I love email, had a Blackberry and that thing was just great.
Today, I have everything I can go to email. If I could get it all, I would.
I do not need or want lots of silos. I do want one store, some rules, and for it to operate off line and async.
Replacing email will take a lot. There was email before http. I have seen nothing even close to the simple utility, robustness of email, never mind anything that looks to endure like email has.
I have almost all email I have ever received. Amazing. And it just works. The better search is, the better it works. There are tons of emails to myself too. I know I can search them and read what past me suspected present me needs to know and that all weaves right in.
I wish more things worked as well and like email does.
RSS is one of those things, BTW.
USENET is another one, but well out of favor. Fact is, someone could spiff USENET up and it could very easily come back.
Async, threaded discussion is amazing. Make inline media a little easier, and... yeah.
Problem is none of those high utility things are sexy.
Maybe there should be a floor that just works well. Maybe we are not all that well served by all these attempts to disrupt and own people through what are important interactions.
Big conflict of interest there, if you ask me. It matters now, is lean, mean, near universally used.
Ok, so what is there really to disrupt?
Not much.
And that is why I love email. Unlike just about every other thing I have loved, it will be there, and I will not have to think about it much. It is awful nice to have something be that way.
Nice enough for me to think long and hard about putting it at any kind of risk.
> Unlike just about every other thing I have loved, it will be there, and I will not have to think about it much. It is awful nice to have something be that way.
Well said. Email is the universal killer app for perpetuity.
And the lesson here is that it is so because nobody owns it, we all own it. It can't go bankrupt, it can't pivot to be something else, it can't lose all its best features when a new product manager is promoted and wants to make a statement. Things that every proprietary system will do and eventually disappear.
I have all email I've wanted to preserve back into about 1990 and I can read it just the same as back then. I will, guaranteed, be able to continue to access it with no change for as long as I live. No proprietary app will ever come close to matching this longevity.
Because it is an open standard I own my entire pipeline. I can receive, send, filter, script, trigger on content, automate.. there are no limits. It's my data.
I centralize everything to email. RSS goes to email, sites I scrape go to email, signal goes to email. If I can't pipe it to email somehow, I don't really have the time to deal with that kind of special snowflake. Email me.
Email is the unix pipe of communication, infinitely flexible to taste.
Google Reader made RSS feel just like Gmail (which isn't the same as email in general I will agree, but close enough for many people). It was fast, dense, and easy to scan days and weeks of content in a single sitting. I'm _still_ mad they gave it the axe so Vic Gundotra could juice the numbers on failing Google+.
In the past I’ve felt the opposite of your sentiment.
I’ve found my email to be unwieldy. I’ve felt like I have to apply constant hygiene and maintenance to keep it from becoming useless.
Checking out on an e-commerce site, trying out a new tool, registering a free trial...these are things I guess I do frequently enough that it seems to doom me to sort and sift through noise.
I know the common solutions are a good set of filtering rules or separate emails/aliases. I lean toward the latter and it’a definitely helped but I still find it all a bit of a pain and time sink.
That said, you make a nice case for it and I can definitely identify with some of the ‘zen’ of email you’re describing.
I feel like I’ve tried every email client out there, but is there some solution I haven’t thought of of where I get a friendly GUI but can configure mail filtering in code (i.e something I can keep in git) rather than clicking around?
I’ve toyed with ideas of bundling by sender - or quietly placing new senders into their own ‘message requests’ type bin for me to approve or deny.
Or some kind of intelligence for identifying, for example, a receipt or confirmation email (which I want indexed) vs a promotional email from the same vendor (which I do not).
> This website is powered by DFeed, an NNTP / mailing list web frontend / forum software, news aggregator and IRC bot. DFeed was written mostly by Vladimir Panteleev. The source code is available under the GNU Affero General Public License on GitHub: https://github.com/CyberShadow/DFeed
DISCLAIMER: To all chat-app haters, my point is that the user experience of these newfangled services is just much better, o course I'm not taking into acct all the very real concerns stemming rom these apps.
