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Comment by Spivak | Hacker News Reader

You replace it with literally any chat application made in the last 30 years. Hell even Microsoft Lync didn't have this problem.

You don't even have to replace the email system behind the curtain, just make it work like group chats. People seem to get "start a group chat" vs "send a message to each person individually."

Why we even still bother with the letters and mailboxes metaphor is beyond me. It implies a level of ceremony that just isn't needed anymore. Just send the file, what does "attaching" mean in the digital age?

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I was on a team looking at real life communication behaviors in 2000 or so, when email was pretty new to “normal” folks. We learned it was very common for people on their home computers communicating with family to just reply-all to the most recent message to the family. This meant the subject line was somewhere between useless and actively confusing, so they ignored it.

What they really wanted (without knowing how to ask for it) was a multi-party chat application, but one with attachments and universal addressing — which in 2025 we still don’t have, thanks to rent-seeking. Fortunately, email was defined before anyone realized how much money you could make by maintaining a walled garden.

> People seem to get "start a group chat" vs "send a message to each person individually."

The WhatsApp groups for my kids school classes, bands and sports teams beg to differ.

Communities seems like a legitimately useful feature to manage this. Absolutely nobody uses it because that would require an iota more forethought than the bare minimum.

The difference with email here is that if these were email groups I have access to sophisticated tools to manage that noise on /my end/. With WhatsApp I’m beholden to the tools that Meta deign to provide, then to the subset of those that the group chat convener bothers to enable. Thus, all I actually have in practice is “mute this chat”.

> You replace it with literally any chat application made in the last 30 years.

And that's how you lose me. Async communication is best for 99% of the time. Sending me an email invite to a meeting covers the 1% where synchronous is better. I'm not using an instant-interruption (chat) service, and I don't get meeting invites any other way than email.

Upon further reflection, a world without email would be nice and quiet, for me at least. Maybe that's not so bad.

>replace it with literally any chat application made in the last 30 years. Hell even Microsoft Lync didn't have this problem.

Ah yes, let me just ask 1000 people to install microsoft lync before they can see my message

>"Why we even still bother with the letters and mailboxes metaphor is beyond me"

Well for one it enables us to apply a whole lot of law and case law without reinventing the wheel.

Mail contents enjoy a lot of privacy privileges, while headers do not as they are used for routing purposes.

>Just send the file, what does "attaching"

Ah yes just send the file, how didn't we think of this sooner, you must publish your findings with the engineering community, pronto open an rfc

No need to be snarky, this is a UI issue. In any chat application you open the chat with your desired recipient(s) and send the file. And it works, you don't have to write a message and then attach the file to it. You also don't have to think about the difference between attaching an image and having an image in the message. It's unnecessary ceremony on the part of the user, you would never invent it again.

But you can send an empty message and attach a file. Not sure what the issue is.

On a more general note, email is a standardized protocol and originates from the network, while standards do sometimes define interface requirements, it's for sure sparse.

Also most software tends to implement standards comprehensively and unimaginatively, so I agree that email UI is an issue.

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