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Comment by dvt | Hacker News Reader

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?"

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Usually when I talk to people about the “confusing threads” in email, it turns out that they are using a broken client like Gmail. Threading in email is great. Your email client is broken and not respecting the protocol:

https://lwn.net/Articles/837960/

> not respecting the protocol

  Though optional, every message SHOULD have a "Message-ID:" field.
  Furthermore, reply messages SHOULD have "In-Reply-To:" and
  "References:" fields as appropriate, as described below.

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2822#section-3.6.4

For the uninitiated, SHOULD denotes the following in RFCs:

  This word, or the adjective "RECOMMENDED", mean that there
  may exist valid reasons in particular circumstances to ignore a
  particular item, but the full implications must be understood and
  carefully weighed before choosing a different course.

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2119#section-3

> Though optional, every message SHOULD have a "Message-ID:" field.

Most MTAs, in my experience, will add a Message-ID header to a message even if the client did not add one to the original message it sent to the MTA.

Was this ironic with Google Wave?

Can you imagine a company that went all in for Google Wave and then had to deal with Google pulling the entire product?

Email has been there for over 50 years and it's likely to be around for a long time.

The Lindy effect isn't a bad way to look at it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect

In my current job we've had 3 ticketing systems in the last 5 years.

We now use Slack and Jira but we still archive certain important emails for some things because, well, the archive of email and the fact that someone sent an email is something we can trust a lot better than the rest.

> 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.

I’d be interested to hear what good email tools look like if you have a chance to post some examples.

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.

You have called people rubes and not provided any examples of this proper configuration. Dissapointing and trollish.

I didn't call anyone a rube.

> If you use email like a rube, it is expected to be absolute garbage.

Go ahead and explain an actual configuration that actually works if you'd like to help.

https://notmuchmail.org/

https://www.djcbsoftware.nl/code/mu/mu4e.html

https://www.gnus.org/

Though for those used to a GUI, Thunderbird works reasonably well for threading, quoting conventions, and support for plain text mail. It's also cross platform (at least for the desktop environment).

Agree about Google Wave, but I want to point out that we already see its evolution in just about every real-time collaborative system today – from Google Docs to Slack to Figma and more. "The next Google Wave" isn't going to show up soon, it is already here and widely in use.

unfortunately each of those apps has their own protocols. I don't really remember wave well but wasn't the idea there is that they provide the networking portion but allowed people to build apps on top of the wave protocol. Essentially giving you the potential for a 'global inbox'.

I think this concept of a 'global inbox' is exactly what I want. In a general day I'm using Jira, Slack, Email, SMS, gitlab issues, etc for my 'work input'. Which means many different interfaces that I'm constantly checking or are constantly beeping at me.

Sometimes I get a glimpse of my wife's email account ... And it is no surprise she doesn't use email.

She gets dozens of emails a day. None of them are spam exactly. Every single website you've ever signed up for your in your life sends out email "for engagement purposes". Drips, reminders, flash sales, weekly roundups.

A dozen different job boards from when she was looking for work a few years ago. Several dozen shopping websites. Four or five pregnancy apps. And more and more and more.

You could argue that normal, non-technical people should know better. That they should be vigorously jumping through hoops to cancel all those email notifications from services they no longer use.

Don't they know there's fine print (in light gray text!) at the bottom telling you how to unsubscribe? Don't they know there's a tiny button in GMail that will (sometimes) unsubscribe for you?

But I expect that my wife's email is like a lot of people's. It is almost entirely impossible to find any signal among all the noise in it.

I religiously unsubscribe from every drip I get, and my email is still a barrage of 40+ mostly noise notifications every day. I used to love Unroll.me before they started selling ppls info, am trying LeaveMeAlone these days as a replacement and it's pretty good so far. In general I think this is an uphill battle though, email is too prone to being the catchall noise bucket and it takes constant work to stop it from becoming unusable.

> Not to mention that email absolutely sucks. The confusing threads,

I mean, the threads are only confusing if people keep insisting on using shit email clients.

> the forwarding, the constant CC'ing,

Think of it as defining a chatroom. Most of the time it can be handled just fine automatically by your email client, but you can also have more finegrained control if you wish.

> someone making it or not making it into a list,

> the spam.

This I will agree with.

> Will the author's next big revelation be "How to use a hammer for everything?"

Yeah, I don't agree with the author that email should be used for everything. But for non-instant, asynchronousm, flexible, decentralized, cross-platform communication it's pretty damn near perfect.

Can't agree more

Email works O.K for one-way communication (e.g. mailing lists or bill notification). Maybe sometimes infrequent one on one communcation

When its comes to having a converstation, particularly with multiple people, I can't think of anything worse. I always dread tracking down information when I have to dig into achived mailing lists

Thats funny, because I hate facebook message threads because it is effectively impossible to have a conversation there because everything overlaps and I can't take the time to write something clear and in multiple paragraphs.

Honestly at this point I wonder if the right solution is a private usenet server: just like email it is not instant but async, unlike email it is spilt into topics better and you can have new people catch up on threads easily.

> I hate facebook message threads because it is effectively impossible to have a conversation there because everything overlaps and I can't take the time to write something clear and in multiple paragraphs.

I've actually adopted some email like conventions when participating in Facebook comment threads. When I click the reply button, it will fill in the name of the author of the comment I'm replying to. I then will append "wrote:" to that line, add a line break, type a > character, and then paste the part of the comment they wrote that I plan to respond to. It almost looks like a quoted email message :)

> I wonder if the right solution is a private usenet server: just like email it is not instant but async, unlike email it is spilt into topics better and you can have new people catch up on threads easily.

With a private NNTP server, you will still need to set up accounts for others to use it. Though if multiple people run their own servers and set up the peering arrangements between then, then it could work without having to set up accounts fro multiple people.

But, the flexibility one can get with email in terms of organizing messages into different folders is lost with NNTP, since that organization is determined by the configuration on the server itself.

I guess you are right on that one, my thoughts were drifting more towards a corporate environment.

I also love your Facebook maners, but, unfortunately I haven't met anybody who does that.

> When its comes to having a converstation, particularly with multiple people, I can't think of anything worse. I always dread tracking down information when I have to dig into achived mailing lists

This is one aspect where newsgroups do better than email. But, unlike email, you need to establish peering arrangements with other NNTP servers (if you run your own). Wtih email, the MTA can rely on DNS MX records to route the message to the correct server.

> When its comes to having a converstation, particularly with multiple people, I can't think of anything worse. I always dread tracking down information when I have to dig into achived mailing lists

Can you give an example of a communication medium — where having a conversation involves multiple different people over the course of weeks or months, with message frequencies varying from several-per-minute to a-few-per-month, and message sizes varying from single sentences to essays — works better than e-mail (and e-mail lists)?

I agree that unwinding a sprawling email thread after the fact can be a lot of work, but I also haven't seen any other medium make that job any easier. It seems to me to be an inherently hard problem.

> the constant CC'ing

Isn't this exactly like adding/mentioning someone in a chat room? Problem is that in a chat room all communication is public and you're seeing/getting notified of every single small message. This is hugely inefficient. For e-mails, one can define filters to park e-mails where you're on CC to read later. You don't have this flexibility with Chat/Slack - the tool defines much more how you should be reading the incoming stream of messages.

Mentioning Google Docs as a part of Luddism is making me feel old.

So is misreading SaaS as SAS and thinking of the old query language.

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