My Inbox Is Not A TV | Hacker News Reader

My Inbox Is Not A TV

myinboxisnota.tv

29 pointstwampss13 comments

I'm really interested in Lamson and Zed Shaw continues his impressive output, but this service seems fruitless. I can unsubscribe from any reputable company's mailing list. Most useful alerts already come in both HTML and text variants. If I really don't want the mail, I click "report spam". Gmail has already "solved" the spam problem for me anyway.

Why would I use this really?

It's also solved the images thing too, letting us choose what we see outside of simple text.

These people think subscribing to a service makes things easier on us, when in the end it's just making things more complicated, and honestly it's likely wasting more time too. And that's assuming middle-man service doesn't go belly up sometime in the future and force us to manually resubscribe to everything all over again.

Does this guy ever sleep?

I feel like I have a good sense of who Zed is and what he does; from that information, I would come to the conclusion: no.

Is this really a "problem"?

I get several HTML emails every week from companies that I've subscribed to and I really like the way they display the information.

This seems to cater to people who install ad blockers and flash blockers, but do those people pay for anything? Ever? How is this service going to make money?

"It is another demonstration of the Lamson Project and is free for now."

I don't think it is about making money. I think it is about fame: http://www.zedshaw.com/blog/2009-07-13.html

Wow, this does sound like a good idea for all those marketing people omitting the plain-text variant for their HTML mail.

It usually goes accompanied by text saying 'It seems you are not using a modern e-mail client to view this message, you can view it here --> link to marketing agency.

One of my bugbears is agency created emails that are sent direct from the agency servers or include agency links for tracking. My relationship is with your business, keep them out of it (or at least out back where I can't see them).

Mailinator.com already does something similar. It creates a random email ID on the fly and lets one use it too - to verify email IDs.

"Lets" not "let's."

Wait, what?

After reading the article yesterday, I was convinced that it was just a joke.

The article was a joke promoting inbox-as-TV. That was a teaser parody for this project, which is inbox-as-not-TV.

Uh, my email client already does this? (Gnus + w3m)

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