Since your talking about user experience, (not mentioning privacy, security, etc.). How is email better in terms of usability than say Telegram or any other app.
Which keep every chat you've ever had.
You can "Save" chats for yourself for later.
You can have usenet-style conversations in huge mega-groups.
You can follow the latest news from channels just like RSS.
All without needing to keep the data downloaded on your device, and backed up in the cloud.
Basically all those separate services you mention (with separate software required to be downloaded to view them) are rolled into in any one-stop-shop chat app. Oh, and it also has phone and video calls too.
I want to love email (I do love the platform) but I've just struggled to find a UI that I don't battle with. Especially one/some that work similarly across different devices.
Email, as in the protocol, only appears robust because of all the qirks. Essentially you cant build email infrastructure 100% after RFC and expect it to work in the real world.
today I'm no longer integrated into the workflow of a "modern dev team" but the last time I was they forced us to communicate on Slack. If I'd have to work in such a distraction-tread-mill I'd be one very unhappy camper. It's not that Slack alone is terrible but how orgs these days expect devs to use it. Some companies I've been at they made their teams announce in the main channel whenever somebody went for a break or when they got back. That's fun with 3 people but god forbid you're working with bigger groups and end up forgetting to enter that you've gone for a dump. I first thought it was only one place that has jumped the shark on common sense, but no, it's every other company since 2016 that thinks it's a great way to communicate.
email or nothing for me. Or pick up the phone (boomer!) or video call me if it's really that important. the 50 additional more ways to hassle me can F right off lol
Many startups (e.g. Slack) aim to replace email, but this is backward. Email is open, standardized, and has been around for decades. The main challenge of the current information environment is multiple independent queues of items that ask for our attention: email, texts, chats, app alerts, social messages, social feeds. This would be much easier to manage in a single location, and email is the location where users have the most control. The control the user has with email is exactly the reason so many companies are trying to replace it.
The thing I hate the most about email is that they allow loading images as a third party resource, instead of requiring them to be sent with the rest of the message data. This allows companies and spammers to track when you open an email.
(They also track every link you click on, but that's a separate issue.)
Slack is great for quick messages. The error is to use one system for ephermal, immediate messages and not use another different one for longer message of less immediate nature. Email is great for the second. I have to have a folder of markdown files where I can draft messages to then post on slack, just because slacks own message editor can't be relied on not to post half my message.
Of course slack also can't handle markdown so my messages end up looking weird, but better weird than unreadable.
The upshot is that my messages end up impressing people because they are not just a garble of words, but have such features as headlines, paragraphs, lists and have been run through an actual spell checker.
Whether or not this is an 'aim', chat (slack, texts) is a distinctly different medium than email, in the same way voice chat is.
Voice is synchronous, real-time communication. It's very immediate, but demands 100% attention while taking place.
Email is asynchronous, with an inherent delay from the slow workflow and turn-around time. It takes at least a few distinct actions to read and send a reply, and there's no indication if the person received your message or is replying (unless you're a sociopath that uses read receipts, anyway). You can of course reply quickly back and forth and get close to a synchronous medium, but it's at best awkward and just really doesn't work well for this.
Chat lives in the middle ground where it is kind of both: though it's really async, most platforms have an indicator of online/offline, typing, etc, and the friction to reply is very small, so it works well synchronous.
More importantly, in my mind, is the expectations that come with the medium.
Chat is casual, ephemeral, and has no expectation of response. After some minutes/hours/days (depending on context) a message goes stale and that's just how it is. It's also perfectly fine to reply "sorry, in a meeting until 2" or "not sure, maybe ask @otherperson?".
Email is more formal, long-lived has an expectation of a useful response. This turns your inbox into a todo list where all the items are added by other people as they see fit. The types of deferrals you can do in chat don't really work in email.
