9 ms·

Email will last forever

350 points by mathouc 12y ago

pearknob 12y ago
I think that a lot of "startups" are using the fantasy of an email-less world as a marketing tactic. I agree, I don't think email is going to disappear. Whether that is a good thing or bad, it's irrelevant
- daigoba66 12y ago
  I'm still hoping to see a resurgence in software designed around federated protocols and architectures. Basically the opposite of things like Google Hangouts, iMessage, Skype, Dropbox, iCloud/Google Docs, and many others.
  - pearknob 12y ago
    Totally agree. Which is why I'm excited about the Gmail API and Inboxapp
    - walterbell 12y ago
      Is that centralized or federated?
mrb 12y ago
The fact "email will last forever" is precisely why I believe it is absolutely the best protocol to build automatic services to access and share personal information. I have spoken about it here: http://blog.zorinaq.com/?e=76 http://blog.zorinaq.com/?e=76 Edit: Someone1234: you don't need to wait for companies to support my proposal. It already works today with Gmail: try my live demo on pm33at@gmail.com - it works by leveraging standard auto-responder features. As to the comparison with XKCD 927, it is invalid: my proposal is radically different from anything that currently exists, because it is decentralized while all current personal information sharing platforms are centralized. Edit: rakoo: yes, XMPP would work too, and would probably be a bit better than SMTP because it is real time. However in practice building something over SMTP has more chances of seeing success (because not everybody uses XMPP, but everybody has email).
- Someone1234 12y ago
  Does this have the classic XKCD 927 problem (https://xkcd.com/927/ https://xkcd.com/927/)? Also wasn't this what XML was meant to solve (a single unified standard for interop)? It could "work" but unless you got at least Microsoft (Exchange server, Hotmail) and Google (Gmail) to sign up then it won't go anywhere (which is largely the issue with all email momentum, Microsoft and Google have no interest so it cannot move forward).
  - silverbax88 12y ago
    XML is a markup to establish protocol, not a standard by itself (other than the basic syntactical standard). A standard would be something like MathML.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - schnable 12y ago
    Google did try to evolve email with Wave... it didn't take, for the reasons described in the article (among others, perhaps).
- rakoo 12y ago
  It strikes me that this is all available with XMPP, which also has user@domain address; If we build the correct tools, XMPP can very well supplant SMTP. http://sat.goffi.org/features.html http://sat.goffi.org/features.html
  - jug6ernaut 12y ago
    Which makes it even sadder that XMPP is being dropped by so many. XMPP is awesome.
  - hobarrera 12y ago
    Indeed, if XMPP gained enough popularity, it would solve this problem, since it already implements several of these things (personal information, location, etc), AND is extensible.
dunno 12y ago
No, it won't. I distinctly remember being told by many people that email would never replace letter mail because email was too impersonal.
- dunno 12y ago
  Are you kidding me? In my lifetime, letter mail has had a longer run than email. And you presume from our brief couple years with it that email is never going to be different?
- moron4hire 12y ago
  "Impersonal" was only ever a label applied to email by people who didn't yet have access to the Internet, jealous they were being excluded. It's the same people who decried smartphones. In all areas that matter, email is superior to paper letters. And in all areas that matter, no one has proposed an alternative to email that is superior in a way that cannot be applied to email. In other words, whatever is wrong about email, can be fixed from within the system. Paper letters had to become email to fix what was wrong with paper letters.
  - dragonwriter 12y ago
    > "Impersonal" was only ever a label applied to email by people who didn't yet have access to the Internet, jealous they were being excluded. This is factually incorrect. Everone I've ever heard use the term to describe email had internet access and was a regular email user at the time they used the term. I'm sure some people who didn't have email have used the term, and I'm sure some of those people had the motivation you describe, but it is simply not true that it was "only ever" used by people without access to the internet (or, more relevantly, email -- whether on the internet or otherwise, as electronic mail existed on networks besides the internet.) > In all areas that matter, email is superior to paper letters. "areas that matter" is a subjective category (and, further, superiority in each of those areas is, generally, subjective as well), it may well be superior to you in each of the areas that matter to you, but those subjective judgements may not hold more generally.
    - 12y ago
grexi 12y ago
The single most important issue with email: Team Inboxes. As soon as more than one person works with an inbox, it sucks big time. But I agree - email will last forever, nearly none of the products you mentioned work without an email notification feature.
- dsr_ 12y ago
  A team inbox is almost always better handled by a ticketing system or a mailing list or both.
  - mathouc 12y ago
    or Front :)
    - dsr_ 12y ago
      A brief look through Front suggests that it is a specialized ticketing system. I predict that, if successful, it will incorporate more traditional ticketing system features.
- gphil 12y ago
  > nearly none of the products you mentioned work without an email notification feature. Not to mention the ability to reply to those emails to add new content to those products. Building around email as a messaging backbone is incredibly powerful.
- dasil003 12y ago
  Is that really the single most important issue? I'd lean towards privacy and authentication as being more important. Team inboxes are not really a mandatory part of email.
  - grexi 12y ago
    At least for me that's the main painpoint which cannot be solved by email alone.
- 12y ago
liotier 12y ago
No one mentions portability, but I believe it is a wonderful property of email - I have more than 15 years of email, moved across various servers and clients on various operating systems and it is still available and functional. What other personal communication channel is that resilient to technological change ?
- out_of_protocol 12y ago
  To my list of quotes. Actually, like 50 years, way before internet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email#Origin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email#Origin
- johnchristopher 12y ago
  Tongue in cheeck: paper is.
- walterbell 12y ago
  Thanks, Jon Postel, http://www.internetsociety.org/what-we-do/grants-and-awards/awards/postel-service-award/ten-year-tribute-jon-postel http://www.internetsociety.org/what-we-do/grants-and-awards/...
- drfritznunkie 12y ago
  Whitfield Diffie (yes, of Diffie-Hellman), just posted to the IP list an email he pulled up from 1976(!) in response to a crappy article about VA Shiva Ayyadura "inventing" email. I'm sure he's got even older emails, but the fact that he had it, was able to easily find it, and then resend it with a descendant of itself 38 years later is pretty amazing to me! " A quick look at my files finds messages from from 1976 that use that format: 29-SEP-76 1935 FTP:CERF at USC-ISI Data Communication Conference/ Sept 1977 Date: 29 SEP 1976 1802-PDT From: CERF at USC-ISI Subject: Data Communication Conference/ Sept 1977 To: walker cc: cerf, wd at SU-AI 22-AUG-76 0857 FTP:LEFAIVRE at RUTGERS-10 MORE ON THE LISP COMPILER Date: 22 Aug 1976 (Sunday) 1155-Est From: LEFAIVRE at RUTGERS-10 Subject: MORE ON THE LISP COMPILER To: DIFFIE at SU-AI so I don't see how this can be novel in 1978. Whit "
- ibisum 12y ago
kevincennis 12y ago
> "People spend on average 2.5 hours per day on their emails" Source? That seems really, really high to me for an average.
- xwowsersx 12y ago
  What does that even mean "on" their emails? Actively reading and replying to email is very different from having email open or receiving emails on your phone, etc.
- michael_h 12y ago
  That sounds about right to me if you include both personal and work email time. You might be surprised at the number of people in large organizations that spend seven hours a day actively reading and writing email.
- eric_cc 12y ago
  I would be really surprised if the real average is even 5 minutes. Average would include people who check email once a week or even far less than that
- TeMPOraL 12y ago
  Well, it's not high if you count writing in. Today I spent ~2h just on a single e-mail conversation (few e-mails sent, few received). Writing thoughtfully to another human takes time.
Mz 12y ago
