Just Use Email – How to Use Email for Everything
justuseemail.com
justuseemail.com
I skimmed a couple articles on the blog and my biggest problem with it is that the author is making a social rather than technological argument (which are all anyways nonsensical).
"Liked a movie? Don't call or IM your friend about it, email them a long form review instead."
"Leave all your group texts and instead send your friends a weekly email summary of your life."
Do you just hate having friends in general?
As a data point, I have run my own email servers for years. Both professionally (couple million transactional emails per year) and for my personal.
If you follow best practices (which is a pain to setup!), deliver ability is generally on par with other providers, unless you got unlucky and got a bad IP.
Much better and more flexible than any proprietary mail system.
Quick look at my archive, of 37k spams only 7k fails SPF. (I accept all email no matter what.) So it's some signal, but not nearly enough.
Look for DKIM. Either it's signed and pass. Or spam if DKIM is missing. You can filter a lot more this way.
Preventing forgeries is what allows the trust to be based on the domain/address rather than the IP.
Our IP addresses are not on any blacklists, and we don't block SMTP or mail ports.
Tailscale (which we have been using to great effect over the last year or so) provides effectively a 'LAN' where the devices can be anywhere. It provides you with a second interface in the 100.x.x.x range. You can trust that any traffic from that range has been authenticated to connect to your Tailscale network.
Hoppy (as I understand it, I've never used it) is more solving the issue of getting a static IP assigned, with the advantage of it following your device if it moves between networks. You get a second interface that is publicly visible, but can't trust traffic coming in from it.
In fact it'll happen even when you send from gmail to gmail itself!
My deliverability from my own email server to gmail feels better than from my company account (on gmail) to gmail users.
I've run a personal mail server for the last 5 or so years and I have SPF, DKIM, DMARC setup correctly, get 10/10 for mail-tester.com and get graded "not spam" for all the other spam tester sites. Spam Assassin loves me and I have a .com mail server.
I can land more or less into personal emails (occasionally I get filtered into spam), but when it comes to corporate emails I pretty much get /dev/nulled each time and can't even land into a spam folder. I can't give out my personal email as a point of contact and have to use my gmail or protonmail instead.
I've all but given up on owning my own email because the protocol has effectively made it impossible to reliably land mail in a mailbox if you don't have a certain amount of outbound mail traffic.
hotmail and icloud are very sensitive and if IP isn't reach a certain reputation(mail volume+age) it's easiser to land on spam even SPF/DKIM/DMARC are passed. But if the recipient interact with sender(mark as non spam, send a reply) then moving forward email send from that won't be flag as spam anymore. So their spam filtering is kind of weak and they used previous interaction as a signal.
gmail, on other hand is rock solid. They have their own false positive obviously but they are rock solid in term of not relying on IP reputation(or less). They are smarte and righfully land your legitimate email on inbox even an email come from a spammy IP.
It's much easier these days. The ecosystem has gotten more complicated, but the community has put in a lot of effort into automating that complexity away.
If any of us are ever going to convince friends and family to leave proprietary platforms like Messenger and Discord, we are going to need an open protocol that allows for the same features and level of polish. Trying to get everyone to just use email is a complete non-starter.
It can be done. It isn’t because there is no billion dollar exit possible on an email based system.
that's not giving email enough credit. Email has zero limitations unlike real snail mail - the email client is the limitation, and that's "just" software.
The fact that gmail client was so successful is evidence that email could've been _the_ premiere platform for open communication. Instead, we now have many separate walled gardens vying for dominance. Imagine how the world would've been if snail mail back in the 20th century needed different stamps for different recipients!
So I often have organizations that send email pointing to their proprietary webmail. The alternative is sneakernet, hard copies, or even faxing.
Also, wouldn't encryption fix this problem? I don't understand how it might be implemented in the real world, but if you encrypt with your private key, then their public key the message should be safe in transit, and at rest (unless they leave it decrypted on disk)
If that's all there is to it, then why do people use other solutions?
> Also, wouldn't encryption fix this problem?
Kind of. The problem is the protocol and lack of consensus prevents this from being feasibly implemented. Personally, I think encryption in transit is a low probability threat for me. I would also like certain data to "expire" or go into "cold storage" after a period of time. Sending it in a side-channel, like Dropbox or Google Drive means I can delete it or revoke access after a period of time but this breaks email.
The biggest reason for it is that in practice email isn't as open and decentralized as people like to think. For most of its history all advancements were controlled by Microsoft, AOL and Yahoo, and today it is controlled by Microsoft and Google.
Most of the OP list of things they don't like are about client UI presentation. Inherently unrelated to the protocol itself.
I don't have any of those issues because I use a client that does the interaction and presentation exactly how I like it.
Reformatting top-quoted replies. This is possible with email because you can pipe the messages through any preprocessing you want. Inserting custom processing into the delivery pipeline is generally impossible with all proprietary systems, but easy with an open standard like email.
HTML formatting: Again, easy due to customizable preprocessing and/or viewers.
Eighty people responding to a thread: This is threading, handled natively by most good email clients. Gmail makes a mess of it though, so I get why it'd be painful if you use gmail. Don't use gmail.
> because the protocol leaves so many decisions up to clients.
I feel like this is a misunderstanding. The clients have nothing to do with the protocol (SMTP), that's the job of the MTAs (mail transport agents).
The client provides the UI/UX interaction part. It is an immense strength of standards like email that there are tons of clients. You may want a completely different UX with your email than me, so you're free to have it exactly the way you want and so am I. And we can still message each other. This is impossible with proprietary walled gardens.
Email threading is trivial, nothing magical about it. Most every decent email client will properly thread conversations. Gmail will not, so yes gmail is super painful for long threads. Use a better client.
I agree with everything else and think "managing group messages" has other issues. For example, it's nice that I can duck out of an iMessage group, but can't duck out of a text message group or email chain.
no shared concept of a group/channel/...
no shared history support
no shared concept of a thread
no consistency about how previous replies are referred to (e.g. different quoting styles)
no real identity support
...
mailing lists
> no shared history support
Your own client or provider can store history. you also don't own someone else's history - a good feature imo.
