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Comment by arasmussen | Hacker News Reader

What I would really love for someone to fix is how slow email is. Why is it so much slower to send an email than an SMS or FB message with the same contents?

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There's no free lunch. FB (Or rather, Apple and Google's Push Notification Server they depend on) and SMS are centralized messaging systems and that's why they can be fast, whereas email is decentralized and designed to be "good enough", which makes it slow but as a result has other benefits that centralized messaging systems can't have

And for what it's worth (especially considering all that you've mentioned), email is still often quite fast.

I would personally much rather PAY for a centralized system that works better than "good enough".

Until the centralized system fails. Email is resilient and will still be working post-apocalypse, where as, FB will probably not.

It is?

I've routinely used email like an IM system with folks in different companies. GMail will spool email in <30 seconds. Exchange can be near instantaneous.

My gmail email regularly doesn't make it to my inbox until more than 10 minutes after it has been sent. It fucking blows.

I'm glad we picked Office 365 over Goog

FYI: If you have "Undo" enabled there is a delay on sending outgoing email from Gmail.

The short answer is that (1) email wasn't designed to be instantaneous, and (2) it uses a distributed protocol.

One of our goals is to make transit as fast as possible. But there's a limit to what Inbox can do right now since it works on top of existing providers, like Gmail or Yahoo! Mail.

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