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Comment by jimmar | Hacker News Reader

I strongly disagree that the problem with email is clients. We simply get too much information sent to us via email. I don't want to have to filter my inbox--I want to receive just as much information that I need.

For example, my company sends me an email everyday telling me about company-sponsored social events. Often, the emails contain information they've already sent at least 5 times. Email is the wrong way to communicate this information. They should have a shared calendar or web page that lists this information. No email client UI can resolve poor information sharing practices.

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The same problem exists with physical mail. I don't need advertisement flyers. I want a realtime spreadsheet with updated prices and discounts.

> The same problem exists with physical mail.

I get way less physical mail than email.

People have to pay money to send me physical mail. It's not a lot of money, but it 99% of email spammers would not be able to afford to physical spam me.

True, but I can automate throwing the email into the trash, I have to manually pickup the snail mail at least 3 times a week to keep the mailbox from overflowing. I have a sorting table right next to the trash can. Most days, it all goes into the trash.

Almost all clients have blacklists, instead of whitelists, which is the problem.

Email should be "block" by default. If you want to send me an email, your email address/account should first request to be allowed to email me, and once I approve your emails can come through. If I ever get sick of you, I should be able to block you with a keystroke.

You can implement this flow. It makes a huge difference:

http://blog.nawaz.org/posts/2018/Sep/solving-my-email-proble...

I don't want to have to configure blacklists and whitelists. My current workflow which seems to be inline with the rest of the world is if the message is junk, send it to my email. If its important, send it to me via Teams/Slack.

At least everything sent to me via IM apps comes from a real person.

Where it disappears into the figurative rear view mirror.

To each his/her own. I'm the opposite. Anything via IM is treated as fleeting, and if I don't get to it now it's forgotten. I'm not going to keep track of dozens of channels.

The benefit of email is its openness. I can organize it as I wish - I can't seem to do that with Teams (nor Slack, most likely). Can I copy a Slack message and put it into my personal channel? Can I tag it with a label, and then do a query to get all messages with a label? Can I make a TODO item in the TODO app of my choice and link to a message?

I do all this with email. It's even easy.

Also, Teams/Slack searching sucks. They're also resource hogs.

> Anything via IM is treated as fleeting, and if I don't get to it now it's forgotten.

Agree on this - I'll reply to emails I got weeks ago when I finally get around to dealing with them. I've never responded to a chat message more than a day old (unless I've been offline for an extended period).

So you sign up at my website for something. We send you an email. Your blocking system rejects it. I'm not going to send a suitably-formatted request to you.

I think you are sending exactly the kind of email the parent is trying to block — transactional email.

The parent signed up to receive whatever it is that I am sending. But it will not arrive (fully) unless I do something (or they remember to add a From: address that they do not yet know).

> I'm not going to send a suitably-formatted request to you.

That is the intended goal.

In reality, if you read the article, your email goes into quarantine and if I really do want to read messages from your site, I simply whitelist the address with a keystroke.

> if I really do want to read messages from your site

If you didn't want to read them, you wouldn't have signed up. Your quarantine will be full (even more than "Spam"), and you won't know (necessarily) what the from address looks like.

> If you didn't want to read them, you wouldn't have signed up.

There are many use cases beyond what you're stating. Often I need to sign up for a web site temporarily ("Sign up to get our free ebook!") ("You need to sign up to place an order") In those cases I simply ignore the emails.

If I sign up for a newsletter with the intention of reading it, I'll keep an eye out for it and whitelist it. It's not hard.

> Your quarantine will be full (even more than "Spam"), and you won't know (necessarily) what the from address looks like.

I've been using this system for 3-4 years now, and this so far has not been a problem. I still monitor the quarantine folder as I don't expect everyone to go through the hoops to get to me. It's just a much smaller burden than having it all show up in the inbox and I can check it at a different pace (e.g. once every few days).

And even if I somehow forget to whitelist your site, what's the worst that will happen? I won't get messages from your site. Of all my worries in this world, this just doesn't even register.

> I strongly disagree that the problem with email is clients. We simply get too much information sent to us via email. I don't want to have to filter my inbox--I want to receive just as much information that I need.

It sounds like you haven't tried an email client where filtering is ergonomic. I use mu / mu4e for filtering and reading emails. At my inbox, I press `s`, enter a search term, and instantly get matches. I can press `S` (capital s) to further refine the search with another term if the previous was too broad. Filtering is incredibly powerful and useful if it is presented in an accessible way in the client.

The fact that we all need such advanced filtering to make email usable at all should be the canary in the coal mine that we’ve lost our way.

Good email client UI may help facilitate a better information sharing practice

Sometimes I wonder why the email client doesn't look more like Facebook with groups (=mailing lists) and posts/threads and DMs etc

Maybe the problem is that culturally, email is treated like face-to-face talking. We often talk to each other just to be pleasant. It wouldn't be weird for someone to remind you about a meeting if they saw you, or to ask if you're going to the company picnic. Actually, it would be weirder if they just posted it on the calendar and said nothing else.

So, maybe email clients aren't the issue, people are the issue (like most problems).

> email is treated like face-to-face talking.

Really? I tell everyone who emails me that emails are postcards written in granite. Anyone might be able to see them, forever, from now on.

I also tell them that I check my emails once a day. If something is really urgent, stand in front of me.

Hmmm… someone should really make an email client with user-friendly filters to let you sinkhole that junk into a folder you never look at ;).

>someone should really make an email client with user-friendly filters to let you sinkhole that junk into a folder you never look at

If you read past it, he actually wrote "I don't want to have to filter my inbox".

I also agree with him. I never use email clients' software filtering "rules" or "smart folders" because that's extra digital housekeeping work I don't want to do.

Doesn't matter if the email client filtering UI is "user-friendly". I still don't want to mess with it.

Yeah my bad, brain autoparsed that as “filter” == “clean out” in context.

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