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Comment by buttocks | Hacker News Reader

Feedback: Email is just fine. It is mature and should just be left alone. It is not something that should be reinvented.

The next thing should not be email at all. It should be something fundamentally different, not another iteration of email.

Seeing some downvote criticism on this comment, let me clarify.

I understand the value in working on an established set of federated protocols. Everyone has an email address and this is a very convenient way to start. But it was invented decades ago and has had many kludges bolted on to it to deal with problems or to very slightly improve the user experience. Who's instead going to be more bold and go for a greenfield project to do asynchronous personal communications?

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I wonder if this is true or not, personally I don't use email enough to invest in a product like this ATM but have been kicking the idea of starting a home based business up for a while now and think something like this would fit quite well.

Saying Email is just fine or whatever is along the lines of the re-inventing the wheel argument yet every once in a while someone does exactly that and the world is a better place for it!

*Edit*

The one thing that makes me a bit nervous is signing up with my google account, I wish there was more information on the security behind doing this, in other words am I handing the keys to the kingdom over to a 3rd party by doing this? Is my google account subject to any vulnerabilities this app may or may not have? These questions make me reluctant to "Sign Up" especially for a trial.

I don't get the down-votes on this comment either. (Other then maybe HN is not really the place where folks like to "leave things alone...".)

Email is a fact of life and it is not going anywhere, but in general I would prefer communicating over the Matrix protocol. There is plenty of innovation and development still needed in the messaging space, but continuing to view email as the core technology to build on top of is unnecessarily limiting. (Note that this is not a criticism of the Shortwave team as we all need great email clients! I am just concurring that there are protocols that are fundamentally better than email...)

Here are a few fundamentally different async protocols in development which could challenge SMTP:

DIME - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Mail_Alliance

Math Mesh - https://mathmesh.com

TMTP - https://mnmnotmail.org (my work)

Email is a couple of related but separable things.

One of those things is transport and all that it entails (delivery, storage, addressing, etc.) Another is a particular kind of messaging.

One can use the transport for other kinds of messaging.

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