Hacker News Reader

Comment by joedev | Hacker News Reader

"Email is a distributed, asynchronous messaging protocol." What a complete disconnect from the users of email.

To 99.99% of people who use email, Paul is correct: "Email is not a messaging protocol. It's a todo list. Or rather, my inbox is a todo list, and email is the way things get onto it." When people say "email", they almost always mean their email client.

Failure to account for the common usage of the word and demand that people use the word email only to mean the protocol is short sighted, results only in the angst found in this article, and solves nothing. Life is too short to be so angst-filled over the use of one word.

View on HN

"To 99.99% of people who use email, Paul is correct: "Email is not a messaging protocol. It's a todo list. Or rather, my inbox is a todo list, and email is the way things get onto it."

I don't agree with this, in fact I feel this projecting the email power user's use of email onto everyone. At the end of the day, I think most people just want to email each other a message or a small file or pics of their kids or the latest dumb chain email. I do use my email as a todo list personally I write those elswhere, I do send myself links through email but I've configure Gmail to recognize that and put them in my bookmark label.

I also agree with the post, email does what it's meant to do well and you can build clients to do all the features you are asking for.

"you can build clients to do all the features you are asking for". I agree and that is exactly what people mean when they say email can be smarter - they mean email _clients_ can be smarter.

Looking at the ten most recent messages in my inbox, I have a political call to action, two invitations to apply for jobs, two newsletters from companies about their services, two informational newsletters, an invitation to a meetup, an account statement and a request from a friend to host a website on my server.

Half of these are not to-do items in a sense other than "please read this text". They don't even want a reply.

* The political call to action is an annoyance; it wants me to sign a petition against CISPA. I plan to write my congress people directly instead. I don't know how I got subscribed to these, but writing this comment reminded me to unsubscribe.

* I don't want to read any of the four newsletters. I might want to read them some day, and ideally, they'd be filtered in to a "newsletters" folder and not show up as "new mail" when they come in.

* The account statement is something I want to have but not act on. It shouldn't trigger a "new mail" alert either.

* I have no desire to apply for the jobs. I'm kind of curious as to where these people got my email address, as they appear to be actual employers and not recruiters.

* I might go to the meetup.

* I wrote a reply to my friend, agreeing to host her website and telling her what she needs to do to make that happen.

How do you propose to improve my experience?

Filters that can automatically file an email from a particular sender in a folder and mark it as "read" (so it doesn't give you a new mail notification) are something that's already been implemented. For example, both Mozilla Thunderbird and Microsoft Outlook support it.

I know I can manually set up filters. I haven't though, and I suspect I'm not in the minority.

What makes you so sure that 99.99% of people using email think it's a todo list and why do think they mean their email client?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com