7 ms·

E-mail is the Universal Platform

102 points by skevvis 15y ago

jwieringa 15y ago
I love my inbox and I don't know what I would do without it. I use it as my primary interface to as many applications as possible. E-mail forever!
- ajankovic 15y ago
  What kind of email service do you feel is lacking at the moment? What would you like to do over the email that you can't right now?
blueplastic 15y ago
So, why would I trust you with 5 years of all my sent and received emails? Should I take your word for it that you'll just save the email addresses and the sent/received timestamp for each?
- skevvis 15y ago
  @blueplastic - we do regular security audits and will soon engage with a firm to provide that guarantee as well. In the interim, what would you like to see to alleviate that?
  - blueplastic 15y ago
    I do appreciate the reply. The only way I'd feel safe is if you never got or saw my emails. Instead of me sending 5 years of my emails to you, I'd rather you send me 2,000 lines of code to analyze my email locally and locally tell me who I need to follow up with. If your analyzation code came to me, I wouldn't even mind if it did NLP and deeply datamined the emails to tell me who I may have missed following up with. Ideally, I'd like to see unsecure e-mail replaced by crypto communication systems based on OTR and people locally storing their emails on Raspberry Pis, but that's dangerous stuff and I probably shouldn't have even said that. Thing is, I'm sure you're nice guys and gals right now, but when you're billionaires and have 500 million people's digital data, evil you will turn. By the way, good presentation at SVNewTech last night.
  - dsr_ 15y ago
    I have to think about the security of my business. The way to get me to stop running my own SMTP and IMAP is to provide a service which is: - auditable (our stored messages by us; the whole system by a third party) - reliable (99.9% uptime, that's not so awful) - resilient (if you lose a server or a data center, I shouldn't have to worry about it. Ideally I don't notice anything except perhaps a slowdown) - guaranteed (with a hefty bond against security issues and another one against prolonged downtime, not a pro-rated refund) Those are the gotta-haves. If you provide a secure clearinghouse to talk to our clients and vendors, that would be a major selling point. It has the chicken-and-egg problem, of course, but also the network value effect.
strait 15y ago
Meanwhile, in the real world, delivery is not reliable.
- spydum 15y ago
  Many years ago, working a support desk at an ISP, I fielded calls from angry seniors who wanted to know why their dozens of email forwards were not getting delivered to their friends, who desperately needed to know about the Microsoft/AOL cash reward giveaway. Suffering through the message logs, I would find typo'd email addresses, blacklisting message, or whatever the cause of the day was. I'd then have to explain that email and the internet was "best effort", and there was no guarantee of delivery, even if you did manage to type the email address correctly. Interesting now, how most people wave off email delivery as flaky, or accept that spam filters will eat the 5% of incorrectly classified mail. Are social networks more or less reliable? Have we all become numb to the best efforts of the web? I'm not sure. I think it is interesting though. I wonder if those seniors still call up these days?
webwanderings 15y ago
"As Contactually is an professional " Do people really have service oriented websites in open with such obvious mistakes?
- skevvis 15y ago
  Yes, but they fix them as soon as it's brought to their attention. Thanks!
sankalpk 15y ago
http://www.quora.com/Why-did-ccLoop-fail http://www.quora.com/Why-did-ccLoop-fail? This is an interesting read.
- skevvis 15y ago
  @sankalpk - I've seen that before, and it's a great post-mortem. I can see why it's hard for a collaboration company that's not solving a strong pain point. We look at the relationships that are live and die via e-mail, and are building a solution for that.
rvkennedy 15y ago
Sooner or later, email will either die or get better. The problem with email for most of its life was that there was little competition. Certainly SMTP has never had a serious rival. IMAP came to challenge POP, and won: this made email better. And Exchange has certainly set a standard that IMAP and webmail providers have had to meet. But it's not much compared to the seething shark tank that the web has been for the last twenty years. Sooner or later I think a RESTful HTTP or SPDY API will replace IMAP, and (for client-server comms at least) SMTP. I think ccLoop is a side-issue, because they were addressing the problem of mailing list management. Contactually's approach seems to be wrong-headed to me, making the user send and receive more emails! But really it's more of a CRM system than a step forward for email, so perhaps it's solving a problem I don't have. At comms.io, we're writing an email client. The idea is to work with IMAP, take on the lessons of Gmail, but modernize the experience, make it lightweight and transparent. If you've seen the Gmail interface lately, what I mean by lightweight is the opposite of that. Anyone who's interested in helping out, do get in touch.
- skevvis 15y ago