- Email is not sexy? Design beautiful interfaces. Mailbox has managed to make email light, fast, and mobile-friendly. Sparrow was creating the most intuitive and pleasurable mailing experience etc. I wish the author had not said "etc" at the end. He is obviously very knowledgeable about the topic. A lot of people, even people who spend LOTS of time online (like me) have not tried out every email client out there, and this is a missed opportunity to inform me and impress me with his depth of expertise on the domain his company is involved in. I am sure I am guilty of this at times, where I either assume "everyone knows what I know" or I realize they don't and I don't want to sound like a braggart or something but I find myself feeling like I have been told "surely, you know all these examples and what they did different/right" and the answer is "No, no I do not -- what did they do??"
billpg 12y ago
Looking at the listed "Email is..." statements, an important one was missed. Email is broken. Disagree? I'm sure your response expressing your disagreement won't end up in the spam folder.
lucian1900 12y ago
It is, however, a horrifically bad protocol. We don't need a new app, but a better protocol for unified mail, IM and audio/video. XMPP is close, but flawed.
- digikata 12y ago
  I agree, email as a communications may very well survive forever at the endpoints, but I keep hoping something richer will subsume it.
- leonroy 12y ago
  I have my own opinions on the subject but curious what you see as XMPPs failings?
  - lucian1900 12y ago
    Very high overhead (largely because of all the XML) and the implicit requirement of a persistent connection. There are other things, like awkward and unevenly supported voice and encryption, but those are higher level concerns. TextSecure's protocol is probably closest to what I'd like to see as a standard.
hrvbr 12y ago
The concept of email is too fuzzy. Is it SMTP that will last forever? This technology is more like sending postcards that every middleman can read. Certainly a more private alternative will replace it someday, and it should be more spam-proof. Also email serves many purposes. If it is to be replaced, it will be on a use-case by use-case manner. RSS is a better alternative to one-to-many mailing lists. Forums are a better alternative to many-to-many mailing lists. Etc. But yes, we should improve what we have until we can replace it.
- dinglefuk 12y ago
  SMTP and POP have encrypted analogous. Web server+Forum+Web browsers is hardly a better alternative to email many-many mailing lists.
  - daigoba66 12y ago
    While SMTP and POP protocols can be transmitted over TLS between hosts, which prevents reading messages along the wire, the email data itself is _not_ encrypted. A compromised SMTP server can easily read and copy any message received or transmitted.
    - byerley 12y ago
      And, even if you use a side-channel to distribute keys between the sender and receiver (to encrypt the data safely), the header absolutely has to be plain-text. Governments and companies scraping email meta-data is already a huge problem. A protocol closer to Tor would make for much more secure email distribution, but it would also require a complete protocol rewrite. Potential death of email from a back-end point of view at least.
- sliverstorm 12y ago
  Encrypted SMTP is already in widespread use. Many MTA's already receive and deliver email over secure channels, and email clients (e.g. Outlook) have supported secure channels for a long time.
scoofy 12y ago
Depends on what you mean by "forever." If you mean, say, 30-50 years, even maybe 1000, sure, i'll give you that, but i'm still skeptical, but to suggest that there won't be a better communication tool that comes along to replace the written word from one node to one other, i'd say you're deluded. There is lots of room for improvement.
- gabriel34 12y ago
  Agreed. It might seem pedantic to call this article on its use of "forever", but it is not. By setting this in stone you are actually discouraging innovation. Not everyone who promises ground breaking enhancement over email is right, but someone might come up with something. And if the article's author really meant forever, I can envision a future of effortless communication through PC facilitated "telepathy" or any other sci-fi concept that obviates email. "Eternity, my friend, is a long f[*]ing time"
- vegabook 12y ago
  30-50 years is surely "forever" even in snail mail terms. 1000 years? Wow now we're talking about an era-defining technology for civilization itself! I'm going to go with your lower bound: if email lasts largely unchanged for 30 years, then it will have been the most important application of the internet era.
baumbart 12y ago
Well for me, Email is already dead. Of course, dead software still exists, for information can not be destroyed. But, there will be more surveillance. There will be more counter-surveillance tools becoming popular. But Email will not stay on that list. Over the long run, the electronic mail will fall back behind inherently encrypted solutions. At least I hope that.
- jcbrand 12y ago
  What do you use instead of email?
  - baumbart 12y ago
    https://bitmessage.org/ https://bitmessage.org/
    - walterbell 12y ago
      Isn't bitmessage (like bitcoin) susceptible to traffic analysis?
      - baumbart 12y ago
        No. Bitmessage is essentially a decentralized version of alt.anonymous.messages.
josephschmoe 12y ago
Email will last as long as we are thinking of computers in terms of files and text. That's the foreseeable future. Anything beyond that is speculation.
ChuckMcM 12y ago
I find it interesting to contrast 'forever' with another technology that will last forever 'vinyl records'. I expect there will always be point to point, store and forward communication channels, but those channels have existed for millenia, from travelers who stacked rocks to tell those who came after where the trail was, to people who send compromising photos of themselves across cellular networks. So if we set aside the tautology for a moment, communication channels get morphed into a solution for a particular need, regardless of how well they service that need, and when there is a particularly wide disparity between need and implementation, there is an opportunity to create a better channel. My current favorite example is Trello as a way of communicating activity status from many to many on many projects. Something email does poorly (but has been used for in the past) and Trello does brilliantly. But lets look at the points one by one. #1 everyone has an email address -- sure today they do, and 25 years ago nobody did, and 25 years from now its possible everyone will have a "fooservice" address. #2 email is flexible -- see my point above, flexing is not the same as serving. #3 other stuff is great for professional communication but we still use email. -- and before that inter-office memos. I get that these guys (Front) are invested in email sticking around but I would note that putting an adapter layer in front of it is no more, nor less, efficient than putting an adapter layer in front of TCP/IP or smoke signals or a 45 year old text file transfer protocol, whether or not "email" in the form of SMTP will survive should be irrelevant to Front, the question should be will the need for their service survive.
- soneca 12y ago
  About #1, I don't have the data, but I would bet that there are more people with a SMS address (aka phone number) than with an email address.
  - alan_cx 12y ago
    Not disagreeing, but a number of people have many email addresses. No idea how that stacks up with people with SMS though.
    - soneca 12y ago
pkorzeniewski 12y ago
E-mail is a sufficient way of communication for almost every case - just like traditional, physical mail was 100 years ago. You can send a party invite to your friends, you can send family pictures to your mother, you can discuss a project with your co-worker and you can send an invoice to your customer - all of that using a single application. If you need to contact someone immediately - use IM or phone. Why do we need a seperate tool for every scenario? Sure, they provide some useful stuff, but nothing beats simply opening your e-mail client and typing a message to whoever you want.
usethis 12y ago
Sure, email is not perfect, but it is the most flexible communication method the internet has to offer. It is not tight to a single organization, or "owned" by a single company and reasonably portable with an open protocol. Tools will be invented to further optimize the experience, but in essence it will remain the same, just like a telephone call hasn't changed. I will not commit an essential part of my business again, to a single company's closed-sourced product (like for instance MS Office in the past, though OSX being the exception). I recently started using Mailbox as my personal Email Client again, and I am very impressed in how they "optimized" the experience. It basically converts your emails into task items, with different priorities, in lists etc. When combined with notes, it could make any task / note app obsolete. Unfortunately it only works with GMail and iCloud, but I hope Dropbox keeps investing in the product.
usethis 12y ago
