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Comment by paxys | Hacker News Reader

I'm on the exact opposite end of the spectrum. I haven't used email outside of work for many years now, and don't miss it one bit. And even at work most communication now happens on Slack. The digital world has evolved since 1997, and email simply hasn't kept up.

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?

View on HN

I'll give you an up-vote because I think a variety of different viewpoints is important, but I'm very much in the e-mail camp. My biggest reason is simply: it's the only ubiquitous, decentralized, open protocol that I can think of. I can run my own server if I want, an I can interact with anybody with an e-mail address. Sure, there was XMPP for IM, but that doesn't have wide adoption; same with other protocols.

If anything, I like email now because these days people in my circles only use it for informational purposes, which means no annoying chain messages, empty inspirational videos, Facebook conspiracies and their ilk.

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.

I agree. My work has both an unofficial slack and official email. Email is for the serious, no nonsense posts. Slack can have a mix, but with the understanding that it is more informal. We do not pay for slack, so this informality is enforced by the message/content being unavailable as we go on.

The last paragraph can be done with a good IM, such as Telegram, as it has not crippled itself to virtue signal E2E, and has functional cloud sync and search. I even forward my emails to it as it’s easier to organize them there.

> it has not crippled itself to virtue signal E2E

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.

If you're trying to hide your communications from state-level actors, there are better options than a consumer messaging platform

There might be if everyone in the conversation is sophisticated enough to use them. If you're trying to set up communication with a large number of people who have consumer-level technical knowledge in a country that had a coup two days ago and is now suffering a crackdown at the hands of the new military dictatorship, Signal might be just the ticket.

At this point, I use telegram for essentially everything, not just email either. I found this HN thread through the Hacker News telegram feed[0]. I don't check reddit, or have other RSS feeds anymore, I just subscribe to the equivalent telegram channels. I even use the "to me" telegram channel for searchable notes

[0] https://t.me/hacker_news_feed

Creating these channels is pretty easy, BTW. Just glue rsstail and a Telegram library such as Telethon together. I have a channel where HN posts with a certain score threshold are posted, for example.

How do you forward email to Telegram?

You can use a system like https://hanami.run. It support forward to Telegram.

FULL DISCLOSURE: I'm the founder

Atleast for gmail , google has their own telegram bot (has the blue tick beside it) , just type “gmail bot” in your telegram search bar , it will have a bot with a blue tick beside it

I also use this, but it's not gotten any updates since it was introduced. I would like to rewrite a bot from scratch, but the Gmail bot's initial offering is still good enough that I don't have the motivation.

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.

Organisation, I tend to disagree conversation/threading is fundamentally broken with email. I really liked nntp for that stuff but alas...

conspiracy theories**

Your points are even more valid when you start to move to different counties. You quickly realise that people in other countries often don’t use the apps you are using, in fact you most likely won’t have heard of the apps they are using.

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.

> 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.

In the countries I’ve been, people use all sorts of apps and each person is very shocked when you don’t have “the app” that everyone is using. And of course the fashions change over time, so app X is popular for a few years, then it’s app Y. It’s impossible to keep up with all these trends.

Mostly people are able to email, even if it’s a bit unusual, and perhaps, like you say, mostly a work thing.

When you move to a new country that has a dominant messaging app, you can't avoid installing it without making your life a lot more difficult. And moving already makes your life difficult enough.

That's a heck of a claim.

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 can't speak to your life, but not having Whatsapp would result in my being left out of some conversations and activities I want to be a part of. Email or SMS could theoretically substitute with reduced functionality in most situations; Matrix could substitute with no loss of functionality. Most of the time the other people in the conversations prioritize their activity/task/goal/socializing over technical or ideological concerns about their communication tools, so getting them to change tools would be an uphill battle.

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.

It's not a heck of a claim at all, it's a pretty reasonable one.

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.

For example, in Spain, people will not communicate in written form with you outside Whatsapp. You can try sending an SMS, they won't answer to not risk being charged.

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.

I'm not disagreeing with this, especially the social aspects, although I would point out:

> 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.

Yes, it is possible, but being seen by your peers and acquaintances as a pain in the ass is going to make your life more difficult.