> no consistency about how previous replies are referred to (e.g. different quoting styles)
A preference for individuals to decide.
> no real identity support
What's a "real" identity? my email address is my identity.
Not understood at the protocol level, not visible as such in the client.
> Your own client or provider can store history. you also don't own someone else's history - a good feature imo.
It's a nightmare in practice. Catching someone up on a conversation ends up being a mess of forwarding multiple overlapping but partially distinct emails and then constantly having to resend messages as different people get dropped in different replies. Exiting such a conversation is even harder.
> A preference for individuals to decide.
The cost is much bigger than the benefit.
> What's a "real" identity? my email address is my identity.
There's no authentication. You can't associate yourself with multiple organisations except by using multiple addresses, and then there's no way to reflect that those are somehow the same.
I’ve kind of thrown in the towel on this fight. People are going to use what they like. For me, it’s E-mail. My friends and family know how to get in touch with me if they need to: using E-mail. If they want to text each other or WhatsApp each other or Snapchat each other or whatever it is they do, they can go right ahead: it doesn’t affect me. And that’s all OK!
So when Facebook slurps up your email address by virtue of your friends using WhatsApp, that doesn't affect you?
Sure, they now have my E-mail address. I guess that sucks, but it was due to some other idiot's lack of OpSec, and there is nothing I can do about it. I'm not going to convince 2,000 people to stop using Facebook, let alone 2 million or 2 billion.
It's open in name but proprietary. How many competing open source clients exist? Right.
Also, it's extremely limited like every other proprietary system, by the fact that the client is proprietary and thus can only do what they feel like supporting.
How do I pipe incoming signal messages to a script which will process it in ways I like? How do I programmatically send messages based on the output of other scripts? And so on.
All this is trivially easy functionality with email because it is an open protocol.
That said, I think all three methods of communication feel obsolete and useless to me for the same reason, they're drowned out by marketing chatter. The one nice effect of the recent real estate bubble is I've effectively divorced from even using a phone. I don't even move it from the counter most of the time and don't take it with me when I leave the house. It's like 1995 all over again, but if I have it with me, it's a non-stop cacophony of people claiming to have heard from a friend of a friend that I want to unload a house.
Email is no better. Every single company I have ever conducted even the slighest and smallest transaction with suddenly thinks I want to know everything that ever happens with their products and offers. Regular mail is 99% re-fi offers from obscure mortgage providers I've never heard of.
Massive scale direct marketing is probably the worst thing to ever happen to remote communication between parties actually interested in communicating with each other, as the only practical way to do it now is pseudonymously through closed systems you never use to conduct real business with your real identity, to avoid being hounded by everyone who shares a constant contact account with someone you once gave a dollar to.
Maybe it'll force us to actually interact in person again.
If I have a business relationship with someone I'll add them to my contact list. I assume they can do the same. Otherwise gimme see BAT or something for the spam
Also, unlike the unfiltered stream model of chat, you can organize emails into folders, delete useless ones and actually have a decent chance at finding past things via keyword search (because email subject lines). Paradoxically, email also has really good convo threading. In other words, email has high signal to noise ratio.
FULL DISCLOSURE: I'm the founder
The worst problem it has is the lack of multi-account support. The reply functionality is also a bit buggy. I generally only use it as a read-only client.
It's worth considering that there's a place in the world for both a security-first IM system and a features-first IM system. While Telegram does offer optional encryption, I'm not sure I'd trust it if I wanted to hide the content of my communication from a sophisticated adversary.
* Can't use your own domain
* Have to use their client
* Can't add your old email
Why is that a good thing? My email is full of spam both literal and mundane (email notification from stuff I only occasionally care about like CI or products). My Messenger account has zero noise because I can't be contacted by companies - only friends I've chosen to let in.
Just because companies haven't invaded WhatsApp yet doesn't mean they aren't trying, they are, and they already invaded everywhere else.
Hell Facebook and Instagram is an advertisers wet dream.
Depending on the registrar you use, you can set up a 2nd inbox or aliases for junk mail and filter anything that goes to those, etc.
Sure I can. Something isn't better just because it has more features. Easy ability to be spammed with nothing more than a widely shared string ID is not a positive feature.
Even if I used FB auth to log into all of my various internet accounts, my Messenger still won't get spammed. It's a better tool (at least for me).
My email inbox just annoys me while Messenger is so good I haven't deleted my FB account.
You're right, but being able to be spammed with a string ID absolutely is a positive feature. While your inbox may annoy you, I'm sure you also use to sign up for services, get marketing info that you're interested in, get billing notifications, etc. Could Messenger do all that? Yeah potentially, but now you've just moved the spam problem into Messenger. That's why I'm saying Messenger isn't the better tool because it doesn't have spam, it doesn't have spam because it lacks the features that introduce spam.
Pretty sure you create a whitelist on that too, yes?
Of phone numbers, usernames, or …email addresses… depending on what the app uses, that you wish to hear from?
Check out Spike for IOS. I’m not saying you have to USE it, but that it’s a UX problem, not an “email” problem.
The configuration is never over with email, because every time I sign up for something, I've got more filters to set up. With instant messaging? There was never a problem to begin with
Unless you're complaining about getting reminder emails from upcoming doctor appointments, bills and the like. But my impression was that getting those are a feature...
They could deny by default unless the sender is in a contact list.
But I mean the messenger list has to be updated to allow people in every time you meet someone worthy?
You are still doing list management.
No it just read my pre-existing social network graph. And then very accurately predicts who I might want to add to that graph. But practically speaking it comes out to the same thing - I have never had to create a messaging whitelist.
While email and email tooling is completely ignorant of my multiple social network graphs that are stored in various places on the Internet.
I have many email addresses. My most personal is known to people I like and trust. I use it the way many people use IM. I get zero zero spam in it. The emails I use for business or subscriptions or untrustworthy friends of course is spammy.