Sure, email is not perfect, but it is the most flexible communication method the internet has to offer. It is not tight to a single organization, or "owned" by a single company and reasonably portable with an open protocol. Tools will be invented to further optimize the experience, but in essence it will remain the same, just like a telephone call hasn't changed. I will not commit an essential part of my business again, to a single company's closed-sourced product (like for instance MS Office in the past, though OSX being the exception). I recently started using Mailbox as my personal Email Client again, and I am very impressed in how they "optimized" the experience. It basically converts your emails into task items, with different priorities, in lists etc. When combined with notes, it could make any task / note app obsolete. Unfortunately it only works with GMail and iCloud, but I hope Dropbox keeps investing in the product.
elwell 12y ago
IMO, written communication en totale will fade away within the century. Thinking [0] is much faster. [0] - http://emotiv.com/ http://emotiv.com/
- miles932 12y ago
  Having tried it, and recognizing the degree to which this (at least so far) is happening in the "conscious" mind-space rather than sub-conscious/motor-muscle-memory mind-space, typing is vastly faster. Today. It strikes me as an amazingly hard problem to separate one's "inner monologue" from "thoughts i want to transmit". I suspect an easy cheat would be "imagine typing it out" to create a specific, "physical" demarcation in communication types.
- steauengeglase 12y ago
  Even in a conjectural utopia, for legal reasons, you'll always need some kind of "hard copy". No one wants thought blasts from the IRS.
talles 12y ago
Forever is a strong word... but I do believe that email will stand still for some good years. Email will last forever because email has been around since... well... forever. That is one key factor that the article misses: practically everyone is used to email. It's really tough to replace something so well known and widespread. I guess the desire of doing so it's due to so many people struggling with email. How many times have I peeked people's email client looking to hundreds, heck sometimes thousands, of unread emails. I always had inbox zero. I won't say that for me email is a joy, but is definitely no struggle. I guess I'm more organized than most people anyway...
andyl 12y ago
There are tools to make use of HTTP in all sorts of ways. Curl, Wget, Restful APIs, Sinatra, Grape, etc. Fast, flexible, lightweight. Email - not so much. Want a local email server? There's Postfix - yuckkk. The overhead of spam - yuckk. The lack of tooling, the lack of configurability, the DNS complexity. The fact that it requires a SAAS to do shared inboxes. Yuck. Email could be so much better.
- ah- 12y ago
  Check out OpenSMTPd, that makes setting up an email server so much easier. It's still far from what it could be, but pure bliss compared to Postfix.
- aaronem 12y ago
  What's wrong with Postfix? Sure, configuring it takes a little work, but it's not hard, especially not by comparison with Sendmail, which was the standard everywhere when I began my career.
  - _delirium 12y ago
    I didn't even find configuring Postfix to take much work, and I'd never configured a mailserver until a few months ago. Debian's config script autogenerated a basic configuration for me, after prompting with a few questions: receive email for my domain to my unix account, and relay mail only from local or AUTH'd clients. This is the entirety of the manual config I added on top of what Debian produced: # use maildir instead of mbox home_mailbox = Maildir/ # reject obvious spam smtpd_client_restrictions = permit_mynetworks, permit_sasl_authenticated, reject_unknown_client_hostname, reject_rbl_client zen.spamhaus.org It has a very nice manual too, but I have not had to use most of it, because it just works out of the box.
jrapdx3 12y ago
Email is wonderful and terrible. SMTP is pretty simple, and everyone with a static IP can run their own email server. Configuring it requires some study, but it's not too hard. OTOH creating email clients is hard. I wrote a web server and wanted a webmail client. Basic SMPT messaging is straightforward enough, but MIME is a confusing tangle of protocols and rules that is difficult to understand and implement correctly. I mostly succeeded but it took a long time. Part of the problem is the complexity means protocols are often violated and my webmail client has to deal with loads of exceptions to protocol rules to work in the real world. But that's hardly limited to email. Look at http, it has arcane rules too, and some of the common security issues on the net are the result of "sloppily" implementing programs using http. (You know, XSS attacks, SQL injections and so on.) Email has warts but what doesn't. Certainly email "replacements" will have warts too, especially as they are extended to cover the breadth that email has encompassed.
michaelbuckbee 12y ago
To the point of needing email as soon as you're interfacing with a person outside of your group: I'm seeing more and more options for this built into things like HipChat and Slack (both of which have the concept of 'guest' users).
eric_cc 12y ago
"- People spend on average 2.5 hours per day on their emails - Workers check their emails an average of 74 times a day" LOL
peterevans 12y ago
Disclaimer: I work for a company for whom email is a core part of business. Email and letter-writing go together, in my mind. Not so much because email is a literal model of letter-writing, but rather because they give you an important abstraction that I think we all need, which is a form of passive communication. You may get letters which are urgent, and you may get email that is urgent, but the nature of both is that they are hands-off. You don't need to be present to receive mail or email. Well, there is some physical mail that you do need to be present for! -- that being certified mail, some package deliveries, and those represent perhaps a different abstraction. That aside, you have a mailbox to hold mail, and a carrier to deliver it to you. Nobody needs to talk to you, to tell you that happened. You can go and check your mailbox and see what you have at any time. People who want to "kill" email may dislike the form, the implementation, but the abstraction is useful. It will likely continue to be useful -- I don't foresee a time when it will not be. Email, in some sense, will stick around.
mergy 12y ago
Yes! >> http://mergy.org/2014/04/please-stop-trying-to-kill-email/ http://mergy.org/2014/04/please-stop-trying-to-kill-email/
findjashua 12y ago
I recently joined a company where bulk of the communication is done on hipchat. I find it to be a much much better way of communicating, especially due to the chatrooms. I now only use email when I need to have a conversation regarding a specific subject or something I need to bookmark (star) for later.
cletus 12y ago
There are certain phrases I hear in startup pitches that immediately cause me to tune out. One of them is some combination of social, mobile and local. Another is "fixing emaiL" or "email is broken". It isn't. With all the change that's happened with the Internet two forms of communication have proven to be incredibly resilient: SMS and email. SMS is resilient because every phone has it. It's portable and it's simple. The best effort thus far at dethroning SMS seems to be WhatsApp. Sure phone companies (particularly US phone companies) charge a ridiculous amount for SMS. It's no longer the valuable bandwidth control channel that it once was. But even so, I don't see it going away anytime soon. The beauty of email is that it's largely decentralized. With something like Facebok, you get ads inserted into your stream, you're constantly at risk of some privacy snafu and there's always the risk the service changes in some problematic (for you) way or disappears altogether (OK, Facebook isn't going anywhere anytime soon but we've all had services we like get bought out and sunsetted). Email addresses are mostly non-portable. You can have your own domain and have a portable address but most people don't. Just like a phone number has limited portability (eg only within the same country). Changing phone numbers and email addresses seems to be an infrequent enough occurrence for most people that they don't really care about it (as a whole). Certain services provide useful value-adds to email. Spam filtering on GMail is a prime example. There are ads on the Web UI but hey you don't have to use it (there are POP3/IMAP interfaces) and they aren't that offensive (as, say, Facebook ads are). The fundamental use case of both SMS and email is one person sending a message to another person. Think of this like IP (the protocol). People find each other with contacts. Think of this like DNS (kinda). Every "email killer" I've seen has made this most important use case harder or just more complicated and, more to the point, for this use case provides no tangible benefits (that anyone cares about). And in all cases you're giving up the decentralized nature of email so someone has control over your messages and your experience. Why would anyone make that tradeoff? It doesn't make any sense. So forever? Well that's tough to argue. But for a really long time? Sure, absolutely.
- mrborgen 12y ago