The real question though is how you determine the “dominant app”, that’s really not that obvious, especially when you don’t speak the local language. Long term you might be right, installing an app would be beneficial, but in the short term it’s a lot safer to just use email.

I think in most cases it's fairly obvious. I moved to a country that mainly use Whatsapp, and you can't miss it. People will tell you that they "Whatsapp" you, they ask for your "Whatsapp", your bank advertises customer support on Whatsapp, your local barber has the Whatsapp logo on his door, your colleagues want to add you to their Whatsapp group, your landlord sends the bills on Whatsapp, ads in the metro have the Whatsapp logo…

That sounds awesome. In many of the places I’ve been I couldn’t read any of the signage, it’s often not even obvious where the word boundaries are, it just looks like squiggles to me. And the apps people tell you by word of mouth, I often had never heard of. I just decided to stick with email. Boring, perhaps old fashioned, but safe.

Old-school snail mail and voice telephony are just as open, distributed, and ubiquitous. The delivery channel providers are centralized, but that is just as true of email. Hosting your own server means nothing without an ISP.

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.

I really want a way to take an old eve online thing of charging people who aren't a contact for the ability to ensure delivery.

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

For a brief moment, there was a service (Earn.com/21.co) that did this. It was a company that had previously made a SoC mining rig for crypto and the pivoted to this thing where people would pay you to open their messages. Eventually it was overrun by spam messages from scammy crypto ICOs and there were conditions on payouts where you had to sign up for an external email list or register for an airdrop. I think they were bought and shut down by Coinbase.

You really can't run your on email server nowadays though, you need to have been running one for several decades otherwise the email common email providers(gmail, outlook) will automatically just assume its spam. Also due to the way extensions added to the email protocol configuring and learning how to properly configure it so it gets accepted will be a dayjob.

This isn’t universally true, although your broader point (it could change at any time!) is a risk.

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.

This is my experience too: there are a couple providers that are more difficult (Verizon, iirc), but I’ve never found a personal email server much of a hassle to maintain.

I run my own email server, and have for many years. More recently, Verizon/Aol/Yahoo have been a pain in the butt for our larger email lists, even though we run a very clean operation. Still, our deliverability is, on the whole, better than through the much more expensive providers, such as Mailchimp.

I second that. Around 10 years ago it did consumed some time to set up everything, but since then I didn't touch it at all.

Much better and more flexible than any proprietary mail system.

I've recently given up on running my own email server and changed to postmark. The deliverability has gone up, but most importantly I spend less time managing it.

Postmark would cost us around $10k a year. I spend maybe 10 to 20 hours in a year dealing with the server and deliverability issues. It's not clear to me that Postmark could improve our deliverability much either, as it is already pretty good. How much did it improve for you?

Mailinabox is a great package that makes the best practices very easy. I always recommend it or similar packages.

This looks awesome, thanks.

If you want clean IPs for self-hosting a mail server, you can use a service we created called Hoppy Network:

https://hoppy.network

Our IP addresses are not on any blacklists, and we don't block SMTP or mail ports.

for now rubs hands

I also just found out about a service called Tailscale (maybe 30 mins ago). It's not a field I have investigated but both your services and theirs sounded vaguely useful for some problems I'm having. Are they somewhat similar? It sounds like I could solve the same problems in perhaps two different ways.

I think they are pretty different, just both using the same underlying protocol.

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.

that's very interesting, thanks!

This is a recurrent FUD dropping. I’ve run my own for about 15 years and it works. Occasional mails get sent to spam by Gmail, but that can happen if you use a big provider, too. Take an hour to set up DKIM, etc., and you should be OK.

> Occasional mails get sent to spam by Gmail, but that can happen if you use a big provider, too.

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 just switched my long running SMTP to a new IP. I've got SPF, DKIM and DMARC all dialed in. I'm not getting tagged as spam. Even when I add new domains to this host for sending - still gets through to G, Y and MS based services.

As SPF, DKIM and DMARC have become more widely implemented, is IP reputation less of a factor than it used to be in spam detection algorithms? This is just my speculation, but it seems plausible.

Why would it be less of a factor? These things don't prevent spam. I can create a proper mail server with all these and send billion messages from it wherever I like. These technologies prevent various kinds of forgeries.

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.

SPF will pass if there is no SPF record in the domain. Which most probably is the case for most.

