[HN Gopher] Just Use Email - How to Use Email for Everything
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Just Use Email - How to Use Email for Everything
Author : srpeck
Score : 84 points
Date : 2021-05-11 20:54 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.justuseemail.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.justuseemail.com)
| dvt wrote:
| I don't think this kind of Luddism is useful. It's purported by
| the same kinds of people that, upon seeing a new SAAS, quickly
| retort: "couldn't you just do that with Google Docs/Word/pen and
| paper?"
|
| Not to mention that email absolutely _sucks_. The confusing
| threads, the forwarding, the constant CC 'ing, someone making it
| or not making it into a list, the spam. It's absolute garbage. In
| fact, people have been seeking alternatives since the late 80s.
| IRC was a precursor to Instant Messaging/Slack that many techies
| favored. Not that async is some perfect communication strategy
| (it has its own baggage), but it definitely fills some of email's
| gaps. Personally, I think Google Wave was ~15 years ahead of its
| time, and we'll see something akin to it soon.
|
| Will the author's next big revelation be "How to use a hammer for
| everything?"
| sneak wrote:
| > _Not to mention that email absolutely sucks. The confusing
| threads, the forwarding, the constant CC 'ing, someone making
| it or not making it into a list, the spam. It's absolute
| garbage._
|
| This says to me that you have bad tools for email, not that the
| protocol or concept sucks.
|
| If you use email like a rube, it is expected to be absolute
| garbage. The same goes for Facebook or Twitter or Reddit,
| though: you have to change a lot of settings to get a decent
| experience.
| anomaloustho wrote:
| I'd be interested to hear what good email tools look like if
| you have a chance to post some examples.
| sneak wrote:
| The good ones are fairly technical, but there are services
| that make them easier. Sieve or procmail filters and
| clients like macOS Mail.app and mutt are good ones.
|
| My main email client is macOS Mail.app and it's pretty
| great when configured properly in conjunction with
| serverside preprocessing/filtering.
| williamtwild wrote:
| You have called people rubes and not provided any
| examples of this proper configuration. Dissapointing and
| trollish.
| neogodless wrote:
| Mentioning Google Docs as a part of Luddism is making me feel
| old.
| floss_silicate wrote:
| Appreciated the gigantic RSS subscription button at the bottom of
| the page.
| adamretter wrote:
| I love this idea - I am so totally uninterested when yet another
| forum/IM solution is suggested to me. email works and (most)
| everyone has it. The last thing I want to do is install yet
| another client app or sign-up to some online website app. Enough
| already!
| saimiam wrote:
| > (most) everyone
|
| Email is hardly a thing in India for general use. One of my
| interns hates email so much that he built a bot which IMs him
| the contents of his email to Telegram.
| sneak wrote:
| The fact that email is interoperable is what makes this
| possible. Try building a bot to forward your Facebook
| Messenger messages to $OTHER_PLATFORM.
|
| (Aside: if they are okay getting a push notification per
| email, I suggest that they are Doing It Wrong. Email serves a
| different purpose entirely.)
| gsich wrote:
| Email is the only protocol that has widespread adoption in
| probably every programming language. Clients are ubiquitous.
| Filtering allows you to reach many mails without getting out of
| hand.
| thaumaturgy wrote:
| Gmail alone currently handles over 50% of US email traffic, with
| Microsoft and a handful of other service providers taking up a
| good chunk of the other half. These large providers all use
| internal blacklists and filtering rules, which cannot be queried,
| and no support is available if you get blackholed.
|
| Worst of all, Gmail especially isn't great about tagging messages
| as spam; a good chunk of messages sent from outside the Gmail
| network simply disappear. As a Gmail user, there is nothing you
| can do to verify that you're getting all of the legitimate mail
| traffic that is being sent to you.
|
| Further, if you're trying to send any kind of business
| correspondence over email, you have to contend with a massive
| industry of scammers that are also targeting people with
| lookalike messages.
|
| I love the email protocol, but from a broader service standpoint,
| email is terribly broken right now.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| > Worst of all, Gmail especially isn't great about tagging
| messages as spam
|
| My experience is the exact opposite of yours - I find Gmail's
| spam detection absolutely amazing. I get essentially zero spam
| in my inbox, and perhaps 4-6 false positives in the spam folder
| a month.
|
| >As a Gmail user, there is nothing you can do to verify that
| you're getting all of the legitimate mail traffic that is being
| sent to you.
|
| What other communication service/protocol would allow you to do
| this?
| ihattendorf wrote:
| > perhaps 4-6 false positives in the spam folder a month
|
| That's 4-6 valid messages a month the average user will never
| see.
| tkzed49 wrote:
| I disagree, I think "check your spam" is fairly widely
| understood.
| elcomet wrote:
| It is not.
| nly wrote:
| Who has time for that when your spam folder is full of
| hundreds of junk messages per day?
| anomaloustho wrote:
| I think the fact that "check your spam" is so widely
| understood is a testament to false positives in the inbox
| being an issue for Gmail.
