Ask HN: Why is instant messaging over email not a thing? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why is instant messaging over email not a thing?

7 pointsi5heu9 comments

I mean it seems like the perfect replacement for WhatsApp and all the centralized messaging services. And everybody has an E-Mail address.

So why is there no widely adopted app that fakes the overlay from an instant messaging service with the email back-end? This idea is obviously not new, i have found 4 companies that tried it [0] [1], one of these companies is Microsoft [2].

Is there a problem i don't see? Is mail to slow? - i have tried it between Gmail and some other service and it seems fast enough.

There is even Push-IMAP (P-IMAP) for the push notification.

So is there a technical problem? Why is the instant messaging over email not a thing?

[0] https://www.spikenow.com/de/

[1] Hop and MailTime

[2] https://techcrunch.com/2015/07/22/microsoft-introduces-send-a-short-form-email-app-that-works-more-like-instant-messaging/

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From article [2]:

> But Microsoft argues that there’s still a place for this sort of short-form messaging within email, too, noting how you may need to quickly send a co-worker a message like: “don’t send the presentation yet!” or “let’s chat in 10,” for example.

Couldn't you just put that quick message in the subject line of an e-mail with an empty body? It doesn't seem like you'd need a separate app to do that.

As far as I'm concerned, I wish my co-workers would stop trying to call or Slack me and just send an e-mail. Then I can have all my messages in one place that's easily searchable and can be filtered using my e-mail client's filtering rules.

This is exactly what I was thinking. If you could just chat with an appealing UI over email, you have all your massages on one place.

SMTP has a SEND command, so it should use that for such a purpose, I should think. But of course, not all email services support it, but you can use MAIL instead of SEND is not recognized, and then it will still work.

I usually receive a notification in the status bar on my computer as soon as the message is sent, although that is because I run my own email server. If you use someone else's server, then such a thing is more difficult, and may be too slow.

What's the issue? You already listed Spike and Hop, which I believe are the best examples. Delta Chat also merits mention. They're all great UIs that can do IM and use email as the backend.

I think the main downside to the approach is that there are so many messaging apps out there, there isn't a clear use case for an email based one, besides a technical one. It is nice to be able to send one liners to team members and clients, but it's something that Slack and all other collaboration apps accomplish. What do you think is missing?

It looks like Hop is now Spike.

I didn't know Delta Chat, it looks promising, i will try it out!

> What do you think is missing? The interoperability, the freedom of not be owned by a company. And, at least in Germany, all people have 3 messaging types - SMS, Email and WhatsApp. And i don't want to use a Facebook product.

So the only other possible way to communicate with all other people is E-Mail. SMS is no option since its 0.09€ per send SMS.

I really also asked myself this question before. I sometimes used Outlook in an instant-messaging way and wondered if there is any optimized frontend to do so. Many „old school“ businesses and government entities still struggle to introduce instant-messaging as an official way to communicate - end then it ends at the company’s boundaries as others use other tools. Email is broadly accepted. I would become a user of instant-mail.

Because you don't want to get an email every time someone hits <enter>. The UI is very different, an email client would have no idea how to treat these one-liners and you don't want to have your inbox flooded with messages. Also, people just don't seem to care what protocol is used, and email is massively inefficient for that.

An early reason is that email, being all public protocols and interoperable and all, is less end-to-end encryptable than an app where you control all the code and systems.

all you need is an X-Notification header . i guess nobody is going to do it though because they can't lock in users.

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