Look for DKIM. Either it's signed and pass. Or spam if DKIM is missing. You can filter a lot more this way.

> These technologies prevent various kinds of forgeries.

Preventing forgeries is what allows the trust to be based on the domain/address rather than the IP.

I don't know. But a) I'm low volume and no list services and b) I checked my IPs against the BL before setting up the VMs. I still believe the terror-tales of trying to get an IP off them. My own spam filters still use them.

SPF, DKIM and DMARC are more about anti spoofing than spam prevention.

Not true. With some effort, it's possible to set up a pre-made email server script like Mail-in-a-Box or Mailcow and make sure its reputation is clean enough to send and receive email from the big providers like Outlook, Gmail and Yahoo.

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.

The only “common” email provider that has given me problems is Zoho. They’re annoying and do not respond on their mailer daemon email or whatever. I tell people we can’t correspond if they use Zoho and no one has had a problem with that yet.

I want to throw my hat in here because there are plenty of the "works for me" crowd.

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.

did you send to gmail/hotmail/icloud?

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.

I've not tried icloud, but for personal email addresses that I have tried (gmail, outlook, hotmail, protonmail) I've not had many problems landing in inboxes. For corporate mailservers I almost always have trouble even getting beyond the mail filtering solution. Microsoft EOP (which seems to be the most ubiquitous) will basically blackhole any mail I send without telling me.

You still can. The main and most important thing is to have a clean IP. So no major cloud provider who reuse IPs.

It's fine to want all your communication on an open protocol, but email is just plain clunky and not good at all for the types of online communication people have grown accustomed to. It literally is just an electronic equivalent of sending a letter, and inherits most of the limitations that implies.

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 literally is just an electronic equivalent of sending a letter, and inherits most of the limitations that implies

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!

Email has very real limitations, imposed both by the protocol itself and by lack of consensus among all the major and minor clients.

Can you give some examples? I've never seen any mentioned.

End-to-end encryption, large attachments, managing group messages (aka "reply all" problem), changing message subject, quoted messages when replying, HTML/CSS formatting, sorting/labeling/folders, tracking protections, sending messages over websocket, heck even basic message threading. None of this works consistently across different clients.

But those are problems with /the client/. Not the protocol.

They are all problems with the protocol, considering that the protocol doesn't define how to do any of this.

The protocol doesn't need to define any of those things. Just like HTTP doesn't define what goes on inside the viewport of the browser.

That is the problem. The protocol doesn't dictate how prior messages in a thread should be included or referenced. So any given thread is a hodgepodge of different solutions, making for an ugly, unreadable mess. Some clients try to clean this up, but it's basically an impossible task when you have no way of knowing what other clients will do.

Then should we not amend the protocol to define these things? Why reinvent the wheel, when we could improve it?

Yes we should, but people have been trying for 20 years and it hasn't happened yet. The wheel has been successfully reinvented already.

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.

> Then should we not amend the protocol to define these things?

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.

I don’t understand how your client can solve for someone else sending you top-quoted replies, or word-html-engine compatible HTML designed to work in outlook. Or eighty other people hitting reply all on the email chain you’re on. The clients other people use can behave completely differently, because the protocol leaves so many decisions up to clients.

You're adding things not in the OP list I was responding to so I didn't claim that. But let's try:

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.

Client support for the features you’re talking about has everything to do with the protocol. How are you threading if not based on SMTP headers? What SMTP headers are meaningful for threading? What does SMTP have to say on the subject? Nothing - because it only talks about MTA behavior not clients.

You have some magical email client that turns "reply all" firehoses into clean Slack/Discord-style message threads?

Slack threads are the worst possible UI ever, so that's not something to aspire to.

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.

What client is that?

Isn't the "reply all" problem a user issue? If people used BCC instead of a bunch of To's, we'd never hear about it. Heck, I would think email clients would prompt if you tried to sent more than a dozen people without BCC.

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.

Email has:

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

...

> no shared concept of a group/channel/...

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.

> mailing lists

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.

Sending private information is the first thing I think of--from a bunch of aspects. Secure in transit has had a bunch of different, awkward implementations. My biggest concern is sending tax documents and it sitting in someone's archive folder (or sent folder) for years until their account is compromised.

