Email Is Not Broken | Hacker News Reader

Email Is Not Broken

kevq.uk

33 pointsthereyougo12 comments

> Spam is by far the biggest problem

It's not. The biggest problem is big email providers such like Gmail.

It is related.

You can't easily run your own mail server because the hurdles you have to overcome to not land in gmails (outlook, etc.) spam folder - or even get delivered at all. DKIM, SPOF, a good IP range.

Then your server itself will be exposed to spam and might make it a lot less fun to use.

The big ones are not playing nice with smaller ones because of spam.

I have a couple of dedicated servers in colocation and run my own email server. It's taken more than two years of having all recipients clicking "not spam" and applying to anti-blacklists, ensuring DKIM,SSL Et cetera to actually obtain a decent success rate.

Google, Microsoft really are the destroyers of the internet.

That is so true, but for gmail/hotmail try that:

Gmail:

https://support.google.com/mail/answer/81126?hl=en

Hotmail (register as sender):

https://sender.office.com/

And a good spamtest:

https://www.mail-tester.com/

There is a small number of things which, I believe, should be done to make email great again:

1. Deprecate the 7-bit stuff and make UTF-8 the default codepage.

2. Give up the practice of overquoting (including full text of previous messages into each message - clear message ID and relation tracking is enough).

4. Ban antivirus etc software signatures - misleading statements saying "the message has been checked by an antivirus".

5. Standardize the way inline pictures are attached.

6. Stop prepending countless prefixes like Re:Fwd:RE: in the subject line

7. Give up the practice of discouraging subject specification omission - this leads to uninformative, irrelevant and misleading subject fields in many cases when subject changes, is not clearly defined from the beginning or is hard to describe concisely

8. Standardize supported HTML&CSS subsets.

9. Add support for MarkDown, AsciiDoc or some other lightweight markup.

10. Disallow quoting an forwarding of decrypted versions of previously encrypted content by default.

> 4. Ban antivirus etc software signatures - misleading statements saying "the message has been checked by an antivirus".

Many of those "antivirus companies" are selling usage data that they obtain via pixel tracking. Explaining this to someone who uses such "antivirus" is like explaining the difference between the web and the internet, those users don't want to understand the difference.

How to implement the changes I listed is a separate question. A sufficiently influential organisation (like Google, Apple or a consortium of internet service providers) interested to do this could succeed easily.

Email is an enormous market with probably thousands of use cases. I share his perspective that email (for the most part) isn't broken FOR ME. B/c the way I use email is pretty straightforward, it's basically another messaging platform for my life. But I have a ton of friends that would kill for better email clients b/c they have different use cases. And instead of killing, they are paying for Superhuman, Hey, Front, etc. I always appreciate a different perspective, that was an insightful read, thanks for sharing.

Wonder what the chances are that Hey eventually renames the Imbox. I don't think it's going to be a cultural phenomenon and I think they'll probably get tired of writing "Imbox (not a typo)".

The direct proximity on a Qwerty and the non-obviousness of the pun makes it a rather odd name of choice. Something more directly different like the “Inbag” (because a “bag” is less personal and office-like than a “box”, I guess) would have been a neater name, personally.

I think it’s appropriate for a service that allows you to permanently block senders, to make those senders know they couldn’t reach you. It’s just like if someone calls you and you never answer the phone, they leave you a message. They assume you got the message. But in this case, you don’t. I think there are some things for what you’d like to be notified if someone could not receive your email.

Email for interacting with clients (customers) has kind of replaced the phone as the most important channel for businesses.

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