There's definitely disagreement on these, and that can cause a lot of friction between people that treat them differently (for example: people that use email as if it's chat drive me absolutely crazy -- let's just chat and finish this conversation in 1/2 the time, or have a voice call and finish it 1/10th the time!).
Windows Phone had this too. You could mix timelines from Facebook and Twitter in one view. Messages from FB and SMS showed up in one list. I don't know how they got the licensing and API access to be able to do that, but it was great. Also they styled everything according to the phone UI, so everything was one font, dark mode was just one toggle, it always matched your phone theme, etc.
Palm’s webOS did a unified inbox the best way. BlackBerry had a few implementations in the 2000s but the one this article refers to wasn’t really a true unified inbox, in part because the applet support for many of the services was weak (you had to go through weird protocols to send IM messages through BIS/BES whatever). The latter implementations with BlackBerry 10 were OK, but this was something Palm really nailed.
Had to scroll through almost 100 replies before seeing any mention of WebOS and it’s awesome unified mailbox. For the few fortunate to use it it was an amazing piece of tech. Unfortunately it wasn’t enough to push WebOS into the mainstream. Palm was bought by HP who didn’t have much imagination and eventually sold WebOS and the IP for peanuts.
All they had to do was keep focused on their actual demographic (high-end office workers), allow their other demographic (drug dealers / buyers), and let everyone else worry about consumers.
Always refine the keyboard, unquestionable notifications, ignore the “single pane of glass” trend, and definitely not even a single phone with Android.
Their user-base would be “small”, but so what. Noone needs 8 Billion users. 100M is plenty to sustain R&D.
And don't forget that all of that worked within Gmail. It floors me that Google didn't realize what they had when they had it. I used to manage all of my daily communications though one pinned tab that was always open. Heck, half the day, that tab would have its own dedicated computer monitor. Moving to a new service for email, messaging or SMS didn't even enter my mind because it would have been so inconvenient. But now, I'm happy to experiment, because it's all siloed anyway. As someone who has had Gmail since 2004 and a Google phone number since just after they bought Grand Central, there's a good chance I'll be using my own domain for email in a year.
Side note: I love the succinct format on this link. Well written and to the point: 1 minute to read. You don't always have to create a blog post with unnecessary information just to post your opinion online. And sometimes a tweet just isn't enough.
I host a public Matrix instance that offers bridges to signal, Telegramm, whatsapp and instagram. This in Addition to tge Matrix native contacts, results in a single ui wäre all my messages arrive.
I could als bridge E-Mail, but the combined inbox of k9 mail works good enough. Bonus that this works independant oft my phone.
I still miss my blackberry Bild from a Hardware perspective.
It seems like if Apple created an actual app for Notification Center messages they could do this, or something close enough. The nature of temporary notifications is a pain point for me, and could be solved if I could go to such an app and see previously read notifications. And motivations are already centralized from every app / service.
The answer to why this never happened again is simple. We live in an era where all tech companies or tech services, big or small, are antagonistic against each other.
Companies want your full attention and wallet. They don’t want to share you.
Monopolistic behavior seems to be a principle of modern tech. You either win everything or lose everything.
I really don't think I would like this feature. I like the compartmentalisation of different streams of work, different social groups etc.
My friends often complain about having different chat apps, but I quite like being able to see a single icon pop up on my lockscreen and having a fair idea who it's from.
Beeper is a product founded on top of Matrix, which is a standard for interoperable, decentralized, secure communications. Think email, but E2E encrypted and modern. One of the core features is bridges - the ability to reach out into other communication silos and bring them into Matrix. https://matrix.org/docs/guides/introduction
No affiliation, but I'm quite excited about the Matrix ecosystem. Element is a great client already.
The Blackberry managed to be a unified inbox because it also unified UX.
Today everyone has to have their own UX, so the notion of, say, message _transports_ (which is what you had in, for instance, cross-protocol IM clients like Adium) is dead.
iMessage, Facebook, Whatsapp, Signal, etc. all have their own UX, and that is impossible to unify today.