  Completely agree with you that email will either die or get better. The timeline is the question. We haven't seen any strong competitors to the current incarnation of "e-mail" come and really threaten the core architecture. E-mail is too open, too standardized, too widely implemented to be quickly overtaken by any other solution. With Contactually, we started with that theory - e-mail is still, and will be for the foreseeable future, the primary mode of communication. We're not focusing on making the user send and receive more emails - but we push the realization that e-mail is already where you're doing most of your communication. Why shouldn't you have a tool that leverages that?
  - blueplastic 15y ago
    Did you totally miss Facebook's existence? Teenagers these days don't even use email. Facebook's sucking in the next generation's messages. Email's too slow and asynchronous they cry. Douglas Rushkoff would bet to differ, but anyway. Facebook's unified messaging was kind of interesting, but I might as well be CCing all my email to Kim Jong-un.
blueplastic 15y ago
E-mail is so broken fundamentally, that it's not even funny. I'm surprised more people aren't trying to replace it. E-mail's based on the idea that it is free to message me and bother me and take a few precious seconds of my stream of consciousness. If it's free to email people, then of course spammers will flood email channels with their deals and scams. Ideally, I want a communications platform where only my 200 or so friends, co-workers and friends of friends can message me for free. Anybody else who wants to contact me has to send the message with a $1 bitcoin (interrupting my stream of conciousness price would be custom set by me, so lil' wayne would probably set his price at $75). If the message from a stranger I got was in fact a cool dude I met at a party last weekend following up on that cat picture, then I'd click "reply and return" to give him back that bitcoin. If I see that the message is from a prince, I'd just ignore it and go buy some gum or something with his precious $1. The current horrible e-mail architecture feeds giants like gmail, microsoft, yahoo b/c everyone is going to get tons of junkmail and people around 1999 had to start moving to cloud based providers who did free spam detection to parse through people's emails (Outlook Express sucked at spam cleaning). Problem is the web giants are snorting in everyone's private communications. It's as if the US Postal Service offered to deliver all mail for free, but in exchange opened everything and read it and if they thought this is something you shouldn't read or if this is marketing propaganda, so they won't deliver it to the recipient. I think pretty much everyone would think that's a crappyly architected postal service, but I guess with email we shouldn't be thinking about those kinds of things. Let's just figure out some new technical protocol instead, after IMAP and POP and SMTP will be replaced by SPDY or RESTful HTTP right? Yeah, let's build that instead. True, e-mail is a universal platform, but it sucks.
- sliverstorm 15y ago
  It sounds like you are asking for Facebook?
  - blueplastic 15y ago
    wtf
- Auguste 15y ago
Tawheed 15y ago
Email is not going to die. It will evolve. Just like how websites and browsers have evolved over the past 10 years.
- sliverstorm 15y ago
  +1. I swear email has been "Going to die" for at least as long as it has been The Year of Linux on the Desktop.
bane 15y ago
I'm almost convinced at this point if somebody simply built a facebook like interface, and used email as the messaging protocol, but didn't display it like an email, more like a FB conversation (as opposed to a threaded or gmail-like conversation view), that it would be used. There's not really much that's offered by alternate messaging solutions that email can't do if it existing in the right sort of framework: 1) Person-to-person? Check 2) Person-to-group? Check 3) Group-to-group? Check 4) Group-to-person? Check 5) Multimedia? Check 6) Fancy formatting? Check 7) Attached files? Check 8) Near real-time? Check (most of the time) 9) Deliver Fault tolerant? Check 10) Federated/distributed? Check Why everybody seems to want to reinvent email is beyond me. About the only thing that FB or G+ offer is the storage of a server-side contact list so I don't have to remember their email address and the use of a white-list for sender/receivers so I don't get spam. Offer the same with email and a decent web interface and you've basically recreated any "modern" social network, except it'll be built on a time-tested, robust protocol that's already ubiquitous across the internet and already has billions of users. edit I guess what I'm saying is that it's the application layer (server and client side) in the email equation that needs most of the rework, not the protocol layers.
- chetan51 15y ago
  I agree with most of what you said, except that the real-time aspect is not real-time enough. If email were actually real-time, then it could completely replace instant messaging as well. Right now it's lacking.
  - bane 15y ago
    True, which is probably why google put im right next to the message viewer in gmail. I know of many ocassions where a flurry of emails turned into an im session. I think gmail's "conversations" are really the first try at what I'm talking about, a new front end on email, but I don't think they work well enough personally. And they haven't really expanded well on the concept recently.
    - chetan51 15y ago
      Google Wave was really what I thought the ideal marriage between email and IM. Why did it fail again?
Argorak 15y ago
Just as a funny observation: If email is the universal platform, why is the "Call us"-link more prominent than the email contact? :)
moe 15y ago
Those who don't understand Usenet are forever doomed to re-invent it...