So I often have organizations that send email pointing to their proprietary webmail. The alternative is sneakernet, hard copies, or even faxing.

Unless you physically hand your taxes in, isn't any solution technically vulnerable to being compromised?

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)

> Unless you physically hand your taxes in, isn't any solution technically vulnerable to being compromised?

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.

> If any of us are ever going to convince friends and family to leave proprietary platforms

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!

> 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.

So when Facebook slurps up your email address by virtue of your friends using WhatsApp, that doesn't affect you?

Not really, because I don't use Facebook. I'm avoiding the bulk of the harm from Facebook (e.g. the dopamine spikes, wasted time I'll never get back, feed addiction, emotional manipulation/experiments, etc.) by simply not using it. Until I start getting ads from them even off of Facebook properties, I don't really care what they think they know about me.

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.

Both Google and MS created excellent IM systems based on email.

It can be done. It isn’t because there is no billion dollar exit possible on an email based system.

What IM systems are you referring to..?

Pretty sure he's talking about the original chat embedded in the Gmail interface. The earliest records I can find in my logs are from February 2006. For at least 7 years I used it, and for many years my usage was quite extensive. Either due to changed preferences when I got older or iMessage or other things, it looks like I generally stopped chatting in there around May 2013. From my perspective, Google was sitting on a gold mine because so many people I knew in the USA and across the ocean were using it and it worked very well until they started fiddling with the product in ways that made it more clunky.

Matrix.org is exactly what you are describing

> I can interact with anybody with an e-mail address

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.

There’s nothing preventing you from automatically filtering those emails. All of my GitHub / CI emails go straight to a subfolder. All spam gets added to filters, etc.

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.

You're coming from a position that email is good and it's worth configuring it to work well. But I don't particularly like email. I have zero interest in setting up aliases or filters when the problem simply doesn't exist when I use a better tool.

This doesn't make much sense to me. We're talking about functionality (being contacted by companies or automated processes) that doesn't exist at all in Messenger. You can't say it's the better tool in this case when it makes no attempt to compete with that feature.

> You can't say it's the better tool in this case when it makes no attempt to compete with that feature

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.

> Something isn't better just because it has more features

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.

So your messenger app read your mind?

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.

It didn't read my mind, it's just that my instant messaging is 0% automated messages and 100% people I know. My email is 98% automated messages from services I signed up for using my email, and 2% my mom.

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

So you're saying you voluntarily gave out your primary email address and then don't like that they are emailing you? Why give it out in the first place then? It's free to setup a dummy email address for these purposes.

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...

I could set up multiple accounts. But then I have to check multiple accounts. Either way, I have to go out of my way to make email as pleasant to use as instant messaging already is.

This is definitely a case of "that's just how you use it", as my phone number is relatively accessible and many services have asked for it, so I get plenty of spam straight to my phone via almost every messaging means that can be tied directly to my phone. That means things like whatsapp in addition to plain old SMS.

That’s because email providers have it backwards.

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.

> So your messenger app read your mind?

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 don't feel that's a medium / tool issue, I've found it's a usage pattern issue.

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 :)

> 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.

> > I can interact with anybody with an e-mail address

> 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.

> 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.

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.

You can very, very easily filter email in the same way to get the same result.

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.

Not as easily as just using a tool that doesn't need any configuration to avoid spam. And it's disingenuous to say that email spam can just be filtered out to get an experience that is as spam-free as Messenger.

XMPP is having a resurgence with OMEMO being added to clients and some new clients (Dino) being made. However, I'm not sure if it will ever be the popular thing even among the free software options.

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.

> However, I'm not sure if it will ever be the popular thing even among the free software options.

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 run my own XMPP server, have done for years (now just out of the fact it'll take more work to turn it off than to keep it going.)

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.

Check out Google Trends with XMPP

Can that predict the future? ;)

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/

No, it can't, but it is a good indicator.

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.

Those are great aspects of email, and I certainly wouldn't want it to go away. But that doesn't mean it's the most effective or efficient tool for all use cases. Like the GP, our team switched to Slack some years back, and our email volume dropped to near zero, while quality of communication went way up.

I really think all email needs is a fresh coat of paint. I believe the ruby on rails team worked on something like this, but I forget the name of the service

You’re probably thinking about Hey https://www.hey.com. The issue I see with it is that it goes beyond a refreshed interface and breaks IMAP compatibility.

