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