Comment by mark_l_watson | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mark_l_watson | Hacker News Reader

I would like to see more people using simple email and blogs instead of social media. One way to make this work is having a clear flag for friends and family that an email is just for fun, and they should not feel like they have to read it if the title does not interest them.

I let people I work with, family and friends know that if I send out a broadcast email with everyone on a BC blind copy, then they really should not feel obligated to read the email. This allows me to send out general interest emails to a dozen or more people and feel like I am not wasting people's time. I don't use email lists, rather, I spend a minute deciding who might be interested.

This is cumbersome but it gets around problems of Facebook choosing which of your posts they will show your friends.

I like this idea very much. I did the same reasoning regarding whatsapp and the likes. Mobile messaging is another use case that can be handled pretty well with email. We just need a better UI.

To toy around with the idea I created a prototype (still far from prime time but already working): http://www.carteggio.ch

Like the thinking here, but how to handle spam?

SPAM is a general problem with email. I assume that "for fun" emails sent to people I know will not be considered to be SPAM :-)

I don't want to say spam is a solved problem, but at least with gmail, I haven't seen anything spam-like hit my inbox in at least a month.

I think, there are some good spam-filters out there.

Gmail as replacement of FB is a little troublesome solution, I think. Gmail also has his privacy problems, though absolutely not as huge as Facebooks. I think, own (challenging) or paid Mail-providers should be preferred if you really want more privacy. Paid Mail-providers should be able to do the spam-filtering for you.

I'm seriously looking at Fastmail rather than Gmail. Once they get CardDAV / CalDAV support out of development, I would consider them a serious contender.

FYI, our CalDAV support has been in full production for almost a year now.

I was referring more to them as a pair. I know that CalDAV has been out for a while (didn't know it was production, thought it might still be beta), but I know that CardDAV has been taking longer due to integration with your pre-existing contacts system. :)

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