I imagine if one uses any IM service to enroll into dozens of services / products / subscriptions / websites / etc... Spam will come regardless of medium :)
Not if I use FB auth. My Messenger would remain spam free. Because ability to authn someone and ability to send someone a message were decoupled, which is just better than email.
> Why is that a good thing?
Because it is useful to have a communication mechanism which is universal. It is a standard and not owned or controlled (censored) by anyone. Sure there a dozens, possibly hundreds, of fragmented chat protocols that can't talk to anything other than their own proprietary clients. But only email is universally available.
> only friends I've chosen to let in
You could configure your email client the same way and then you have the same behavior.
I have never found that to actually be useful in practice. Non-universal protocols with proprietary clients have worked well for me - they have been convenient, well-engineered, well-designed, and well-populated by the people I want to talk to.
But “everyone is using X” they will tell you, but you’ll have no way to know for sure. Are you really going to install every piece of software people say to install?
At least with email, it just works and there are minimal security issues, and it’s an open protocol etc etc, even if it’s a bit old fashioned.
Here in China, most people only use email at work.
Mostly people are able to email, even if it’s a bit unusual, and perhaps, like you say, mostly a work thing.
Could you give an example of such a "messaging app"? I don't have any "messaging apps"; although I do have a 'phone which supports SMS (I assume it supports email too, although I don't know how comfortable email would be without a physical keyboard).
Do you have examples in mind about how my life might be "a lot more difficult" than if I installed the sorts of software you allude to?
I moved from a country that tended to use Facebook messenger and sometimes SMS (though that was fading), to one that primarily uses WhatsApp. While I already had WhatsApp installed from travelling there in the past, I almost never used it outside of travel purposes.
When I moved, everything ended up in WhatsApp. If I met someone and wanted to meet up with them another day, it was WhatsApp. I'd get added to a group because it was someone's birthday, it was WhatsApp. Many apartment buildings have a WhatsApp group to discuss building related things. It was how I told my landlord that something needed fixing. So on, so forth. Lately there are some people I talk to on Telegram, and a couple on Signal, but most of my social (and other things) organisation goes via WhatsApp. I could uninstall it, but then I'd lose a chunk of social contact.
For me, email has become mostly an avenue for notifications from companies or newsletters. The most back-and-forth I've done with it in a long time was when I was buying an apartment, a lot of documentation and organising was done through email.
As for SMS, no one uses that except perhaps one automated reminder about something every few months.
In short, unless I'm really important to a group, I have to use what they use or get left out. If I'm the most important person in every group I'm in, I'm probably in the wrong groups.
Your friends will communicate and organize events only on Whatsapp. Your colleagues will have social interactions on Whatsapp, even send you work messages when on the go. Your landlord will communicate via Whatsapp, including sending you utility bills to pay. The person you want to buy second-hand stuff from communicates via Whatsapp. The real estate agent trying to find you a place to live will send proposals by Whatsapp. Many businesses advertise customer support on Whatsapp also, although in that case it's never the only option.
It's not literally impossible to live without it. I know some grandparents without smartphones. But it does make your life a lot more difficult.
> Your colleagues... even send you work messages when on the go.
> Your landlord will communicate via Whatsapp, including sending you utility bills to pay.
> The person you want to buy second-hand stuff from communicates via Whatsapp. The real estate agent trying to find you a place to live will send proposals by Whatsapp.
In each of these examples, the other party has something to gain (a client; a bill payment; offloading some work; etc.), which I'd wager is enough to tolerate the minor inconvenience of sending an SMS/email.
We have Matrix now, and although most clients are lacking and it can be laggy, in 5 years it will probably be pretty good. I'm especially excited about their P2P work which sounds like it'll allow account migrations, offline messages to nearby people via bluetooth or LAN, etc.
I switched from primarily using a matrix.org account to using one on a smaller server after the big matrix.org hack a few years back. However, my main server is now incredibly bad. I get messages out of order, it goes offline a lot, etc. I don't want to lose my contact list and history again, so I'm kind of holding out for the option to change homeservers/have multiple/have none. It's also annoying how incredibly few Matrix clients support multiple accounts. I know of Quaternion and Neochat, but that's about it. Every XMPP client I've ever used supports multiple accounts. Dino did from version 0.1.
I still use XMPP and IRC at the same time, but I have most IRL contacts only on Matrix. I think it'd be hard to get them all on XMPP as well, so I'm just enduring.
I'm one of the many people actively working on XMPP projects. Is there something in particular that makes you think this?
People often talk about XMPP in the past tense on HN. It's understandable, XMPP had a peak of popularity with the adoption of Google Talk, but Google being Google and shutting that down did not end XMPP. It continues to be active and growing.
I feel it's right that a protocol doesn't need to be in the general consciousness. See the even worse Google trend for SMTP, for example, despite email still being considered a growing network.
I wrote a bit about protocols being for developers and not users at https://snikket.org/blog/products-vs-protocols/
Why didn't you look up Email instead of SMTP? It's not like you want to measure XMPP based on a XEP.
Protocols might not be for (end)users, but the underlying concept is - depending on what you want to build: A product or an open standard.
The protocol is important to users in the sense of devs.
An open standard requires users and devs.
I almost never use it to talk to people these days, and typically see one, maybe two other people logged in at any given time, when it used to be a lot more. And I think one of those is someone like me who just has a client always connected. I like what XMPP stands for, but it really does feel like it's faded in at least the "general instant messenger" sense.
And it's a fine way for government or businesses to contact me, just like mail was.
But just like mail letter writing declined after the invention of the telephone, e-mail has declined after the invention of IM
A lightweight client could have an IM-like interface that does not quote the original message on replies. Who cares if it's SMTP under the covers, the whole experience could feel quite IM-like and it would have all the other benefits of email (not being locked in to a specific provider being the main one).
You can even get free S/‘MIME certificates that validate on all clients.
People don’t do it because encrypted mail can’t be searched or archived, and it becomes cumbersome to have a wider array of clients.
HN discussion from when it was launched is here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19216077
If "email" simply means "gmail.com" to you then it's natural to assume that you'd think it hasn't evolved.