|
| Ideally this phrase would not be so widely known and
| understood if Gmail didn't have so many false positives
| going to the spam folder. I'd imagine that, as a
| performance metric, the Gmail team would consider false
| positives to be a metric for improvement, not a metric of
| pride.
| anamexis wrote:
| GGP's point is that in some circumstances, Gmail will
| simply disappear emails, with no trace, instead of
| quarantining them.
| annoyingnoob wrote:
| I run my own email server. The most important people in my life
| have accounts on my own server. No gmail needed or wanted. I
| can answer all of those questions of delivery for myself.
|
| We get so much spam from gmail that gmail has earned itself an
| increased spam score just because its gmail. Its unlikely that
| my users see much from gmail, unless they want it.
| thaumaturgy wrote:
| Yeah, that was my experience too as a mail server admin.
| inter_netuser wrote:
| read-receipt isnt handled well by gmail?
| edoceo wrote:
| Read receipt isn't handled well by my mail server either. Its
| not a good feature anyway
| kulix425 wrote:
| no
| weeboid wrote:
| To put this into context and understand where the puck even is,
| my daughter (18 y old, freshman in college), last sent me an
| email in 2017. Before that, one in 2016, and one in 2015
| [deleted]
| kitkat_new wrote:
| There is a more modern alternative* to Email: Matrix It improves
| significantly in security (easy E2EE) and usability (and of
| course functionality) while still keeping advantages like
| decentralization.
|
| How the protocol is used is up to you and the Matrix client
| (which atm is mostly chat, but I am sure one could give you a
| more email-like client).
|
| *ignoring the ubiquitous presence of email, which is kind of the
| main selling point - Matrix is still in the tens of millions
| ashton314 wrote:
| Is Matrix really that widely used? I'm a fan--I want to set up
| my own server one of these days when I get the time--but I get
| the feeling that it's still kinda niche. Who's using it? This
| is exciting!
| arbuge wrote:
| Well, you can certainly blog using just email:
| https://PublicEmails.com.
|
| Disclaimer: it's one of my side projects.
| cameronbrown wrote:
| I also built http://feedsub.com for RSS to inbox. There's
| better tools out there nowadays but I find it useful.
| paxys wrote:
| I'm on the exact opposite end of the spectrum. I haven't used
| email outside of work for many years now, and don't miss it one
| bit. The digital world has evolved since 1997, and email simply
| hasn't kept up.
|
| I skimmed a couple articles on the blog and my biggest problem
| with it is that the author is making a social rather than
| technological argument (which are all anyways nonsensical).
|
| "Liked a movie? Don't call or IM your friend about it, email them
| a long form review instead."
|
| "Leave all your group texts and instead send your friends a
| weekly email summary of your life."
|
| Do you just hate having friends in general?
| daveslash wrote:
| I'll give you an up-vote because I think a variety of different
| viewpoints is important, but I'm very much in the e-mail camp.
| My biggest reason is simply: it's the only ubiquitous,
| decentralized, open protocol that I can think of. I can run my
| own server if I want, an I can interact with _anybody with an
| e-mail address_. Sure, there was XMPP for IM, but that doesn 't
| have wide adoption; same with other protocols.
| babypuncher wrote:
| It's fine to want all your communication on an open protocol,
| but email is just plain clunky and not good at all for the
| types of online communication people have grown accustomed
| to. It literally is just an electronic equivalent of sending
| a letter, and inherits most of the limitations that implies.
|
| If any of us are ever going to convince friends and family to
| leave proprietary platforms like Messenger and Discord, we
| are going to need an open protocol that allows for the same
| features and level of polish. Trying to get everyone to just
| use email is a complete non-starter.
| peterpost2 wrote:
| You really can't run your on email server nowadays though,
| you need to have been running one for several decades
| otherwise the email common email providers(gmail, outlook)
| will automatically just assume its spam. Also due to the way
| extensions added to the email protocol configuring and
| learning how to properly configure it so it gets accepted
| will be a dayjob.
| gsich wrote:
| You still can. The main and most important thing is to have
| a clean IP. So no major cloud provider who reuse IPs.
| edoceo wrote:
| I just switched my long running SMTP to a new IP. I've got
| SPF, DKIM and DMARC all dialed in. I'm not getting tagged
| as spam. Even when I add new domains to this host for
| sending - still gets through to G, Y and MS based services.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| As SPF, DKIM and DMARC have become more widely
| implemented, is IP reputation less of a factor than it
| used to be in spam detection algorithms? This is just my
| speculation, but it seems plausible.
| rubatuga wrote:
| If you want clean IPs for self-hosting a mail server, you
| can use a service we created called Hoppy Network:
|
| https://hoppy.network
|
| Our IP addresses are not on any blacklists, and we don't
| block SMTP or mail ports.
| znpy wrote:
| that's very interesting, thanks!
| edmundsauto wrote:
| This isn't universally true, although your broader point
| (it could change at any time!) is a risk.