  The "fixing email" / "email is broken" are quotes you only hear from startup guys and UX geeks. Email is indeed working really well. Most people outside of this niche seems to have no fundamental problems with it. Just an example: I recently needed to send a script to an 8 year old kid and a grandma at around 75. Couldn't have done it any other way than email. The point being that email is an enormously broad platform. Its so broad that the second you turn to mobile to solve email, you have limited your way out the competition.
lasermike026 12y ago
It's insecure and it must die. To be more correct, email can not continue in its current form.
- JoeAltmaier 12y ago
  Right! Most of the problem is unauthentic email - spam. Why oh why don't my peers sign their email, so I can test the signature and even file them by source/topic? This seems dead obvious.
LeicaLatte 12y ago
I hate the tight coupling slack introduces. It should have been called leash instead. Glad to see it slowly going away. Email is a product of the 60s predating HTTP itself and built to stand on its own. Its non-invasive and loosely coupled which scales across all kinds of people. Not just for ADD nerds like us.
azinman2 12y ago
News flash: startup working on email product says email will last forever.
edpichler 12y ago
When Google Wave appeared on public I really liked and believed it would replace the email. I think one day the, now open sourced, Apache Wave Project will rebirth with: - a fast user interface (today really sucks); - decentralized and easy to install servers; - Features that are missing;
AndrewDucker 12y ago
The reason email will last forever is that nobody owns it. If Twitter goes bust then you lose all of your tweets. If Facebook goes bust then all of your status updates go out of the window. But email is an open, free protocol that anyone can implement and is deliberately designed to be decentralised. And so the ecosystem will last as long as a few people find it useful.
- Walkman 12y ago
  Facebook is more likely to stay than email IMO.
- ldng 12y ago
  Exactly. Email is so resilient because it's an open decentralized protocol. Every other alternatives I've seen is closed and/or centralized in a way or another. No wonder they fail.
LizVerano 12y ago
if you will not delete it so it will last forever.lol
spammy_throw1 12y ago
https://zulip.com/hello https://zulip.com/hello
Mustafabei 12y ago
Made me remember the quote by Reinhold Niebuhr: "Frantic orthodoxy is never rooted in faith but in doubt. It is when we are unsure that we are doubly sure."
deathanatos 12y ago
> The email protocol is simple and flexible. Ha, okay. I'm going to include actual emails in "the email protocol", because if you just count the network protocols you're not doing anything useful. Emails are anything but simple. They were born in the early days of the Internet, and no doubt time and the impossibility of predicting the future is responsible for how things turned out — but they are anything but simple. Email messages are ASCII only. You can put non-ASCII characters into a header however. It looks like this: Subject: =?UTF-8?B?SMOpbGzDtOKApgo=?= Writing a parser for this is an unnecessary challenge in this day. (If you ever need to do email, for parsing or outputting, get a library.) Watching a coworker unwilling to take the time to the read the RFC try to write a parser for this… is a very special hell.¹ The body also has to be ASCII, so just about every email client out there has to do: Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64 And then encode the body in base64, wasting space and network bandwidth. Technically, you can send full 8-bit message bodies, but the sender and receiver have to agree ahead of time. Either GMail doesn't support it, or it just doesn't bother even when the email destinations are all GMail. (Or, it could be because some IMAP client might get the message, and not support it.) There's also that every message has a text version and an HTML version — hopefully semantically similar — but HTML support in email clients (at least the big ones) is terrible. (see for example http://www.email-standards.org/ http://www.email-standards.org/ ) You'll think support is great on the web after you're done. I've not covered un-wrapping headers. Or the things people think aren't valid email addresses. (Your average Joe thinks [a-zA-Z0-9]+@<a domain name> matches all valid emails. Oh, and that they're case insensitive too.) Or IMAP. Or encryption. Or even whether email gets encrypted while on the wire from Hotmail to Comcast. > Slack pretends to be “an email killer” I'm not sure they're out to kill all emails… just the ones that would be better as a real-time communication. ¹Don't test your library's output email on Gmail, either. Gmail is creepy good at correcting bad input. "It works on Gmail" != it's correct. I do wish I could send restructured text emails and have the client just render them. In theory, email has everything I need. Clients just need to support it, that's all. I'll admit, that is kinda cool.
- EntiPag 12y ago
  > Email messages are ASCII only. You can put non-ASCII characters into a header however. It looks like this: To me that is a good example of how email is flexible, and also simple. It's flexible because it could support non-ascii text strings, without changing a thing. It's simple because the protocol doesn't care what the subject says. It only cares that it's an ASCII string. That sounds like good engineering to me, as well. You could argue that a new version of the email protocol could be improved to do away with those hacks, but that doesn't take anything away from email's simplicity and flexibility.
exodust 12y ago
I like email and can't see it dying at all. I have several email addresses for various purposes and it's no hassle to manage. I have about 5 email addresses and 1 work email. It's good having a dedicated "website sign-up" email address for forums and so on, where you don't care about the spam level. The flexibility in setting up your in-box how you want is a great thing about email. I don't understand people who constantly complain about their in-boxes. Learn to manage your in-box, I say, and stop crying about your first-world inbox clutter problem! I'm interested in secure online collaboration tools, and it's great to see so many options emerging. These secure tools can easily coexist with email and keep everyone happy. Email is a familiar, reliable, predictable service that everyone knows about. It doesn't get "updated" every 3 months by some agenda-driven tech giant with ideas about how we ought to be communicating.
adnsr 12y ago
Something is weird about email: Everyone can pretend to be someone else. It would be sane to reject all emails from a domain, that has no SPF record. I was asthonished when i realized that this is not already happening. Designing a large communication system it is just pure insanity to not include a sentence like this in the spec: "One can only send messages as one of the names he has power over." This could be ensured simply by SPF. It should be safe to assume, that a domain that has no SPF-record is not used for sending emails. I know that this is not the case right now, but it would change really fast, if you would push an update to the SPF-checkers, to enforce that rule. SPAM would be much less of problem than it is right now. Today you have to block ip-addresses, which is a large mess. With this rule enforced, you could block domains. Which are much harder to obtain and have a way smaller quantity.
jonifico 12y ago
Dude, if IE6 is still around, there's not chance email is going out of business any time soon. Period. However, with the rising of new communication channels, we might get better at communicating certain pieces of information over time, that's what it's all about, anyway.
akrymski 12y ago
Any argument around "Email" should first define what email is. Does the author mean SMTP will last forever? MIME? IMAP? Email is a way of sending a message using a number of old, insecure and inefficient protocols. Will better alternatives to these protocols gain traction one day? Most definitely. What will remain of "Email" as we know it today is the addressing scheme IMO. The universally acceptable way of messaging a user@any-host is the real power of email, and will remain for the foreseeable future whilst transport and encoding protocols come and go (eg VoIP succeeding PSTN). In fact, email should last as long as the DNS system exists, given that the addressing system is directly tied to it. Being a flexible P2P messaging system, email can be easily extended to provide features of any "email-killer" app out there (including realtime communication) if need be. These innovations haven't happened simply because major email server providers dominate their existing markets (Exchange!) and have little incentive to innovate given the high barrier to entry for startups selling email servers to corporates. Email clients have seen more innovation, but there's only so much a client can do to extend capabilities of email. plug: for this reason we're developing a full-stack email service in Node comprising client and server apps (end plug)
Mad_Dud 12y ago
Couple of years ago RJBS gave a great talk about email, it's complexity and issues - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JENdgiAPD6c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JENdgiAPD6c