My understanding is that this is the point of Matrix, i.e. to create an open protocol that you can use for IM regardless of who serves your messages.
But the point of saying "just use email" is that we don't need anything new, we just need to shift our idea of what email is. It's only slow and clunky because we still think if it as such. Our email clients and infrastructure are all built around email being something you get around to checking, like a digital version of your physical mailbox. But it doesn't have to be this way. You have a uniquely identifying email address, and everyone you know does too, this should be all we need to have communication that's as responsive and highly compatible as we want/need it to be.
I think the thrust of this article is mostly work related. He talks about being a consultant and seeing people waste so much time on SaaS tools, for example.
Personally I don't mind using "throwaway" services in my personal life - all your examples are things that don't matter - but for important stuff like work I want one place with all my information - not lots of crappy silos that don't integrate that I have to search for that key bit of information.
I don’t open any work emails anymore. Got tired of the gotcha mentality.
Evolved beyond instant text messages? because that's all email is.
Honestly I hate IM tools. The threading is crap, the search is crap, the startup time is crap. there's no understanding of who can read what or what the edit history of messages are (I've been in IMs with people who will edit their messages days later to gasslight you, that alone is enough to make me hate IM apps.)
> edit their messages days later to gasslight you
Or perhaps restrict editing, e.g. instead of being able to delete text, you can only strike through+slightly shrink+grey out text.
Plus they don't sit there "forever" because the archiving is usually crap.
Also it's IM. If you're going to obsess over grammar and spelling maybe just use email.
So if someone edited their comment three times, you would be able to read all four versions of it.
- a single window to do stuff with (so you can't really switch between two channels very easily)
- no ability to mark and unmark individual actionable messages as read
- slow as molasses client that sometimes takes seconds to react with high system load (no chance to have your own client)
- inability to integrate with self-developed tools unless you're blessed with an application token
- inability to set up advanced/granular filtering
- no user macros support beyond some primitive workflow automations
My email account is basically a searchable archive of confirmations and receipts.
It's one more information stream I have to monitor, by manually going and checking it. Even if work used Slack - we don't - I'd still have to manually navigate among teams to cycle through all my incoming communications. And bringing additional colleagues into the conversation on a purpose-specific, temporary basis is much higher friction than it is with email. Instead of just CCing them on an email, I have to get them invited to that company's Slack, and they have to go through the hassle of setting up an account. And then, since they didn't install the app, I still have to manually prompt them to sign in whenever I see that they aren't remembering to include that Slack in their manual rounds. Which they aren't, because Slack Connect is oftentimes their first experience with having to do manual rounds to purpose-specific locations in order to communicate with people like that.
I've never really got their "move out of siloed email communication" sales pitch. It's like, out of the silo and into a different silo that's deeper and also on fire.
With email, on the other hand, retaining one's own copy of the communication is baked into how the mechanism works.
Maybe for you this is not important. For me it has proved to be key many times.
Also, filtering. You cannot withstand the same stream of info and notifications from Slack as you can from email, because there are no filtering and classification rules. Channels help, but in a limited way.
Slack works well for casual and ephemeral communication. For other use cases, you need a serious tool like email.
So for me Slack has become a second memory for technical and other details.
Sure, it could be improved, but so can anything.
I did not understand this.
I use Slack at work. I would assume my employer owns all the work related discussions we have and keeps that as useful documentation around many issues? And if someone leaves the company, it is a feature and not a bug that they will not have access to those internal discussions.
What is bad about this?
Email is thought of as grandpas business tool.
Look at Spike for IOS.
Messengers are just whitelisted users. Email providers or clients simply provide a shit interface for managing that list.
To me it’s like that story about NASA spending millions on a zero gravity pen when Russian astronauts just used pencil.
Someone was looking to impress people with their spam filtering code and never thought “maybe I can just drop all by default and only allow who I want?”
I’m still waiting for my TSO’d pencil to arrive. http://www.rstengineering.com/rst/articles/tsodpencil.pdf
I was using it for the concept not the specifics.
> group instant messaging is, largely, distracting and of little value (more on this later) and can best be dealt with in weekly ‘batches’, if it’s required at all.
I mean, I dunno about this guy, but I like interacting with my friends. I'll leave a group chat open all day on my other monitor. It's like a break room where you can chat with whoever's around, or all get together and have a nice conversation. Group chats are one of my favourite forms of online social interaction. You don't have to like them, but I can't imagine not at least understanding the appeal.
> people are finding ways to pushback on the ‘instant’ part of instant messaging, to put space and breathing room between when a message is sent and when they ‘deal’ with it.
Uh, yeah! That's part of what makes them work. They slide seamlessly between synchronous and asynchronous discussion. If I want to hear your thoughts at 1pm, I can message you. If you're busy, you can reply later. And if I'm available when you reply, then we can have our conversation synchronously. But if our schedules never align, we'll keep going back and forth until our discussion is over.
While many people shift effortlessly between async anc sync communication, many people also have problems with that. When you do not respond in time, they get impatient. Some people are seemingly not able to do this shifting as effortlessly.
Just a few points to consider, before getting to any conclusions.
Granted, I'm sure some people do have trouble shifting fluidly between sync and async. I don't really have a solution to that, but in practice it hasn't been a problem for me. Maybe if I had different coworkers it would be an issue.
Email has its warts I'll give you that, but since 1997 the world has gotten objectively worse in terms of open, distributed messenging. Everything is a fucking walled garden controlled by some data-harvesting megacorp these days.
I like email because I can roll my own server (and have done so) or I can choose to trust one of several commercial providers and we can all interoperate.
> A) Call Leia and show interest in her weekend, and in her as a person, and after some pleasantries are exchanged, mention how amazing the main character is in the movie he watched.
---
> Situation: Kylo has been fascinated with helmets since time immortal. He custom designs and builds his own helmet. Knowing most of his friends don’t share his passion, he is hesitant to wear his new helmet at their next gathering.
