Why The Greatest Online Tool, Email, Still Needs Disruption | Hacker News Reader

Why The Greatest Online Tool, Email, Still Needs Disruption

blog.frontapp.com

24 pointsmathouc27 comments

Solid article. I do hope to see more people enter the client side of the Email world because personally, I think that is what is slacking. There needs to be better Email clients that are more divorce than JUST supporting Gmail or JUST being on your mobile device. I don't think that Email, in general, is broken. I would rather just see better clients out there to make it more usable. More usable by handling attachments better, or sorting, etc. I still have yet to find a good Email client that works well with various Email account types (Gmail, Exchange, etc.) on different device types (Desktop or Mobile). Airmail [1] is probably the closest, but even that has tons of flaws. My example, if you are using a fork (Email client) to eat cereal, you don't blame cereal (Email) for not working correctly.

[1] http://airmailapp.com/

Thanks & totally agree: E-mail is neither broken or bad and we need to construct better email clients. Airmail is really good for your individual addresses. Here at Front we try to create the first collaborative email client for companies.

> collaborative email client for companies

I read that and thought "what does that even mean? Yet-another-busted-calendar thing?"

Turns out it's actually multiplayer inboxes. Neat! Are you going to release an API so the diehard Emacs users et al can work with everyone else?

As if a sticky, following you around top bar wasn't enough, they also have a bottom bar? It's like reading from a driver's seat of a tank.

Where has this terrible trend originated?

Letterbox Browsing is the wave of the future!

I know funny comments are frowned upon, and comments about funny comments are even more frowned upon, but this made me laugh - perhaps because it is such a ridiculous but apt description. Bravo!

Can we stop using "disruption" as a stand-in for "improvement"?

Email's great. Your company just sucks.

I've seen it before. The boss doesn't want to defer responsibility. So they have everything go through their approval. Suddenly, you're CCing the boss on every thing you send, leaving behind a train of emails to cover your ass. Soon, other bosses demand the same treatment, and before you know it, everyone's inbox is cluttered with FWDs, and Reply-Alls, making sure nobody is left out of the loop.

Your company should have an email policy.

The one UI improvement I can see: make the reply all button hard to find, so morons don't accidentally click it.

Anyone who's trying to think of new ways to disrupt email should take a look at this: http://visualidiot.com/articles/mailappapp

Please can we retire the word "disruption"

We just need to disrupt the term disruption with a new word. The march of progress continues!

But, but, but improving something just sounds soooo boring.

Email is not just IMAP and SMTP. It's much much more (even thought technically speaking the following doesn't have anything to do with email).

Pretty much the only way to invite someone to a meeting at work is to send invite over email. To figure out the place for your meeting, you use "email" client for that. Because you have not sent emails previously to all participants, you use "email" client to figure out the email address of those persons. And the recipients use their "email" client to update their calendar so they remember to come to the meeting.

So to disrupt email, you need to disrupt calendaring and address books and what ever it is called when you search your co-workers email address by their partial name or some wacky username.

It's a mess and a huge beast.

God, I remember the pre-drobox era, when I would e-mail myself different versions of .doc files... the "early days cloud" was just e-mail!!

I think that the biggest thing email clients lack today is a decent open source web client. There is SquirrelMail and Roundcube and as far as I know, that's it. SquirrelMail is way outdated (UI wise) so that leaves us with Roundcube. That front definitely needs some competition.

No, no, no!! That doesn't help whoever doesn't run it's own server, which is nearly everybody.

Why must the client be a web app? Why not a regular app? You just install them on your devices once and have the same interface for every server. Damn Atwood's Law!

It's the reason standards exist, so that you are not at the whims of Google and the like. Just stick Thunderbird on your desktop or K9 on Android.

What if you're at the library, and you're phone is broken?

I use thunderbird too, but it's nice to have a webmail back up. Somethings need to be accessed anywhere, and those things should have web apps.

The reason email usage is so ubiquitous is because everyone has an email address, and the protocols are well-known and universal.

How else would you propose inviting people to a meeting? Put a paper memo in their mailbox asking for a written reply? Call everyone individually on the phone? Walk around the office and gather everyone together?

If you're thinking about the meeting problem, do you propose a meeting/calendar app/client or protocol that is separate from email? Then the problem becomes saturating your user community with your new client. What do you do if someone doesn't use your new meeting/calendar app/client?

I think what you are describing is a problem with meeting/calendars not email.

Because meetings and finding those email addresses are done through email clients, you need to take those into account if you try to write new email client.

Because there isn't any other way to send those invites, figure out the meeting room and the recipients, you need to support those use cases also. Otherwise people will not user your client because then they would have to keep using the old one also.

I don't get the logic that starts with "Technology is moving fast but email doesn't change" and leads to the solution being papering over email's faults with some slick UI. It's like the whole city's water pressure is failing and everyone is complaining about faucet design instead of that we're using two thousand year old aqueducts. We need more out of online communication than email can give us at a really fundamental level. Suffice to say, my thoughts on this are longer than an HN comment: http://structur.al/articles/after-email/

This is like watching an old movie late at night on some VHF station (remember those?) We like the story, but the ending doesn't change.

Good points, though the article doesn't talk about attachments, which are a terrible pain... It's seeing quite a lot of disruption, with the likes of We Transfer or infinit.io, but now that Google Drive covers this for me I haven't used those services as much.

What makes attachments a pain?

you can't attach more than 25MB... And even if you send "just" 20MB you have to wait for it to upload entirely. And sometimes the receiver will have zipped attachments blocked by her own mail client... Terrible experiences :)

Because you have to upload them, wait for them to upload, limited by size, zero control over files once they're sent, etc.

An exciting email client project is in development at http://mailpile.is/ - a self hosted open-source gmail work-alike. (live demo on the site)

I'd like to see the UI be more IM-like.

Edit: Guess I can try to explain. Email messages have become much shorter and back-and-forths are frequent (and not always best solved with a call). IM has almost no spam so the idea would be to strike a better balance between only hearing from people you know against the need for "cold emailing". Google's new tabs sort of address this. IM still suffers from fragmentation so there'd be a benefit from using the universal email protocols (so long as unwanted messages could be contained).

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