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Comment by smallnamespace | Hacker News Reader

> IMO, better to leave "email" open as a generic term

Be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others

If you attempt to redefine the term 'email' to be something broader, then you will inevitably be breaking and/or confusing users who expect the current implementation.

The current meaning of the word is simple and useful. Given someone's e-mail address, I can be reasonably sure of a way to send a text that will be received.

A world where 'e-mail' means a family of incompatible (by necessity, if we're enforcing secure communications) implementations would be worse than today.

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Would you, in ~10 years, prefer a new standard (Signal-Mail, RFC 424242) and have "secure" (for a given definable threat model) standard called email that obsoletes the above RFCs and has 80% market share over current email standards...

...or have 30 different walled-garden, not-interoperable, partially-working (for a given ergonomic use case) apps?

Considering that much of present day communication happens on async on email (including important conversations inside and between banks, governments, land-lords and tenants....), I'd say its something that should happen. And if we can convince the right people, it will happen. We'll live for the next ~5 years in a state of hell (just like we do when we upgrade TLS protocols), and then for the majority of people, things will get better.

My 2c.

And to expand on this a little:

Users don't care. They'll use whatever is given to them, as long as there is no friction. That's why PGP-encrypted email never took off, except as something that tptacek likes to argue against.

Concretely, we (the security-conscious community) need to convince people (engineers, executives, managers) at Google, Microsoft, Oracle, countless other companies, and a myriad of open source communities that this is something important to build, invest, and collaborate on.

The first part is messaging. Then comes networking, convincing individuals in private. Then comes public collaboration. Proof of concepts, test networks, RFCs, production apps.

But until there's a need and money, this won't happen. And it'll be people arguing past each other on the internet.

> ...or have 30 different walled-garden, not-interoperable, partially-working (for a given ergonomic use case) apps?

In having to choose from about 5 to 6 that I have to now, it would certainly be a nightmare if it fragmented to 3 dozen or so. That would be a major problem.

> If you attempt to redefine the term 'email' to be something broader, then you will inevitably be breaking and/or confusing users who expect the current implementation.

An interesting parallel could be Apple's introduction to iMessage in the Messages app, to the point where many use the word "text" to actually mean "sending an iMessage".

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