> Answer: Send out an email to all his friends and include photos of his new helmet.
The first one heavily implies that Luke just calling his friend is a better and more personal way of catching up, and the second one doesn't say the person should send a weekly email summary, it's saying for big projects one is passionate about, email may be a better choice than instant messaging.
I like talking to people who I value. Like that a lot.
For work, or anything with complexity in any major axis, time, number of elements, etc... I continue to use e-mail.
The best thing about that is being able to go back into those e-mails and recover info. My archive goes almost all the way back, and the little bit I don't have in there really doesn't matter much. Surprisingly, the rest has more times than I can count.
People can contact me, literally decades later, and it's there, I can spool it up, and act on whatever it is almost as if I never missed a beat.
Maybe when the new tools are around and endure in a similar fashion I would reconsider. Kind of hard to do so in such an open, portable format though.
Isn't that a social counter-argument ?
The Banks
Medical Aid
Insurance/Vehicle Insurnace
Hosting Companies
Mobile service (voice + 4G)
Crypto Exchanges
All of Google/Microsoft/AWS hangs off email accounts.
Local Government/municipalities.
Entertainment: steam, netflix, online-shops, spotify
Android/iOS stores
The list is endless. I have no idea how people can claim they can get away from email.. The only scenario where I can think of it working for me is if I give everything up and go live in the mountains.
It has nothing to do with hating or not, it just depends on the number of friends and the intensity of incoming communication - not all people are the same. After you cross certain threshold synchronous communication becomes unmanageable and basically prevents you from doing your daily activities as you'd want.
Not to mention that email absolutely sucks. The confusing threads, the forwarding, the constant CC'ing, someone making it or not making it into a list, the spam. It's absolute garbage. In fact, people have been seeking alternatives since the late 80s. IRC was a precursor to Instant Messaging/Slack that many techies favored. Not that async is some perfect communication strategy (it has its own baggage), but it definitely fills some of email's gaps. Personally, I think Google Wave was ~15 years ahead of its time, and we'll see something akin to it soon.
Will the author's next big revelation be "How to use a hammer for everything?"
This says to me that you have bad tools for email, not that the protocol or concept sucks.
If you use email like a rube, it is expected to be absolute garbage. The same goes for Facebook or Twitter or Reddit, though: you have to change a lot of settings to get a decent experience.
My main email client is macOS Mail.app and it's pretty great when configured properly in conjunction with serverside preprocessing/filtering.
Go ahead and explain an actual configuration that actually works if you'd like to help.
So is misreading SaaS as SAS and thinking of the old query language.
Email works O.K for one-way communication (e.g. mailing lists or bill notification). Maybe sometimes infrequent one on one communcation
When its comes to having a converstation, particularly with multiple people, I can't think of anything worse. I always dread tracking down information when I have to dig into achived mailing lists
Honestly at this point I wonder if the right solution is a private usenet server: just like email it is not instant but async, unlike email it is spilt into topics better and you can have new people catch up on threads easily.
I've actually adopted some email like conventions when participating in Facebook comment threads. When I click the reply button, it will fill in the name of the author of the comment I'm replying to. I then will append "wrote:" to that line, add a line break, type a > character, and then paste the part of the comment they wrote that I plan to respond to. It almost looks like a quoted email message :)
> I wonder if the right solution is a private usenet server: just like email it is not instant but async, unlike email it is spilt into topics better and you can have new people catch up on threads easily.
With a private NNTP server, you will still need to set up accounts for others to use it. Though if multiple people run their own servers and set up the peering arrangements between then, then it could work without having to set up accounts fro multiple people.
But, the flexibility one can get with email in terms of organizing messages into different folders is lost with NNTP, since that organization is determined by the configuration on the server itself.
I also love your Facebook maners, but, unfortunately I haven't met anybody who does that.
This is one aspect where newsgroups do better than email. But, unlike email, you need to establish peering arrangements with other NNTP servers (if you run your own). Wtih email, the MTA can rely on DNS MX records to route the message to the correct server.
Can you give an example of a communication medium — where having a conversation involves multiple different people over the course of weeks or months, with message frequencies varying from several-per-minute to a-few-per-month, and message sizes varying from single sentences to essays — works better than e-mail (and e-mail lists)?
I agree that unwinding a sprawling email thread after the fact can be a lot of work, but I also haven't seen any other medium make that job any easier. It seems to me to be an inherently hard problem.
I think this concept of a 'global inbox' is exactly what I want. In a general day I'm using Jira, Slack, Email, SMS, gitlab issues, etc for my 'work input'. Which means many different interfaces that I'm constantly checking or are constantly beeping at me.
Though optional, every message SHOULD have a "Message-ID:" field.
Furthermore, reply messages SHOULD have "In-Reply-To:" and
"References:" fields as appropriate, as described below.
For the uninitiated, SHOULD denotes the following in RFCs:
This word, or the adjective "RECOMMENDED", mean that there
may exist valid reasons in particular circumstances to ignore a
particular item, but the full implications must be understood and
carefully weighed before choosing a different course.
Most MTAs, in my experience, will add a Message-ID header to a message even if the client did not add one to the original message it sent to the MTA.
Can you imagine a company that went all in for Google Wave and then had to deal with Google pulling the entire product?
Email has been there for over 50 years and it's likely to be around for a long time.
The Lindy effect isn't a bad way to look at it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect
In my current job we've had 3 ticketing systems in the last 5 years.
We now use Slack and Jira but we still archive certain important emails for some things because, well, the archive of email and the fact that someone sent an email is something we can trust a lot better than the rest.
She gets dozens of emails a day. None of them are spam exactly. Every single website you've ever signed up for your in your life sends out email "for engagement purposes". Drips, reminders, flash sales, weekly roundups.
A dozen different job boards from when she was looking for work a few years ago. Several dozen shopping websites. Four or five pregnancy apps. And more and more and more.
You could argue that normal, non-technical people should know better. That they should be vigorously jumping through hoops to cancel all those email notifications from services they no longer use.