Yes, that's what I was thinking of. What does it do wrong? I was actually thinking of signing up, but it is too expensive.

I considered it two, here are the things I think it gets wrong:

  * Can't use your own domain
  * Have to use their client
  * Can't add your old email

The last one is a deal breaker. I have 10+ years of email that I still want to be able to search.

As of a few weeks ago, you can use custom domains with Hey.

That makes sense in principle, but in practice I think this is a case where the technology is eventually going to have to meet the real world needs and not the other way around; email just doesn't match typical patterns of personal communication in my experience.

Signal is an open protocol and supports E2E encrypted text, voice and video.

> Signal is an open protocol and supports E2E encrypted text, voice and video.

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.

There were 2 important adjectives before open.

What about secure and encrypted, which I feel are even more important adjectives?

I think they're important too. But it isn't responsive to what they said.

wasn't signal shutting down alternative clients or something?

Just the ones connecting to their servers.

The servers the vast majority of other users connect to.

>The digital world has evolved since 1997, and email simply hasn't kept up.

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

That is a good point. I like to say `s/foo/bar/` to correct myself rather than edit the message. This is also important if people are receiving e-mail notifications for new messages but not for message edits.

Honestly, invisible edits are a UI problem that people really ought to solve - highlight (or in some way indicate with a color change or such) that something has been edited (and specifically, what has changed vs what is unedited in the comment).

Or perhaps restrict editing, e.g. instead of being able to delete text, you can only strike through+slightly shrink+grey out text.

Not that I really like Facebook, but that's one thing they handled well with their comments. You can click on the edited link associated with a particular comment that was edited and see all versions of the comment.

So if someone edited their comment three times, you would be able to read all four versions of it.

I hope you relly rely lik typos siting there forever.

I'd take typos over that any day.

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.

Yup. Slack sucks for work.

- 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

That's the obvious stance to take though. The point is that IM has problems, IMO the largest of which is that all prevalent platforms are privately owned services rather than being a protocol like email is. Sure you may have a gmail address, but you can talk freely to any other email address. That's not the case for iMessage vs FB Messenger vs Slack vs Signal vs WhatsApp vs TikTok vs Telegram vs hundreds if not thousands of other independent platforms.

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.

>The digital world has evolved since 1997, and email simply hasn't kept up.

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.

Amen

Slack is fine for transient communication. That is, it's fine unless you might need to dig up a particular conversation a year after, or five years. Actually, finding stuff as old as one week can be problematic already.

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.

I can find Slack conversations from years ago just fine, also link a lot to Slack in our ticketing system which is very useful.

So for me Slack has become a second memory for technical and other details.

No useful threading in Slack, which is still one of its silliest issues. You must be using a paid version of Slack to see messages from a long time ago, as they have a limit on the no-cost version. This probably makes you dependent on your employer. When one switches between channels in Slack, oh boy is that think laggy! Sometimes I can wait for 5s, before the thing has switched, on a fairly modern CPU and up to date browser. In Thunderbird I can switch to saved searches and folders seemingly no matter how many e-mails I have in there in what seems to be perhaps 100 milliseconds. Lets face it: Slack is hopelessly bloated slow and laggy to no end. E-mail does not have these issues, if you use the right tools, as in not using anything like MS Office 265 Outlook to access e-mails, because that is broken in similar ways.

> This probably makes you dependent on your employer.

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?

What is not useful about threading in slack? My organization uses it to great success.

Sure, it could be improved, but so can anything.

Today was an old friend's birthday. We haven't really talked in years. Figured I'd send him a happy birthday note. You know what still works after 15 years? Email. Now, will he _see_ that email? Hope so.

Yeah, this person's position is totally baffling to me.

> 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.

It surely is nice to be able to chat with friends during working hours. However, it seems, that this is a big source of distraction, which is unwanted in an efficient working environment. Unless of course your friends are working on the same project or you are free to discuss work details with friends outside of the project or employer. Many people are not free to do so. Many people have come to realize, that they focus best, when not distracting themselves with friends and family business while at work.

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.

