.
It is also willing to lock you out of your account and keep begging for your phone number (even if you haven't entered it previously) in order to unlock it.
Pinned messages — the last thing I want is someone else choosing how to manage my inbox and what ends up where.
"Presence" aka more user tracking, now also in your inbox. Who in their right mind would want this, never mind paying for it?
There's also no mention of how all the rest of the concepts interface with users who don't buy into the system. Are there partial updates, are people without a subscription just cut out of comments etc?
There are many companies touting email 2.0 but I deeply doubt this is it.
* Centrally controlled by a single company.
* Closed protocols (so it seems - didn't see evidence to the contrary).
* Encourages you to "Upgrade your conversations" with emojis.
I'm definitely willing to pay! ... for this not to be anywhere near me.
Not that Slack doesn't have some desirable features which I would like in a chat mechanism, but that's not remotely enough to choose it over IRC.
Personally I strongly dislike Slack and hope that Matrix will kill it, but I understand why people adopted Slack and most of those reasons does not apply here.
Such as?
I know of
- Lack of multi-line messages. AFAIK that's addresses in some new IRC RFC but it's not widely
- Server-stored messages. Bouncer can deal with that, though, it's kind of a hack.
Otherwise I love usability of IRC clients! My IRC client binary is 1.1 MB big!!!
There are plenty of ways to easily set up email.
Matrix?
The email itself is presumably just an email. If the company goes out of business you still have all the emails, and at the worst you're just missing how many people Liked them or whatever.
Sorry if I'm missing the obvious, but those were my first set of questions after reading the site.
It says on the website:
Consider is built for Web, Mac, iOS, and Android.
Overall I think the current paradigm of mail clients is not the correct one: a MUA today is still a glorified view of individual emails, as if it was "just" a maildir viewer. I would rather have a HN- or Reddit-like view, where focus is put on the conversation rather than on the people. This will be more useful than focusing on folders (What's the use of a "Sent" folder ?)
More things need to have this ease of exiting with all of the data (cryptographically guaranteed): banks and financial services, social networks, content distribution systems, etc.
That isn't really a thing though. The email protocols cover the format of the message and how it's transmitted, there isn't any standard for how servers are implemented that would allow one to develop email software that automatically works with any server. Otherwise Nylas wouldn't be a thing.
The fact that clients such as Thunderbird (or mutt) exist and work with basically all email hosts is a testament to this fact.
I would like to support improved email but at least some of this has to be implemented at the protocol level, otherwise it’s just another walled garden that will wither and die out in a few years.
Or worse it's another walled garden that doesn't die out in a few years. Not because what it offers in trade for locking you in is worth it, but because the inertia it creates makes sticking with it seem more appealing than migrating to something that could be even worse.
I guess this is a sign that people are generally not happy with Gmail?
They say they're trying to save emails because emails are a unique form of communication that Slack doesn't address. But it doesn't feel like they're actually thinking about email as a platform, they're just blindly stapling features to it. It's not clear how those features interact with existing email features (do inline conversations work with HTML/CSS styling).
And the features don't seem to have much to do with the parts of email they praised. They spend a paragraph talking about how they love email because it doesn't have notifications, because it has subject lines, and because it's an open platform everyone can use. And then they spend a long time talking about how they're going to add a bunch of chat and forum/wiki crap, on a closed platform that not everybody can use. What does any of that crap have to do with asynchronous, thoughtful communication?
If (and that's a really big if) there's an email 2.0, it's probably going to be people settling on Matrix or building something new on top of ActivityPub. I mean, what are the real problems with email? Spam, over-complicated protocols, bad encryption flows, the difficulty of self-hosting (largely because of spam), bad message-signing flows and verification of contents, wildly outdated clients which make it difficult to use modern CSS.
But congrats, I can add emoji reactions now. Which is apparently an acceptable tradeoff for giving up the ability to communicate with anyone on Gmail.
I don't want to be too negative, but I'm kind of irritated that this made the front page at all, and I suspect the reason is likely purely because it mentions email in the title. My uncharitable analysis is that there's nothing worthwhile to see here. It's just another VC spending a bunch of other people's money to desperately try and solve a problem that doesn't exist by throwing engineers at a web app.
This fluffy nonsense is really starting to feel lame.
I know that's not how VC metrics work. They want maximum engagement in minimum time. But IMO these kind of "engagements" are hollow and customer-hostile.
Due to this, fixing email has to be done on the client side.
What are the problems of emails (as a user):
* not encrypted by default
* spam
What I think would make a good email client to combat spam is a plugin for browsers: generate a random per-domain email every time you sign up for something. This makes unsubscribing very easy, and this allows you to see when a service your registered with shared your email with someone else.
Do you need anything else? I'm thinking of at least two other use cases:
* work. But you probably already have a separate work email.
* friends. But your friends are already probably on facebook, or whatsapp, or ... I have zero friends using email to reach out to me these days.
Email 1.0 is already a paid service, by definition. The fact that some companies offer “free” email accounts in exchange for ads doesn’t change anything to the fact that servers need to be paid for.
/s
Honestly, doesn't sound like email.