Don't they know there's fine print (in light gray text!) at the bottom telling you how to unsubscribe? Don't they know there's a tiny button in GMail that will (sometimes) unsubscribe for you?
But I expect that my wife's email is like a lot of people's. It is almost entirely impossible to find any signal among all the noise in it.
I mean, the threads are only confusing if people keep insisting on using shit email clients.
> the forwarding, the constant CC'ing,
Think of it as defining a chatroom. Most of the time it can be handled just fine automatically by your email client, but you can also have more finegrained control if you wish.
> someone making it or not making it into a list,
?
> the spam.
This I will agree with.
> Will the author's next big revelation be "How to use a hammer for everything?"
Yeah, I don't agree with the author that email should be used for everything. But for non-instant, asynchronousm, flexible, decentralized, cross-platform communication it's pretty damn near perfect.
Isn't this exactly like adding/mentioning someone in a chat room? Problem is that in a chat room all communication is public and you're seeing/getting notified of every single small message. This is hugely inefficient. For e-mails, one can define filters to park e-mails where you're on CC to read later. You don't have this flexibility with Chat/Slack - the tool defines much more how you should be reading the incoming stream of messages.
Worst of all, Gmail especially isn't great about tagging messages as spam; a good chunk of messages sent from outside the Gmail network simply disappear. As a Gmail user, there is nothing you can do to verify that you're getting all of the legitimate mail traffic that is being sent to you.
Further, if you're trying to send any kind of business correspondence over email, you have to contend with a massive industry of scammers that are also targeting people with lookalike messages.
I love the email protocol, but from a broader service standpoint, email is terribly broken right now.
My experience is the exact opposite of yours - I find Gmail's spam detection absolutely amazing. I get essentially zero spam in my inbox, and perhaps 4-6 false positives in the spam folder a month.
>As a Gmail user, there is nothing you can do to verify that you're getting all of the legitimate mail traffic that is being sent to you.
What other communication service/protocol would allow you to do this?
That's 4-6 valid messages a month the average user will never see.
Ideally this phrase would not be so widely known and understood if Gmail didn’t have so many false positives going to the spam folder. I’d imagine that, as a performance metric, the Gmail team would consider false positives to be a metric for improvement, not a metric of pride.
Because of that I just added a recurring remainder to go through gmails spam folder every sunday, but that of course defeats the purpose.
Gmail also thinks that every 2fa message from Microsoft is spam for some reason, despite how often I tell it is is not.
Low and behold there was an email in there that was fairly important.
That seems like a lot; with FastMail I get basically 0. The last time this happened was years ago.
I do get the very occasional spam, maybe 5 messages/month or so. Most of them are from marketing agencies that want to "collaborate" on my website or some such and have a spam score of 0 or close to it, and arguably isn't "spam" in the same way as "grow a bigger dick!"-spam is. I doubt gmail would catch those too.
We get so much spam from gmail that gmail has earned itself an increased spam score just because its gmail. Its unlikely that my users see much from gmail, unless they want it.
I run my own mail server and have been for years. My e-mails use SPF, DKIM, DMARC, I have a reverse DNS record set up, a score of 100/100 on mail-tester.com... yet Microsoft refuses to accept my emails. They are sent to the spam folder of my recipients.
I tried contacting their support about it, I'll let you guess how well it went. A man from a warm country told me to join some sort of Microsoft partner program, for which I would have to pay.
This is a disgrace. E-mail is behind closed gates now, because of bullies such as Microsoft.
I started with the "Dislikes about email are Questionable" post, which was perhaps my mistake, but every point in that post had a dripping "I'm sorry peasant, you're doing it wrong" vibe to it.
I can fully understand why someone may choose to use email over other forms of communication, but to be incredibly dismissive of problems other people have with the medium, while furthermore often not even addressing some of the root frustrations people have, is incredibly condescending.
Take the "email is unreliable" point. You can write all the missives you want about how email is the most reliable form of communication known to man, at the end of the day a huge number of messages can get "sent" which never make it to the intended recipient for a myriad of reasons. And furthermore, pretty much everyone has had an experience where this has happened.
Also I find it misses most of the real points against email and focuses on the relatively minor ones.
- email enforces much higher latency communication, which maybe good sometimes, but most of the time is not helpful
- much more difficult to actually keep track of a threaded conversation with multiple concurrent subtrees, it's a stack when instead you want a tree like Zulip / Slack threads. quote replying a subthread in an email tree without disrupting convos in the rest is a painful experience even in the nicest clients.
- file attachment and embed preview experience is worse than most modern IM apps
- no emoji reactions, these are huge for efficient async communication without spamming everyone with notifications
Let's play dumb here, back with POP3 if you configured it to leave the messages the server already had a copy. If you use IMAP you can still have a local copy. (I'm not saying these are valid backup strategies, but if all else fails it's still a decentral copy).
But more importantly, importing and exporting to different email clients and hosts (and even different IMAP server) is varying degrees of work, but it is doable EASILY by default. I can't be the only one keeping 15-18 years of email history and regularly referring back and searching for stuff there? (could be 5 more years but I was careless and didn't properly backup and maybe it's still on some medium...)
Even with matrix, the completely open new hip thing I don't see a good archival strategy by anyone except "somehow keeping logs" like on IRC. Maybe DB backups if it's your own instance. Not cool, but at least possible. And don't even get me started on all the other messengers here. Sometimes the backup works (via Android and maybe iOS) but not always and it's surely not open or accessible.
I'm actually not using email for a lot of private communication these days, but mostly because most of my communication to friends isn't really worth saving (except for logs in matrix/irc channels), I've never been a fan of formal emails between friends. But it's perfect to ask a random question to a semi-stranger. Surely beats Twitter DMs by a mile.
You are not alone.
Instead of installing and/or visiting 100 different apps and services daily, I just redirect all notifications to my email (Reddit, HN, Discord, Matrix, Zulip, Mattermost, Slack, Discourse, Matrix, YouTube, StackExchange, VoIP.ms, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, bank, forums, etc).