350 points by mathouc 12y ago

I think that a lot of "startups" are using the fantasy of an email-less world as a marketing tactic. I agree, I don't think email is going to disappear. Whether that is a good thing or bad, it's irrelevant

daigoba66 12y ago
I'm still hoping to see a resurgence in software designed around federated protocols and architectures. Basically the opposite of things like Google Hangouts, iMessage, Skype, Dropbox, iCloud/Google Docs, and many others.
- pearknob 12y ago
  Totally agree. Which is why I'm excited about the Gmail API and Inboxapp
  - walterbell 12y ago
    Is that centralized or federated?

mrb 12y ago

The fact "email will last forever" is precisely why I believe it is absolutely the best protocol to build automatic services to access and share personal information. I have spoken about it here: http://blog.zorinaq.com/?e=76 http://blog.zorinaq.com/?e=76 Edit: Someone1234: you don't need to wait for companies to support my proposal. It already works today with Gmail: try my live demo on pm33at@gmail.com - it works by leveraging standard auto-responder features. As to the comparison with XKCD 927, it is invalid: my proposal is radically different from anything that currently exists, because it is decentralized while all current personal information sharing platforms are centralized. Edit: rakoo: yes, XMPP would work too, and would probably be a bit better than SMTP because it is real time. However in practice building something over SMTP has more chances of seeing success (because not everybody uses XMPP, but everybody has email).