102 points by skevvis 15y ago

I love my inbox and I don't know what I would do without it. I use it as my primary interface to as many applications as possible. E-mail forever!

ajankovic 15y ago
What kind of email service do you feel is lacking at the moment? What would you like to do over the email that you can't right now?

blueplastic 15y ago

So, why would I trust you with 5 years of all my sent and received emails? Should I take your word for it that you'll just save the email addresses and the sent/received timestamp for each?

skevvis 15y ago
@blueplastic - we do regular security audits and will soon engage with a firm to provide that guarantee as well. In the interim, what would you like to see to alleviate that?
- blueplastic 15y ago
  I do appreciate the reply. The only way I'd feel safe is if you never got or saw my emails. Instead of me sending 5 years of my emails to you, I'd rather you send me 2,000 lines of code to analyze my email locally and locally tell me who I need to follow up with. If your analyzation code came to me, I wouldn't even mind if it did NLP and deeply datamined the emails to tell me who I may have missed following up with. Ideally, I'd like to see unsecure e-mail replaced by crypto communication systems based on OTR and people locally storing their emails on Raspberry Pis, but that's dangerous stuff and I probably shouldn't have even said that. Thing is, I'm sure you're nice guys and gals right now, but when you're billionaires and have 500 million people's digital data, evil you will turn. By the way, good presentation at SVNewTech last night.
- dsr_ 15y ago
  I have to think about the security of my business. The way to get me to stop running my own SMTP and IMAP is to provide a service which is: - auditable (our stored messages by us; the whole system by a third party) - reliable (99.9% uptime, that's not so awful) - resilient (if you lose a server or a data center, I shouldn't have to worry about it. Ideally I don't notice anything except perhaps a slowdown) - guaranteed (with a hefty bond against security issues and another one against prolonged downtime, not a pro-rated refund) Those are the gotta-haves. If you provide a secure clearinghouse to talk to our clients and vendors, that would be a major selling point. It has the chicken-and-egg problem, of course, but also the network value effect.

strait 15y ago

Meanwhile, in the real world, delivery is not reliable.

spydum 15y ago
Many years ago, working a support desk at an ISP, I fielded calls from angry seniors who wanted to know why their dozens of email forwards were not getting delivered to their friends, who desperately needed to know about the Microsoft/AOL cash reward giveaway. Suffering through the message logs, I would find typo'd email addresses, blacklisting message, or whatever the cause of the day was. I'd then have to explain that email and the internet was "best effort", and there was no guarantee of delivery, even if you did manage to type the email address correctly. Interesting now, how most people wave off email delivery as flaky, or accept that spam filters will eat the 5% of incorrectly classified mail. Are social networks more or less reliable? Have we all become numb to the best efforts of the web? I'm not sure. I think it is interesting though. I wonder if those seniors still call up these days?

webwanderings 15y ago

"As Contactually is an professional " Do people really have service oriented websites in open with such obvious mistakes?

skevvis 15y ago
Yes, but they fix them as soon as it's brought to their attention. Thanks!

sankalpk 15y ago

http://www.quora.com/Why-did-ccLoop-fail http://www.quora.com/Why-did-ccLoop-fail? This is an interesting read.

skevvis 15y ago
@sankalpk - I've seen that before, and it's a great post-mortem. I can see why it's hard for a collaboration company that's not solving a strong pain point. We look at the relationships that are live and die via e-mail, and are building a solution for that.

rvkennedy 15y ago

Sooner or later, email will either die or get better. The problem with email for most of its life was that there was little competition. Certainly SMTP has never had a serious rival. IMAP came to challenge POP, and won: this made email better. And Exchange has certainly set a standard that IMAP and webmail providers have had to meet. But it's not much compared to the seething shark tank that the web has been for the last twenty years. Sooner or later I think a RESTful HTTP or SPDY API will replace IMAP, and (for client-server comms at least) SMTP. I think ccLoop is a side-issue, because they were addressing the problem of mailing list management. Contactually's approach seems to be wrong-headed to me, making the user send and receive more emails! But really it's more of a CRM system than a step forward for email, so perhaps it's solving a problem I don't have. At comms.io, we're writing an email client. The idea is to work with IMAP, take on the lessons of Gmail, but modernize the experience, make it lightweight and transparent. If you've seen the Gmail interface lately, what I mean by lightweight is the opposite of that. Anyone who's interested in helping out, do get in touch.