Android _almost_ got that right as you could (theoretically) build unified front-ends to front for separate activities back in the early revisions (and I believe PalmOS nearly got there as well) but today every service wants to own the UX to shove their "experience" in your phone...
Unfortunately it says: contains ads. Same as most if not all BlackBerry Hub apps/components I can find. Seems like it is now freemium garbage and not a product for professionals anymore, unfortunately.
Doesn't the TOS for Twitter prevent this? It's all because each of these services want to present their own "experience". A unifying UI would screw their vision and light hose their revenue.
For pure email, nothing beats 2008 BlackBerry even today. Speed, reliability, consistency, even battery life.
It's a complicated history but the wilful ignorance by a lot of industry people and even fairly intelligent consumers was amazing to watch back in the day.
The iPhone is of course an amazing product, but the amount of distortion it wields is still unnerving
[+] [-] ddingus|5 years ago|reply
Today, I have everything I can go to email. If I could get it all, I would.
I do not need or want lots of silos. I do want one store, some rules, and for it to operate off line and async.
Replacing email will take a lot. There was email before http. I have seen nothing even close to the simple utility, robustness of email, never mind anything that looks to endure like email has.
I have almost all email I have ever received. Amazing. And it just works. The better search is, the better it works. There are tons of emails to myself too. I know I can search them and read what past me suspected present me needs to know and that all weaves right in.
I wish more things worked as well and like email does.
RSS is one of those things, BTW.
USENET is another one, but well out of favor. Fact is, someone could spiff USENET up and it could very easily come back.
Async, threaded discussion is amazing. Make inline media a little easier, and... yeah.
Problem is none of those high utility things are sexy.
Maybe there should be a floor that just works well. Maybe we are not all that well served by all these attempts to disrupt and own people through what are important interactions.
Big conflict of interest there, if you ask me. It matters now, is lean, mean, near universally used.
Ok, so what is there really to disrupt?
Not much.
And that is why I love email. Unlike just about every other thing I have loved, it will be there, and I will not have to think about it much. It is awful nice to have something be that way.
Nice enough for me to think long and hard about putting it at any kind of risk.
[+] [-] jjav|5 years ago|reply
Well said. Email is the universal killer app for perpetuity.
And the lesson here is that it is so because nobody owns it, we all own it. It can't go bankrupt, it can't pivot to be something else, it can't lose all its best features when a new product manager is promoted and wants to make a statement. Things that every proprietary system will do and eventually disappear.
I have all email I've wanted to preserve back into about 1990 and I can read it just the same as back then. I will, guaranteed, be able to continue to access it with no change for as long as I live. No proprietary app will ever come close to matching this longevity.
Because it is an open standard I own my entire pipeline. I can receive, send, filter, script, trigger on content, automate.. there are no limits. It's my data.
I centralize everything to email. RSS goes to email, sites I scrape go to email, signal goes to email. If I can't pipe it to email somehow, I don't really have the time to deal with that kind of special snowflake. Email me.
Email is the unix pipe of communication, infinitely flexible to taste.
[+] [-] qbasic_forever|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] loraxclient|5 years ago|reply
I’ve found my email to be unwieldy. I’ve felt like I have to apply constant hygiene and maintenance to keep it from becoming useless.
Checking out on an e-commerce site, trying out a new tool, registering a free trial...these are things I guess I do frequently enough that it seems to doom me to sort and sift through noise.
I know the common solutions are a good set of filtering rules or separate emails/aliases. I lean toward the latter and it’a definitely helped but I still find it all a bit of a pain and time sink.
That said, you make a nice case for it and I can definitely identify with some of the ‘zen’ of email you’re describing.
I feel like I’ve tried every email client out there, but is there some solution I haven’t thought of of where I get a friendly GUI but can configure mail filtering in code (i.e something I can keep in git) rather than clicking around?
I’ve toyed with ideas of bundling by sender - or quietly placing new senders into their own ‘message requests’ type bin for me to approve or deny.