Someone1234 12y ago
Does this have the classic XKCD 927 problem (https://xkcd.com/927/ https://xkcd.com/927/)? Also wasn't this what XML was meant to solve (a single unified standard for interop)? It could "work" but unless you got at least Microsoft (Exchange server, Hotmail) and Google (Gmail) to sign up then it won't go anywhere (which is largely the issue with all email momentum, Microsoft and Google have no interest so it cannot move forward).
- silverbax88 12y ago
  XML is a markup to establish protocol, not a standard by itself (other than the basic syntactical standard). A standard would be something like MathML.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- schnable 12y ago
  Google did try to evolve email with Wave... it didn't take, for the reasons described in the article (among others, perhaps).
rakoo 12y ago
It strikes me that this is all available with XMPP, which also has user@domain address; If we build the correct tools, XMPP can very well supplant SMTP. http://sat.goffi.org/features.html http://sat.goffi.org/features.html
- jug6ernaut 12y ago
  Which makes it even sadder that XMPP is being dropped by so many. XMPP is awesome.
- hobarrera 12y ago
  Indeed, if XMPP gained enough popularity, it would solve this problem, since it already implements several of these things (personal information, location, etc), AND is extensible.

dunno 12y ago

No, it won't. I distinctly remember being told by many people that email would never replace letter mail because email was too impersonal.

dunno 12y ago
Are you kidding me? In my lifetime, letter mail has had a longer run than email. And you presume from our brief couple years with it that email is never going to be different?
moron4hire 12y ago
"Impersonal" was only ever a label applied to email by people who didn't yet have access to the Internet, jealous they were being excluded. It's the same people who decried smartphones. In all areas that matter, email is superior to paper letters. And in all areas that matter, no one has proposed an alternative to email that is superior in a way that cannot be applied to email. In other words, whatever is wrong about email, can be fixed from within the system. Paper letters had to become email to fix what was wrong with paper letters.
- dragonwriter 12y ago
  > "Impersonal" was only ever a label applied to email by people who didn't yet have access to the Internet, jealous they were being excluded. This is factually incorrect. Everone I've ever heard use the term to describe email had internet access and was a regular email user at the time they used the term. I'm sure some people who didn't have email have used the term, and I'm sure some of those people had the motivation you describe, but it is simply not true that it was "only ever" used by people without access to the internet (or, more relevantly, email -- whether on the internet or otherwise, as electronic mail existed on networks besides the internet.) > In all areas that matter, email is superior to paper letters. "areas that matter" is a subjective category (and, further, superiority in each of those areas is, generally, subjective as well), it may well be superior to you in each of the areas that matter to you, but those subjective judgements may not hold more generally.
  - 12y ago

grexi 12y ago

The single most important issue with email: Team Inboxes. As soon as more than one person works with an inbox, it sucks big time. But I agree - email will last forever, nearly none of the products you mentioned work without an email notification feature.

dsr_ 12y ago
A team inbox is almost always better handled by a ticketing system or a mailing list or both.
- mathouc 12y ago
  or Front :)
  - dsr_ 12y ago
    A brief look through Front suggests that it is a specialized ticketing system. I predict that, if successful, it will incorporate more traditional ticketing system features.
gphil 12y ago
> nearly none of the products you mentioned work without an email notification feature. Not to mention the ability to reply to those emails to add new content to those products. Building around email as a messaging backbone is incredibly powerful.
dasil003 12y ago
Is that really the single most important issue? I'd lean towards privacy and authentication as being more important. Team inboxes are not really a mandatory part of email.
- grexi 12y ago
  At least for me that's the main painpoint which cannot be solved by email alone.
12y ago

liotier 12y ago

No one mentions portability, but I believe it is a wonderful property of email - I have more than 15 years of email, moved across various servers and clients on various operating systems and it is still available and functional. What other personal communication channel is that resilient to technological change ?

out_of_protocol 12y ago
To my list of quotes. Actually, like 50 years, way before internet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email#Origin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email#Origin
johnchristopher 12y ago
Tongue in cheeck: paper is.
walterbell 12y ago
Thanks, Jon Postel, http://www.internetsociety.org/what-we-do/grants-and-awards/awards/postel-service-award/ten-year-tribute-jon-postel http://www.internetsociety.org/what-we-do/grants-and-awards/...
drfritznunkie 12y ago
Whitfield Diffie (yes, of Diffie-Hellman), just posted to the IP list an email he pulled up from 1976(!) in response to a crappy article about VA Shiva Ayyadura "inventing" email. I'm sure he's got even older emails, but the fact that he had it, was able to easily find it, and then resend it with a descendant of itself 38 years later is pretty amazing to me! " A quick look at my files finds messages from from 1976 that use that format: 29-SEP-76 1935 FTP:CERF at USC-ISI Data Communication Conference/ Sept 1977 Date: 29 SEP 1976 1802-PDT From: CERF at USC-ISI Subject: Data Communication Conference/ Sept 1977 To: walker cc: cerf, wd at SU-AI 22-AUG-76 0857 FTP:LEFAIVRE at RUTGERS-10 MORE ON THE LISP COMPILER Date: 22 Aug 1976 (Sunday) 1155-Est From: LEFAIVRE at RUTGERS-10 Subject: MORE ON THE LISP COMPILER To: DIFFIE at SU-AI so I don't see how this can be novel in 1978. Whit "
ibisum 12y ago

kevincennis 12y ago

> "People spend on average 2.5 hours per day on their emails" Source? That seems really, really high to me for an average.

xwowsersx 12y ago
What does that even mean "on" their emails? Actively reading and replying to email is very different from having email open or receiving emails on your phone, etc.
michael_h 12y ago
That sounds about right to me if you include both personal and work email time. You might be surprised at the number of people in large organizations that spend seven hours a day actively reading and writing email.
eric_cc 12y ago
I would be really surprised if the real average is even 5 minutes. Average would include people who check email once a week or even far less than that
TeMPOraL 12y ago
Well, it's not high if you count writing in. Today I spent ~2h just on a single e-mail conversation (few e-mails sent, few received). Writing thoughtfully to another human takes time.