For news websites I refresh all the time, I set up weekly digests. For important keywords and mentions, I set up instant alerts.
It’s easy to setup rules and filters for emails. Except for specific emails that trigger a notification on my phone (confirm registration, verification codes, security alerts, IM messages, important people), I only check my email once a day, and make sure to process it down to inbox zero (with the occasional email snooze).
Having a single inbox to worry about has improved my quality of life a lot.
Feel free to share or ask about specific tools for email digests, mention/reply notifications, and keyword alerts.
I have not yet found a good way to do that in Slack (reliably) and not relying on another tool.
E-Mail in that way is just great as a message is just a text file. You can put it wherever you want and reorganize it the way you want.
Try to attach a slack conversation to an issue tracking system. Won‘t work. Do it with e-mail: it‘s just a text file.
Try to post-pone stuff or organize information in folders. Won‘t work. Do it with e-mail, hell I can even move messages from one account to another.
My point is: Slack will never replace e-mail, it is just an extension of ways we communicate. And that‘s is biggest advantage and disadvantage: it‘s a tool that makes communication sometimes easier, but is‘s also another tool I need to regularly check besides all other communication tools I already have.
https://fastmail.blog/company/email-is-your-electronic-memor...
It was in response to Google promoting AMP for email (aka: you don't get a permanent copy of the content) - but more generally, the advantages of email aren't so much in the right now, they're in the long term searchable and immutable archive.
See also the nice immediate triage features of heyhey - there's some nice stuff in there, but long term their users are going to find that they're living in the moment and not building the value that's stored in the data to the same extent that users of more traditional mailboxes do.
(at least if you have decent search)
> For instance, if WhatsApp goes down, not only can you not send/receive messages, you won’t be able to see your old ones, and no one else on your network will be able to either. You could argue that a single email provider has the same effect, but you’d be wrong. If Gmail goes down, I can still send emails to Gmail recipients and I can still see past messages from Gmail users.
Obviously you will be able to see all your WhatsApp messages when WhatsApp goes down. The same is true for Facebook Messenger and many other applications, because everything is saved locally. It's even possible to send WhatsApp messages while being offline which will then be delivered later on.
I wonder how long this has been the case. My experience in the past is that these applications are not usable without a stable internet connection. That said, email clients have a concept of an outbox where messages that were sent are placed until an internet connecton is established. At that point, those messages are actually sent to their recipients.
In the case of whatsapp, this has been true since its inception. Not sure about Messenger.
This is also possible with WhatsApp. Messages can be sent while not being online and will be delivered as soon as you go online.
IM is twelve things. And they're a different 12 things at different times. And you need to have clients for all of them installed and check all 12 of those clients regularly for messages.
Email, on the other hand, really is a Thing. I can check my mail and be done.
Fix that for IM and I'm there. Or rather, fix that again for IM and convince all the major players not to drop support for the common protocol again and you'll get me back.
You are given a unique email address that is linked to your account and defaults to your default notebook.
The formatting of the email subject lets you choose any notebook as the destination for your email. You can also create a new notebook by simply adding a new notebook name after the "@" symbol.
You can add in hashtags to the email subject, after @notebook. These tags are included in the note and immediately searchable.
Simply add #planning or whatever existing tag you find useful. You can also create a brand new tag straight from email.
Using “!” then the full date and you can activate reminders.
Does anyone have any other apps or workflows that use this type of content-addressing?
Is that an accurate description for what this is? a content addressable macro?
I'd love it if Roam had a similar feature for emailing content into a specific block.
I found this short blog post that outlines this email feature if anyone is interested in checking it out :
Email is hardly a thing in India for general use. One of my interns hates email so much that he built a bot which IMs him the contents of his email to Telegram.
(Aside: if they are okay getting a push notification per email, I suggest that they are Doing It Wrong. Email serves a different purpose entirely.)
There is simply no alternative for information exchange which is so ubiquitous, not locking you to specific vendor who loves to do data farming on you. Extremely reliable and flexible.
For years there have been different projects claiming to be "email kiilers", however email is still there and most of those projects have been long forgotten.
And meanwhile people are flocking to walled garden proprietary systems like Slack etc and saying how great they are. But half of it is to escape the monstrous mutilations that have been applied to email.
Email might be like the venerable cockroach that will survive nuclear war, but it's not a healthy cockroach.
Disclaimer: it's one of my side projects.
If that's how these services get abused, I'm glad now I didn't waste any time on my version :(
http://www.faqs.org/faqs/internet-services/access-via-email/
https://archive.org/details/internetbyemail00shir
https://web.archive.org/web/20001109163400/http://www.expita...
Having said that, for extremely casual messages where I'm not worried about metadata (talking to my parents, a relationship that is already apparent), I would not mind chatting over something like DeltaChat (which is on-and-off working on trying to do XMPP Conversations-style multiple account sign on in one single app) over the alternative of a group text or FB Messenger message. Metadata exists either way, might as well be on an email system I will retain long-term-access to it. The likes of Signal force you to either manually screenshot messages or copy/paste them message by message, there is no bulk unencrypted backup for mundane things like serendipitous conversations about dinner plans for funny family stories. But since DeltaChat is still somewhat locked in to a single account (preventing me from using say work and personal), I'm doing the no-change-choice and continuing to tolerate Signal.
---
10 years ago, I briefly worked for an for a small business that built wordpress plugins. They had an internal message board for communication and, unknown to me, they also used email. It took me six weeks to find out that I had missed hundreds of internal emails, many of which were directed at me. This was due in part to lack of on boarding and mismanagement by my boss (who was also managed the email system).
Now you may ask, why weren't you reading your email, did you not check it? You see, I checked my email religiously, couple of times an hour. But here is what happened.
This company used gmail for domains. And one thing that gmail does is it hides the spam label (or doesn't put a number next to spam). I had assumed, that since I had a brand new email address and that label was either missing or didn't have a counter next to it. I wasn't getting any spam. I was getting some internal email, so I didn't think much of it.