Or some kind of intelligence for identifying, for example, a receipt or confirmation email (which I want indexed) vs a promotional email from the same vendor (which I do not).
[+] [-] e12e|5 years ago|reply
Fwiw this does seem to work pretty well:
https://forum.dlang.org/help
> About
> This website is powered by DFeed, an NNTP / mailing list web frontend / forum software, news aggregator and IRC bot. DFeed was written mostly by Vladimir Panteleev. The source code is available under the GNU Affero General Public License on GitHub: https://github.com/CyberShadow/DFeed
> This DFeed instance (forum.dlang.org) is a frontend to the DigitalMars NNTP server and mailing lists. Portions of the web interface (including style and graphics) are Copyright © by Digital Mars.
I've looked at dfeed a couple of times, but it seems just a little bit convoluted to set up - and I wouldn't really want an irc integration.
But the web forum is snappy and the NNTP integration seems like a great idea.
[+] [-] ROARosen|5 years ago|reply
Since your talking about user experience, (not mentioning privacy, security, etc.). How is email better in terms of usability than say Telegram or any other app.
Which keep every chat you've ever had.
You can "Save" chats for yourself for later.
You can have usenet-style conversations in huge mega-groups.
You can follow the latest news from channels just like RSS.
All without needing to keep the data downloaded on your device, and backed up in the cloud.
Basically all those separate services you mention (with separate software required to be downloaded to view them) are rolled into in any one-stop-shop chat app. Oh, and it also has phone and video calls too.
[+] [-] mbirth|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pacifika|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mixcocam|5 years ago|reply
I need to get in on that!
[+] [-] lucideer|5 years ago|reply
I want to love email (I do love the platform) but I've just struggled to find a UI that I don't battle with. Especially one/some that work similarly across different devices.
[+] [-] joshspankit|5 years ago|reply
USENET could come back with a proper refresh.
[+] [-] tofukid|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] habibur|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] herbst|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DyslexicAtheist|5 years ago|reply
today I'm no longer integrated into the workflow of a "modern dev team" but the last time I was they forced us to communicate on Slack. If I'd have to work in such a distraction-tread-mill I'd be one very unhappy camper. It's not that Slack alone is terrible but how orgs these days expect devs to use it. Some companies I've been at they made their teams announce in the main channel whenever somebody went for a break or when they got back. That's fun with 3 people but god forbid you're working with bigger groups and end up forgetting to enter that you've gone for a dump. I first thought it was only one place that has jumped the shark on common sense, but no, it's every other company since 2016 that thinks it's a great way to communicate.
email or nothing for me. Or pick up the phone (boomer!) or video call me if it's really that important. the 50 additional more ways to hassle me can F right off lol
[+] [-] voisin|5 years ago|reply
Reddit?
[+] [-] xnx|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] surround|5 years ago|reply
(They also track every link you click on, but that's a separate issue.)
[+] [-] tomjen3|5 years ago|reply
Of course slack also can't handle markdown so my messages end up looking weird, but better weird than unreadable.
The upshot is that my messages end up impressing people because they are not just a garble of words, but have such features as headlines, paragraphs, lists and have been run through an actual spell checker.
[+] [-] gregmac|5 years ago|reply
Whether or not this is an 'aim', chat (slack, texts) is a distinctly different medium than email, in the same way voice chat is.
Voice is synchronous, real-time communication. It's very immediate, but demands 100% attention while taking place.
Email is asynchronous, with an inherent delay from the slow workflow and turn-around time. It takes at least a few distinct actions to read and send a reply, and there's no indication if the person received your message or is replying (unless you're a sociopath that uses read receipts, anyway). You can of course reply quickly back and forth and get close to a synchronous medium, but it's at best awkward and just really doesn't work well for this.
Chat lives in the middle ground where it is kind of both: though it's really async, most platforms have an indicator of online/offline, typing, etc, and the friction to reply is very small, so it works well synchronous.