skevvis 15y ago
Completely agree with you that email will either die or get better. The timeline is the question. We haven't seen any strong competitors to the current incarnation of "e-mail" come and really threaten the core architecture. E-mail is too open, too standardized, too widely implemented to be quickly overtaken by any other solution. With Contactually, we started with that theory - e-mail is still, and will be for the foreseeable future, the primary mode of communication. We're not focusing on making the user send and receive more emails - but we push the realization that e-mail is already where you're doing most of your communication. Why shouldn't you have a tool that leverages that?
- blueplastic 15y ago
  Did you totally miss Facebook's existence? Teenagers these days don't even use email. Facebook's sucking in the next generation's messages. Email's too slow and asynchronous they cry. Douglas Rushkoff would bet to differ, but anyway. Facebook's unified messaging was kind of interesting, but I might as well be CCing all my email to Kim Jong-un.

blueplastic 15y ago

E-mail is so broken fundamentally, that it's not even funny. I'm surprised more people aren't trying to replace it. E-mail's based on the idea that it is free to message me and bother me and take a few precious seconds of my stream of consciousness. If it's free to email people, then of course spammers will flood email channels with their deals and scams. Ideally, I want a communications platform where only my 200 or so friends, co-workers and friends of friends can message me for free. Anybody else who wants to contact me has to send the message with a $1 bitcoin (interrupting my stream of conciousness price would be custom set by me, so lil' wayne would probably set his price at $75). If the message from a stranger I got was in fact a cool dude I met at a party last weekend following up on that cat picture, then I'd click "reply and return" to give him back that bitcoin. If I see that the message is from a prince, I'd just ignore it and go buy some gum or something with his precious $1. The current horrible e-mail architecture feeds giants like gmail, microsoft, yahoo b/c everyone is going to get tons of junkmail and people around 1999 had to start moving to cloud based providers who did free spam detection to parse through people's emails (Outlook Express sucked at spam cleaning). Problem is the web giants are snorting in everyone's private communications. It's as if the US Postal Service offered to deliver all mail for free, but in exchange opened everything and read it and if they thought this is something you shouldn't read or if this is marketing propaganda, so they won't deliver it to the recipient. I think pretty much everyone would think that's a crappyly architected postal service, but I guess with email we shouldn't be thinking about those kinds of things. Let's just figure out some new technical protocol instead, after IMAP and POP and SMTP will be replaced by SPDY or RESTful HTTP right? Yeah, let's build that instead. True, e-mail is a universal platform, but it sucks.

sliverstorm 15y ago
It sounds like you are asking for Facebook?
- blueplastic 15y ago
  wtf
Auguste 15y ago

Tawheed 15y ago

Email is not going to die. It will evolve. Just like how websites and browsers have evolved over the past 10 years.

sliverstorm 15y ago
+1. I swear email has been "Going to die" for at least as long as it has been The Year of Linux on the Desktop.

bane 15y ago

I'm almost convinced at this point if somebody simply built a facebook like interface, and used email as the messaging protocol, but didn't display it like an email, more like a FB conversation (as opposed to a threaded or gmail-like conversation view), that it would be used. There's not really much that's offered by alternate messaging solutions that email can't do if it existing in the right sort of framework: 1) Person-to-person? Check 2) Person-to-group? Check 3) Group-to-group? Check 4) Group-to-person? Check 5) Multimedia? Check 6) Fancy formatting? Check 7) Attached files? Check 8) Near real-time? Check (most of the time) 9) Deliver Fault tolerant? Check 10) Federated/distributed? Check Why everybody seems to want to reinvent email is beyond me. About the only thing that FB or G+ offer is the storage of a server-side contact list so I don't have to remember their email address and the use of a white-list for sender/receivers so I don't get spam. Offer the same with email and a decent web interface and you've basically recreated any "modern" social network, except it'll be built on a time-tested, robust protocol that's already ubiquitous across the internet and already has billions of users. edit I guess what I'm saying is that it's the application layer (server and client side) in the email equation that needs most of the rework, not the protocol layers.

chetan51 15y ago
I agree with most of what you said, except that the real-time aspect is not real-time enough. If email were actually real-time, then it could completely replace instant messaging as well. Right now it's lacking.
- bane 15y ago
  True, which is probably why google put im right next to the message viewer in gmail. I know of many ocassions where a flurry of emails turned into an im session. I think gmail's "conversations" are really the first try at what I'm talking about, a new front end on email, but I don't think they work well enough personally. And they haven't really expanded well on the concept recently.
  - chetan51 15y ago
    Google Wave was really what I thought the ideal marriage between email and IM. Why did it fail again?

Argorak 15y ago

Just as a funny observation: If email is the universal platform, why is the "Call us"-link more prominent than the email contact? :)

moe 15y ago

Those who don't understand Usenet are forever doomed to re-invent it...