As far as distraction goes, you can just mute your notifications and be inactive for a while. Bring up a slack window from work, and keep up-to-date with work events while tabling discussions with your friends for the time being — move from sync to async.

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.

I'm with you, I absolutely cannot stand using email unless I absolutely have to, which is mostly just at work.

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

I remember using email in an IM-like fashion, having a real-time back and forth conversation. The only difference is that most email clients quote the entire conversation on every reply.

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).

The problem is that the moment you try and add even the most basic value-add features, other email clients can't understand you anymore. And this applies to fundamental things like identity verification, encryption and group chats.

Technically I don't see an issue with doing these things in a portable, standard way. Email signature and encryption (s/mime) has existed for a long time and most mainstream clients know how to handle it. The nut that has still not been cracked very well AFAIK is how to create and share public keys in a seamless way.

For S/MIME you don’t need to share keys. Your private key gets signed by a CA that you both trust.

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.

Like DeltaChat.[1]

[1] https://delta.chat/en/

That's the basic idea behind "Chat over IMAP", which for various reasons hasn't seen as much effort put into it as many of us would like (not that I can talk, I haven't done anything).

HN discussion from when it was launched is here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19216077

I agree. Email is fast enough to have a real-time conversation, I do it often. Maybe not as instant as WhatsApp, etc, but with other advantages.

Right now I need to maintain (and routinely check) a physical mailing address, a telephone number, and an email address just in order to set up and use various day-to-day services provided by government and businesses. When will it end?

Outside of work, I use whatever channel people interact with me on. That's largely SMS, various chat apps, and some e-mail, and a fair amount of voice.

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.

I think the key point here is "outside of work".

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.

Slack will not be around in 10/20 years. Email will be. I think the only way email hasn't "evolved" is it doesn't have any good built in encryption.

But every single business out there uses email to interact with me as a consumer:

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.

All the "evolution" is is getting you to use bespoke rich clients for email-like store-and-forward systems (fb messenger, instagram dm, et c) that show you ads that you can't configure and can't replace.

If "email" simply means "gmail.com" to you then it's natural to assume that you'd think it hasn't evolved.

I'm pretty sure that's not what the author meant in the movie and helmet examples.

> 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.

The problem is just a presentation one.

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?”

NASA didn’t spend a single dime developing the Fisher space pen. It was developed by the Fisher company at their own expense, in the hopes that it could be profitable. Yay, capitalism. Lead pencil tips frequently break during use. Carbon pencil lead is electrically conductive. You really do not want random pieces of electrically conductive debris floating around in your spacecraft.

I’m still waiting for my TSO’d pencil to arrive. http://www.rstengineering.com/rst/articles/tsodpencil.pdf

Yeah who cares though? I thought the story was apocryphal altogether.

I was using it for the concept not the specifics.

> Do you just hate having friends in general?

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.

At old job, I remember working with external orgs and my coworkers. Coworkers would pretty much talk over Slack. We would use email/zoom for communication with external orgs. At new job, we use Slack Connect and I think it replaces a lot o that external emailing.

As someone who has to interface as a client with companies that want us to use Slack Connect, I just hate it.

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.

Also it's moving from a more decentralized silo to a completely centralized one. Email continues to be a groundbreaking communication technology. I feel like one company being able to pull the plug on that might be really scary. I guess email is pretty centralized, but if you get banned by Gmail for whatever reason, you can always go run your own email and continue to work within the larger ecosystem.

There are some other interesting implications from centralizing it like that, too. For example, clients who communicate using Slack Connect are unlikely to be retaining their own independent records of the communication. This potentially puts them at a disadvantage in the event of a contract dispute. They may be unable to obtain a record of past communication without resorting to a legal discovery process, and you need to lawyer up and file a lawsuit before you can do that.

With email, on the other hand, retaining one's own copy of the communication is baked into how the mechanism works.

I don't know what there is to keep up. email realizes a basic concept of open, federated, async, text based communication. it has its flaws but it's as useful as it was.

Work loves to send those fake pen-test security emails.

I don’t open any work emails anymore. Got tired of the gotcha mentality.

> Do you just hate having friends in general?

Isn't that a social counter-argument ?

I think it's fair to respond that way to someone who said group chats are "distracting and of little value."

Ditto.

My email account is basically a searchable archive of confirmations and receipts.

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