Mz 12y ago

- Email is not sexy? Design beautiful interfaces. Mailbox has managed to make email light, fast, and mobile-friendly. Sparrow was creating the most intuitive and pleasurable mailing experience etc. I wish the author had not said "etc" at the end. He is obviously very knowledgeable about the topic. A lot of people, even people who spend LOTS of time online (like me) have not tried out every email client out there, and this is a missed opportunity to inform me and impress me with his depth of expertise on the domain his company is involved in. I am sure I am guilty of this at times, where I either assume "everyone knows what I know" or I realize they don't and I don't want to sound like a braggart or something but I find myself feeling like I have been told "surely, you know all these examples and what they did different/right" and the answer is "No, no I do not -- what did they do??"

billpg 12y ago

Looking at the listed "Email is..." statements, an important one was missed. Email is broken. Disagree? I'm sure your response expressing your disagreement won't end up in the spam folder.

lucian1900 12y ago

It is, however, a horrifically bad protocol. We don't need a new app, but a better protocol for unified mail, IM and audio/video. XMPP is close, but flawed.

digikata 12y ago
I agree, email as a communications may very well survive forever at the endpoints, but I keep hoping something richer will subsume it.
leonroy 12y ago
I have my own opinions on the subject but curious what you see as XMPPs failings?
- lucian1900 12y ago
  Very high overhead (largely because of all the XML) and the implicit requirement of a persistent connection. There are other things, like awkward and unevenly supported voice and encryption, but those are higher level concerns. TextSecure's protocol is probably closest to what I'd like to see as a standard.

hrvbr 12y ago

The concept of email is too fuzzy. Is it SMTP that will last forever? This technology is more like sending postcards that every middleman can read. Certainly a more private alternative will replace it someday, and it should be more spam-proof. Also email serves many purposes. If it is to be replaced, it will be on a use-case by use-case manner. RSS is a better alternative to one-to-many mailing lists. Forums are a better alternative to many-to-many mailing lists. Etc. But yes, we should improve what we have until we can replace it.

dinglefuk 12y ago
SMTP and POP have encrypted analogous. Web server+Forum+Web browsers is hardly a better alternative to email many-many mailing lists.
- daigoba66 12y ago
  While SMTP and POP protocols can be transmitted over TLS between hosts, which prevents reading messages along the wire, the email data itself is _not_ encrypted. A compromised SMTP server can easily read and copy any message received or transmitted.
  - byerley 12y ago
    And, even if you use a side-channel to distribute keys between the sender and receiver (to encrypt the data safely), the header absolutely has to be plain-text. Governments and companies scraping email meta-data is already a huge problem. A protocol closer to Tor would make for much more secure email distribution, but it would also require a complete protocol rewrite. Potential death of email from a back-end point of view at least.
sliverstorm 12y ago
Encrypted SMTP is already in widespread use. Many MTA's already receive and deliver email over secure channels, and email clients (e.g. Outlook) have supported secure channels for a long time.

scoofy 12y ago

Depends on what you mean by "forever." If you mean, say, 30-50 years, even maybe 1000, sure, i'll give you that, but i'm still skeptical, but to suggest that there won't be a better communication tool that comes along to replace the written word from one node to one other, i'd say you're deluded. There is lots of room for improvement.

gabriel34 12y ago
Agreed. It might seem pedantic to call this article on its use of "forever", but it is not. By setting this in stone you are actually discouraging innovation. Not everyone who promises ground breaking enhancement over email is right, but someone might come up with something. And if the article's author really meant forever, I can envision a future of effortless communication through PC facilitated "telepathy" or any other sci-fi concept that obviates email. "Eternity, my friend, is a long f[*]ing time"
vegabook 12y ago
30-50 years is surely "forever" even in snail mail terms. 1000 years? Wow now we're talking about an era-defining technology for civilization itself! I'm going to go with your lower bound: if email lasts largely unchanged for 30 years, then it will have been the most important application of the internet era.

baumbart 12y ago

Well for me, Email is already dead. Of course, dead software still exists, for information can not be destroyed. But, there will be more surveillance. There will be more counter-surveillance tools becoming popular. But Email will not stay on that list. Over the long run, the electronic mail will fall back behind inherently encrypted solutions. At least I hope that.

jcbrand 12y ago
What do you use instead of email?
- baumbart 12y ago
  https://bitmessage.org/ https://bitmessage.org/
  - walterbell 12y ago
    Isn't bitmessage (like bitcoin) susceptible to traffic analysis?
    - baumbart 12y ago
      No. Bitmessage is essentially a decentralized version of alt.anonymous.messages.

josephschmoe 12y ago

Email will last as long as we are thinking of computers in terms of files and text. That's the foreseeable future. Anything beyond that is speculation.

ChuckMcM 12y ago

I find it interesting to contrast 'forever' with another technology that will last forever 'vinyl records'. I expect there will always be point to point, store and forward communication channels, but those channels have existed for millenia, from travelers who stacked rocks to tell those who came after where the trail was, to people who send compromising photos of themselves across cellular networks. So if we set aside the tautology for a moment, communication channels get morphed into a solution for a particular need, regardless of how well they service that need, and when there is a particularly wide disparity between need and implementation, there is an opportunity to create a better channel. My current favorite example is Trello as a way of communicating activity status from many to many on many projects. Something email does poorly (but has been used for in the past) and Trello does brilliantly. But lets look at the points one by one. #1 everyone has an email address -- sure today they do, and 25 years ago nobody did, and 25 years from now its possible everyone will have a "fooservice" address. #2 email is flexible -- see my point above, flexing is not the same as serving. #3 other stuff is great for professional communication but we still use email. -- and before that inter-office memos. I get that these guys (Front) are invested in email sticking around but I would note that putting an adapter layer in front of it is no more, nor less, efficient than putting an adapter layer in front of TCP/IP or smoke signals or a 45 year old text file transfer protocol, whether or not "email" in the form of SMTP will survive should be irrelevant to Front, the question should be will the need for their service survive.

soneca 12y ago
About #1, I don't have the data, but I would bet that there are more people with a SMS address (aka phone number) than with an email address.
- alan_cx 12y ago
  Not disagreeing, but a number of people have many email addresses. No idea how that stacks up with people with SMS though.
  - soneca 12y ago

pkorzeniewski 12y ago

E-mail is a sufficient way of communication for almost every case - just like traditional, physical mail was 100 years ago. You can send a party invite to your friends, you can send family pictures to your mother, you can discuss a project with your co-worker and you can send an invoice to your customer - all of that using a single application. If you need to contact someone immediately - use IM or phone. Why do we need a seperate tool for every scenario? Sure, they provide some useful stuff, but nothing beats simply opening your e-mail client and typing a message to whoever you want.