More importantly, in my mind, is the expectations that come with the medium.
Chat is casual, ephemeral, and has no expectation of response. After some minutes/hours/days (depending on context) a message goes stale and that's just how it is. It's also perfectly fine to reply "sorry, in a meeting until 2" or "not sure, maybe ask @otherperson?".
Email is more formal, long-lived has an expectation of a useful response. This turns your inbox into a todo list where all the items are added by other people as they see fit. The types of deferrals you can do in chat don't really work in email.
There's definitely disagreement on these, and that can cause a lot of friction between people that treat them differently (for example: people that use email as if it's chat drive me absolutely crazy -- let's just chat and finish this conversation in 1/2 the time, or have a voice call and finish it 1/10th the time!).
[+] [-] neaanopri|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sp332|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] typon|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] filmgirlcw|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yardie|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joe_fishfish|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joshspankit|5 years ago|reply
All they had to do was keep focused on their actual demographic (high-end office workers), allow their other demographic (drug dealers / buyers), and let everyone else worry about consumers.
Always refine the keyboard, unquestionable notifications, ignore the “single pane of glass” trend, and definitely not even a single phone with Android.
Their user-base would be “small”, but so what. Noone needs 8 Billion users. 100M is plenty to sustain R&D.
[+] [-] tacostakohashi|5 years ago|reply
Just recently, the've destroyed it and now SMS / voicemails are in "Messages", disconnected from chats.
[+] [-] jetrink|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xnx|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] emptyparadise|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joaomoreno|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nvr219|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] normaler|5 years ago|reply
I host a public Matrix instance that offers bridges to signal, Telegramm, whatsapp and instagram. This in Addition to tge Matrix native contacts, results in a single ui wäre all my messages arrive. I could als bridge E-Mail, but the combined inbox of k9 mail works good enough. Bonus that this works independant oft my phone.
I still miss my blackberry Bild from a Hardware perspective.
[+] [-] ppetty|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] whoisjuan|5 years ago|reply
Companies want your full attention and wallet. They don’t want to share you.
Monopolistic behavior seems to be a principle of modern tech. You either win everything or lose everything.
[+] [-] stevage|5 years ago|reply
My friends often complain about having different chat apps, but I quite like being able to see a single icon pop up on my lockscreen and having a fair idea who it's from.
[+] [-] yunyu|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Dedime|5 years ago|reply
Beeper is a product founded on top of Matrix, which is a standard for interoperable, decentralized, secure communications. Think email, but E2E encrypted and modern. One of the core features is bridges - the ability to reach out into other communication silos and bring them into Matrix. https://matrix.org/docs/guides/introduction
No affiliation, but I'm quite excited about the Matrix ecosystem. Element is a great client already.
[+] [-] nvr219|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ROARosen|5 years ago|reply
For those seeking a comparative app for todays platforms, here are some that were mentioned on HN.
https://missiveapp.com/
https://www.beeperhq.com/?hn
[+] [-] rcarmo|5 years ago|reply
Today everyone has to have their own UX, so the notion of, say, message _transports_ (which is what you had in, for instance, cross-protocol IM clients like Adium) is dead.
iMessage, Facebook, Whatsapp, Signal, etc. all have their own UX, and that is impossible to unify today.
Android _almost_ got that right as you could (theoretically) build unified front-ends to front for separate activities back in the early revisions (and I believe PalmOS nearly got there as well) but today every service wants to own the UX to shove their "experience" in your phone...
[+] [-] dade_|5 years ago|reply
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.blackberry...
[+] [-] 2ion|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] protomyth|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kevincox|5 years ago|reply
There is maybe a slightly different implied ephemerality but at the end of the day they seem basically the same.
[+] [-] dddw|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jollybean|5 years ago|reply
It's a complicated history but the wilful ignorance by a lot of industry people and even fairly intelligent consumers was amazing to watch back in the day.
The iPhone is of course an amazing product, but the amount of distortion it wields is still unnerving