|
| As a data point, I have run my own email servers for years.
| Both professionally (couple million transactional emails
| per year) and for my personal.
|
| If you follow best practices (which is a pain to setup!),
| deliver ability is generally on par with other providers,
| unless you got unlucky and got a bad IP.
| dqv wrote:
| The only "common" email provider that has given me problems
| is Zoho. They're annoying and do not respond on their
| mailer daemon email or whatever. I tell people we can't
| correspond if they use Zoho and no one has had a problem
| with that yet.
| [deleted]
| paxys wrote:
| Signal is an open protocol and supports E2E encrypted text,
| voice and video.
| znpy wrote:
| wasn't signal shutting down alternative clients or
| something?
| tkzed49 wrote:
| That makes sense in principle, but in practice I think this
| is a case where the technology is eventually going to have to
| meet the real world needs and not the other way around; email
| just doesn't match typical patterns of personal communication
| in my experience.
| sneak wrote:
| All the "evolution" is is getting you to use bespoke rich
| clients for email-like store-and-forward systems (fb messenger,
| instagram dm, et c) that show you ads that you can't configure
| and can't replace.
|
| If "email" simply means "gmail.com" to you then it's natural to
| assume that you'd think it hasn't evolved.
| sethammons wrote:
| Today was an old friend's birthday. We haven't really talked in
| years. Figured I'd send him a happy birthday note. You know
| what still works after 15 years? Email. Now, will he _see_ that
| email? Hope so.
| teawrecks wrote:
| That's the obvious stance to take though. The point is that IM
| has problems, IMO the largest of which is that all prevalent
| platforms are privately owned services rather than being a
| protocol like email is. Sure you may have a gmail address, but
| you can talk freely to any other email address. That's not the
| case for iMessage vs FB Messenger vs Slack vs Signal vs
| WhatsApp vs TikTok vs Telegram vs hundreds if not thousands of
| other independent platforms.
|
| My understanding is that this is the point of Matrix, i.e. to
| create an open protocol that you can use for IM regardless of
| who serves your messages.
|
| But the point of saying "just use email" is that we don't
| _need_ anything new, we just need to shift our idea of what
| email is. It 's only slow and clunky because we still think if
| it as such. Our email clients and infrastructure are all built
| around email being something you get around to checking, like a
| digital version of your physical mailbox. But it doesn't have
| to be this way. You have a uniquely identifying email address,
| and everyone you know does too, this should be all we need to
| have communication that's as responsive and highly compatible
| as we want/need it to be.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| I'm with you, I absolutely cannot stand using email unless I
| absolutely have to, which is mostly just at work.
|
| And it's a fine way for government or businesses to contact me,
| just like mail was.
|
| But just like mail letter writing declined after the invention
| of the telephone, e-mail has declined after the invention of IM
| chki wrote:
| I want to point out something from one of the articles which is
| so far from the truth that it somewhat undercuts the authors
| credibility:
|
| > For instance, if WhatsApp goes down, not only can you not
| send/receive messages, you won't be able to see your old ones,
| and no one else on your network will be able to either. You could
| argue that a single email provider has the same effect, but you'd
| be wrong. If Gmail goes down, I can still send emails to Gmail
| recipients and I can still see past messages from Gmail users.
|
| Obviously you will be able to see all your WhatsApp messages when
| WhatsApp goes down. The same is true for Facebook Messenger and
| many other applications, because everything is saved locally.
| It's even possible to send WhatsApp messages while being offline
| which will then be delivered later on.
| ApolloVonZ wrote:
| I'd disagree. E-Mail is useful for invoices, customer contact,
| first point of contact or 2nd point of contact if someone tried
| to reach out per Facebook etc. and a serious business relation
| needs to be formed. However at work we switched to Slack a while
| back and it was such a relieve! Trying to organize projects per
| mail was just horrible. Especially when you got non technical
| staff involved that doesn't correctly forward or answer email and
| uses reply-all and reply interchangeably, or switches between
| personal and shared accounts without noticing it. Slack is not
| perfect but for us it did the job and still does.
| Snitch-Thursday wrote:
| I'm not one for using emails for everything. Sometimes the UI /
| UX just doesn't go great with things like synced up messaging and
| besides, email leaks metadata all over.
|
| Having said that, for extremely casual messages where I'm not
| worried about metadata (talking to my parents, a relationship
| that is already apparent), I would not mind chatting over
| something like DeltaChat (which is on-and-off working on trying
| to do XMPP Conversations-style multiple account sign on in one
| single app) over the alternative of a group text or FB Messenger
| message. Metadata exists either way, might as well be on an email
| system I will retain long-term-access to it. The likes of Signal
| force you to either manually screenshot messages or copy/paste
| them message by message, there is no bulk unencrypted backup for
| mundane things like serendipitous conversations about dinner
| plans for funny family stories. But since DeltaChat is still
| somewhat locked in to a single account (preventing me from using
| say work and personal), I'm doing the no-change-choice and
| continuing to tolerate Signal.
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