Ask HN: Will there ever be an email replacement? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Will there ever be an email replacement?

8 pointsluxpir7 comments

Calling all futurists, security-nuts, freedom-fighters and config-tinkerers.

Is it at all likely that email will become 'a thing of the past' any time soon?

There is much talk of Slack replacing email within organisations. But not necessarily within social circles. IRC, Skype and the like have been doing the rounds for years, but never actually supplanting the king of comms.

One-to-many options such as social networks, blogs and RSS feeds certainly account for much exchanging of information nowadays, but again, we still have email. Lots and lots of email.

Looking to the future, some folks, like Donald Knuth, have abstained altogether[0], while others envisage an open, encrypted, p2p, blockchain-based protocol that enables file-transfer and even voice/video calls[1].

Is it likely that we'll ever find a solution to overcome email's spam, inefficiency and security weaknesses, or will we just keep on under the weight of a creaking ruin that just manages to stay standing?

--

[0] http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/email.html

[1] That'd be me. No, not Bitmessage and no, not XMPP.

I hope not. Email is one of the few remaining, totally decentralized, original services which anyone can set up a server and run with. I've never had any issue with it across 25 years, honestly.

It just 'fits' with the web. name@address.tld - it's fantastic.

Sort of agree. Running own mail servers myself. But it wasn't without hassle. Imagine non-technical family members setting up a VPS, postfix+dovecot+spam/av solution and then getting that to work securely on their mobile devices. Not to mention the spam and surveillance issues.

There is room for improvement, no?

Yes, of course. The core tenants though, shouldn't be evicted, ever.

I honestly cried when alt.* on usenet was lost. We lost so much.

Email is great because it's very simple, robust, easy to understand for users, and platform agnostic. I don't think it should be replaced.

I do think that the tools around email are insufficient though. GMail improved email usage, but the bigger problem with email is still spam (which is only solved by machine learning, and never 100% solved). I wonder if IMAP could be improved.

I wonder if there could be a system that uses cryptography to remove spammers from the equation, like an automated voting system, but I'm no expert. A solution might be to build a distributed database of digital signature, which would be make account creation a little more tedious. I guess you could call this a "signature whitelist". Your account would be made worthy the longer it is in use.

Another thing I'd like to have is more interoperability between GSM/SMS and email. For example I'd love to be able to receive a text message once I receive an email labeled "important" in my gmail.

The one thing that would greatly help users, is to let automated email label itself as not being sent from an human.

These are sensible ideas, that have mostly been implemented.

- IMAP could be improved, but nobody wants to end up with yet another standard... - look at hashcash, or DKIM plus some reputation system. The big providers - GMail, Yahoo, Hotmail, et al. - run such reputation systems. You can learn more about dealing with those by searching for "deliverability" - GMail is perfectly happy to push a notification to your smartphone, at least. - "Precedence: bulk" exists, as do other headers for more specific situations.

Email doesn't need to be replaced.

Email clutter and the email-cartel providers that can easily make you a spam bot are the problem.

How many times has someone sent out an email to 5/6 people through BCC (or alike) and then you suddenly get marked by their providers spambots.

n17r4m makes a good case for using self-hosted solutions. Then again, with everyone else on their cartel-email addresses, your poor little self-hosted domain (eventually) gets thrown into the mix of spam with those nigerian prince emails, across the entire cartel.

email is the most flexible and powerful form of identity we have perhaps only next to the mobile so don't think so.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com