Hacker News Reader

Comment by geargrinder | Hacker News Reader

Haha you really believe this? Everybody lost because of the misuse. The effectiveness of real emails is way down from 15 years ago. Obviously there are many factors, like multitudes of alternative services, but wading through tons of spam opened the door to those new options. The same fate probably awaits today's popular services. We will move on, they will die.

View on HN

Yes. I really believe this. I still use email daily as do most (all?) people I know. It's a primary means of communication, especially when you need a digital "paper trail" of the communication.

I remember email before Gmail. I used to delete hundreds of spam messages a day. It was torture. Not anymore. Now my inbox is all legit mail with vanishingly few spam messages. And my junk mail folder almost never has legit mail in it. For all intents and purposes the email spam problem is solved.

TBH this is not my experience with Gmail. Some mails randomly get classed as spam for unknow reasons while many are missclassified ("promotion" whereas it was a direct message and "primary" for a lot of stupid promotional stuff").

And legit important mails ending in spam (mostly billing) is a huge problem for many companies I know. On the other side you can spam without issue and end up in the primary box when you switch servers and providers frequently enough and target a small amount of people (under 100 000).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com