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Comment by tormeh | Hacker News Reader

Email sucks. It doesn't need replacement with something else that does the same but encrypted. The whole skeuomorphic concept of electronic mail is just not great and needs to go away. What we need is federated chat, like Matrix maybe.

Apropos: Is anyone aware of an email client that groups mail by sender, like a chat client? That would make email far more usable for me, as addresses that send a lot of mail and addresses that send little mail would get the same amount of screenspace. Currently my company email is drowning in automated internal semi-spam.

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>Email sucks

Email is great. I can choose between umpteen providers or run my own mail server, it's a standard protocol with many different clients to suit one's needs, I can't get banned by a faceless FAANG corporation for no reason and with no recourse, I'm not locked into some walled garden and dependent on the benevolence of corporate overlords and I don't need to worry about some intern at Google suffering from NIH syndrome deciding to make completely unneeded "improvements" that negatively impact my UX.

Email is old but that doesn't mean it sucks.

Internal "semi-spam" is a social problem and needs a social solution. Changing protocols won't change the spam problem at your company.

All the benefits you're listing are benefits that any federated protocol, for example Matrix, has. Completely orthogonal to email itself.

And the problems you listed with email aren't actually problems with the technology so much as problems with the way people at your company (and others) misuse the technology. They're completely orthogonal to email itself.

I'm not sure that's true. Email has a somewhat archaic data model that has suboptimal support for things like threading.

What exactly does it need to do better threading ? Today a client can write anything they want in the References: and In-Reply-To: headers, and the server doesn't verify that it's valid. Would that be enough for you ?

I only mentioned one problem with the clients, and an abstract complaint about doing one electronic communication but pretending it's physical.

Some problems with email, from a user perspective:

- The latency is too high for truly real-time communication

- There is no cryptographic verification of the sender's identity (this problem is also shared with telephony). This has lead to really harsh anti-spam measures that make it hard to self-host. Sender verification + client-side sender whitelists would solve spam for good. It also means grouping by sender gives a very false sense of security regarding identity continuity between messages

- There is no good support for groups or threads. Subject lines of type "Re: Re: Aw: Re: Sv: new proposal" is not an acceptable solution, as they look ugly and clients often disagree on how to parse and write them, leading to breakage of the thread

- Clients do not group by sender, group or thread, partly because these concepts do not actually exist in email (see above) and partly for social reasons

- Partly for historical reasons (it's just mail on a computer!) and partly for technical reasons (there is no sender, etc.) email is presented as huge letter-like affairs, leading to a felt need for all sorts of formalisms for every single message even if the messages are two minutes apart. Also email signatures (with logos?!) being attached to every message are just so wasteful both in terms of storage and in terms of screen space

Some of this problems are (in my opinion) actually advantages.

E-mail’s latency makes it so people write longer, thought out messages, instead of spamming very short messages. This makes for a different kind of communication, which is better for many things.

It also removes the expectation to respond really soon, and the sender doesn’t know if you’ve read the message.

Indeed!

I for one appreciate this property of email. The recipient doesn't neeed to be at their desk; their equipment doesn't have to be switched on; and they don't have to be awake at the same time as me.

I also prefer to type considered, thought-through messages (and I am unhappy that various messaging clients have hijacked email, so that my correspondents reply to me in a format that suggests they mistook my email for a text message).

Also, I have no messaging client on my laptop; and my fingers are too blunt to accurately type more than a few characters using the virtual keyboard on my mobile.

> The latency is too high for truly real-time communication

If you want real-time communication you really ought to be using VOIP.

> There is no cryptographic verification of the sender's identity (this problem is also shared with telephony). This has lead to really harsh anti-spam measures that make it hard to self-host. Sender verification + client-side sender whitelists would solve spam for good. It also means grouping by sender gives a very false sense of security regarding identity continuity between messages

I agree that the crypto situation in email needs addressed. I don't think that the answer to this problem is "throw it away and start competing standard #1982374" though.

> There is no good support for groups or threads.

Mailing lists are groups. Threading actually works quite well with subject-line threading. Mailing lists have been doing this successfully for decades.

>Clients do not group by sender, group or thread,

Some do. Gmail does, for example.

>Partly for historical reasons (it's just mail on a computer!) and partly for technical reasons (there is no sender, etc.) email is presented as huge letter-like affairs, leading to a felt need for all sorts of formalisms for every single message even if the messages are two minutes apart. Also email signatures (with logos?!) being attached to every message are just so wasteful both in terms of storage and in terms of screen space

The formalisms thing isn't actually true, and all of these are social problems, not technical ones.

It's okay to just admit you don't like email, even if it's for purely subjective reasons.

>>Clients do not group by sender, group or thread,

> Some do. Gmail does, for example.

Thunderbird too.

For threading, look into the use of the References: email header.

This grouping complaint is a poor excuse for trying to junk existing email solutions; obviously the existing structures are capable of supporting that kind of grouping. If you want to launch a replacement for the existing structure, it's unhelpful if you are unfamiliar with the strengths and weaknesses of what you are proposing to replace.

The weaknesses of traditional email have been a subject of intense and detailed discussion for over 20 years. For a replacement to succeed, it will need to take account of the content of those discussions.

> I can't get banned by a faceless FAANG corporation for no reason

They can make your life difficult though with their seemingly random decisions about what constitutes spam even when you jump through all the SPF/DKIM/DMARC/etc hoops.

What I mean is they can't lock me out of my emails and contacts without recourse because (unless I use gmail or similar) my contacts are stored on my local device, and potentially so is my mail.

Deltachat maybe? Check it out. You might like it, it's a federated chat (since mail is) and built on top of the email tech stack

https://delta.chat

Thanks! This looks great!

Thunderbird and Outlook both group by sender, and have for more than 20 years.

I think delta chat does exactly this: https://delta.chat/ (email as chat)

Thanks! This looks great!

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