What I didn't know at the time was the internal email addresses were on the same domain as the marketing emails. They did a lot of unsolicited marketing, as such gmail automatically marked their domain as spam. Nearly every single email from the company was going into my spam folder.
Worse nobody said said anything about me missing these emails (including those from the owner/CEO and the CFO). Maybe they said something to my boss, but as he wasn't happy I had been assigned to his group he probably "forgot" to mention it to me. Anyway, I am sure missing several hundred emails was one of the reasons I wasn't retained passed my probationary period.
The big takeaways:
1. Don't do marketing from the same domain as internal email
2. Use a different domain for internal email
3. Always check the spam folder.
4. If you consistently don't hear from someone through email, ask them if they are receiving your email.
0. Don’t use Gmail.
Use a real email client.
How the protocol is used is up to you and the Matrix client (which atm is mostly chat, but I am sure one could give you a more email-like client).
*ignoring the ubiquitous presence of email, which is kind of the main selling point - Matrix is still in the tens of millions
As soon as you have few hundred channels or groups in non business oriented messengers like whatsapp, missing critical/important messages cannot be avoided. Skipping certain lists/groups, training your spam filter etc is at least available when you use email.
https://sourcehut.org/blog/2020-10-29-how-mailing-lists-prev...
Choosing what tool to communicate is a social decision, not a personal one. You can’t prove the tool X is more effective way to communicate by just using it yourself.
Email give you a FREEDOM to use anything you want with it because it was developed at times when data farming wasn't the main goal for big tech.
That's why in most cases we just ask for email address.
I'm reminded of this law:
Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can. - jwz's Law of Software Envelopment
How true it is even years later
My family has a group whatsapp chat. It's mostly for sending pics of my nieces and nephews and random conversations. Email would be terrible for that.
Ditto, the literally decade old skype chat I've with friends.
You can cook a meal with a campfire. If you put enough effort into it, you might even get a better result than cooking in a kitchen. But I am not going to light a campfire every night.
I am not going to convince my elderly mother to use a new email client. She literally does not even know what an email client is.
I do appreciate a Slack channel in the right conditions.
I am using emails as a reminder tool for a long time and it’s very efficient as the first thing I do in the morning is to check my inbox. I have even built an app to email myself in one tap or with Siri : https://boomerang-app.io
Email is by far the most broken software experience of my life. I've been thinking that for a while.
Now by broken, I don't mean the software doesn't work as intended. I mean that the software can't let me manage things the way I want.
The alternatives (eg MS Teams) by very much not perfect, but at least get me closer than I can with an email client.
Here are some specific things I find suck:
1. There isn't any that indicates why I'm receiving this email. Sometimes that's not obvious. Could it be I'm BCCed? Or maybe I'm on a mailing list, that's on a mailing list, that's on a mailing list? Or maybe it's both!
1a. If I receive an email due to being BCCed, my email filters won't work at all. 1b. In the case of a mailing list containing a mailing list, I have to manually create separate rules for both the parent and child lists and keep them in sync.
2. Email filters scale poorly. Hence why I end up needing to refactor them twice a year. This analogy is a bit of a stretch but: email filters are like programming where everything must be in a giant switch statement, but you are also allowed if statements and goto for extra control flow. It's not a perfect analogy, it breaks as you look more closely at the details, but I think both result in similar problems cropping up.
3. You are stuck choosing between highly limited server rules that affect all clients, or client only rules that only change things for the current client. I want to be able to look at my email from my desktop client, my phone, or a web browser and see the same thing in all 3 places. So I am stuck with the crippled server rules.
4. Smart folders come close to being able to replace the majority of my email rules, but not quite. The implementations I've played with are all missing something. I do think they'd be an improvement in the cases they are applicable.
5. Emails don't contain any hints at what kind of email they are. I believe they could, via headers, but they don't. An email is an email is an email. Well, every client I've used has special handling for meeting invites. I think this should be expanded. I find in practical use there are a few "types" or "kinds" of emails. Things like a broadcast vs a question vs a meeting invite vs a request for volunteers vs etc. Having a bunch of different types of messages baked in with different defaults for each, would likely remove half the email rules I have.
6. Marked as read and notifications are too simple. But here I at least understand that addressing the issue gets complex very quickly[0]. Maybe being able to snooze an email would help me here, but I've never used a client with snooze. Do these clients with snooze generally let you see the queue of snoozed items and process them early if you'd like to?
7. I can't block people. Creating a rule that auto-deletes emails is not quite the same as blocking.
Besides these technical ones, there are a few cultural ones as well.
1. Email has a culture of BCCing people "to be polite". As mentioned in 1a above, my rules don't work on these emails, so they end up being less polite in practice.
2. Email has a culture of including everyone who might be relevant just in case. Mostly this just drives the signal to noise ratio down. It is end of business hours for me now, and I've received 175 emails so far today. I maybe needed to read 15 of those.
3. Since email rules exist, people will default to blaming the receiver for not having a rule. If I spam @everyone or @here in MS Teams or Slack people blame me for spamming. In email land, I find people will first get mad at the receivers for not liking the spam I am sending them. Bizarre!
4. A portion of the email world takes a hardline stance on email by asynchronous communication. Sometimes you need a synchronous conversation. Sometimes you have something that is urgent. Yes, I'm aware flow exists and can be quite brittle for some people. It is sometimes worth breaking it.
That was quite cathartic to write. Email has been the least pleasant piece of my software life for years now. With work, I just have to deal with it as best as I can (you'll notice most complaints above are work centric). But outside of work I definitely try to minimize my usage.
[0] - Slack's notification flowchart. As complex as it seems, I don't consider this over-engineered. https://d34u8crftukxnk.cloudfront.net/slackpress/prod/sites/...
a. It is used as the basis for setting up a lot of accounts, but there is no clear way to establish identity with an email account.
b. SMTP is very dated, and the large amounts of metadata (if not the entire body of every mail as well) that goes through it is doomed to be in plaintext forever
c. Encryption is far from standard, PGP is very clunky and has problems of its own, and just doesn't have adoption. It works, somewhat, but it's not really good enough.