usethis 12y ago

Sure, email is not perfect, but it is the most flexible communication method the internet has to offer. It is not tight to a single organization, or "owned" by a single company and reasonably portable with an open protocol. Tools will be invented to further optimize the experience, but in essence it will remain the same, just like a telephone call hasn't changed. I will not commit an essential part of my business again, to a single company's closed-sourced product (like for instance MS Office in the past, though OSX being the exception). I recently started using Mailbox as my personal Email Client again, and I am very impressed in how they "optimized" the experience. It basically converts your emails into task items, with different priorities, in lists etc. When combined with notes, it could make any task / note app obsolete. Unfortunately it only works with GMail and iCloud, but I hope Dropbox keeps investing in the product.

usethis 12y ago

elwell 12y ago

IMO, written communication en totale will fade away within the century. Thinking [0] is much faster. [0] - http://emotiv.com/ http://emotiv.com/

miles932 12y ago
Having tried it, and recognizing the degree to which this (at least so far) is happening in the "conscious" mind-space rather than sub-conscious/motor-muscle-memory mind-space, typing is vastly faster. Today. It strikes me as an amazingly hard problem to separate one's "inner monologue" from "thoughts i want to transmit". I suspect an easy cheat would be "imagine typing it out" to create a specific, "physical" demarcation in communication types.
steauengeglase 12y ago
Even in a conjectural utopia, for legal reasons, you'll always need some kind of "hard copy". No one wants thought blasts from the IRS.

talles 12y ago

Forever is a strong word... but I do believe that email will stand still for some good years. Email will last forever because email has been around since... well... forever. That is one key factor that the article misses: practically everyone is used to email. It's really tough to replace something so well known and widespread. I guess the desire of doing so it's due to so many people struggling with email. How many times have I peeked people's email client looking to hundreds, heck sometimes thousands, of unread emails. I always had inbox zero. I won't say that for me email is a joy, but is definitely no struggle. I guess I'm more organized than most people anyway...

andyl 12y ago

There are tools to make use of HTTP in all sorts of ways. Curl, Wget, Restful APIs, Sinatra, Grape, etc. Fast, flexible, lightweight. Email - not so much. Want a local email server? There's Postfix - yuckkk. The overhead of spam - yuckk. The lack of tooling, the lack of configurability, the DNS complexity. The fact that it requires a SAAS to do shared inboxes. Yuck. Email could be so much better.

ah- 12y ago
Check out OpenSMTPd, that makes setting up an email server so much easier. It's still far from what it could be, but pure bliss compared to Postfix.
aaronem 12y ago
What's wrong with Postfix? Sure, configuring it takes a little work, but it's not hard, especially not by comparison with Sendmail, which was the standard everywhere when I began my career.
- _delirium 12y ago
  I didn't even find configuring Postfix to take much work, and I'd never configured a mailserver until a few months ago. Debian's config script autogenerated a basic configuration for me, after prompting with a few questions: receive email for my domain to my unix account, and relay mail only from local or AUTH'd clients. This is the entirety of the manual config I added on top of what Debian produced: # use maildir instead of mbox home_mailbox = Maildir/ # reject obvious spam smtpd_client_restrictions = permit_mynetworks, permit_sasl_authenticated, reject_unknown_client_hostname, reject_rbl_client zen.spamhaus.org It has a very nice manual too, but I have not had to use most of it, because it just works out of the box.

jrapdx3 12y ago

Email is wonderful and terrible. SMTP is pretty simple, and everyone with a static IP can run their own email server. Configuring it requires some study, but it's not too hard. OTOH creating email clients is hard. I wrote a web server and wanted a webmail client. Basic SMPT messaging is straightforward enough, but MIME is a confusing tangle of protocols and rules that is difficult to understand and implement correctly. I mostly succeeded but it took a long time. Part of the problem is the complexity means protocols are often violated and my webmail client has to deal with loads of exceptions to protocol rules to work in the real world. But that's hardly limited to email. Look at http, it has arcane rules too, and some of the common security issues on the net are the result of "sloppily" implementing programs using http. (You know, XSS attacks, SQL injections and so on.) Email has warts but what doesn't. Certainly email "replacements" will have warts too, especially as they are extended to cover the breadth that email has encompassed.

michaelbuckbee 12y ago

To the point of needing email as soon as you're interfacing with a person outside of your group: I'm seeing more and more options for this built into things like HipChat and Slack (both of which have the concept of 'guest' users).

eric_cc 12y ago

"- People spend on average 2.5 hours per day on their emails - Workers check their emails an average of 74 times a day" LOL

peterevans 12y ago

Disclaimer: I work for a company for whom email is a core part of business. Email and letter-writing go together, in my mind. Not so much because email is a literal model of letter-writing, but rather because they give you an important abstraction that I think we all need, which is a form of passive communication. You may get letters which are urgent, and you may get email that is urgent, but the nature of both is that they are hands-off. You don't need to be present to receive mail or email. Well, there is some physical mail that you do need to be present for! -- that being certified mail, some package deliveries, and those represent perhaps a different abstraction. That aside, you have a mailbox to hold mail, and a carrier to deliver it to you. Nobody needs to talk to you, to tell you that happened. You can go and check your mailbox and see what you have at any time. People who want to "kill" email may dislike the form, the implementation, but the abstraction is useful. It will likely continue to be useful -- I don't foresee a time when it will not be. Email, in some sense, will stick around.

mergy 12y ago

Yes! >> http://mergy.org/2014/04/please-stop-trying-to-kill-email/ http://mergy.org/2014/04/please-stop-trying-to-kill-email/

findjashua 12y ago

I recently joined a company where bulk of the communication is done on hipchat. I find it to be a much much better way of communicating, especially due to the chatrooms. I now only use email when I need to have a conversation regarding a specific subject or something I need to bookmark (star) for later.

cletus 12y ago

There are certain phrases I hear in startup pitches that immediately cause me to tune out. One of them is some combination of social, mobile and local. Another is "fixing emaiL" or "email is broken". It isn't. With all the change that's happened with the Internet two forms of communication have proven to be incredibly resilient: SMS and email. SMS is resilient because every phone has it. It's portable and it's simple. The best effort thus far at dethroning SMS seems to be WhatsApp. Sure phone companies (particularly US phone companies) charge a ridiculous amount for SMS. It's no longer the valuable bandwidth control channel that it once was. But even so, I don't see it going away anytime soon. The beauty of email is that it's largely decentralized. With something like Facebok, you get ads inserted into your stream, you're constantly at risk of some privacy snafu and there's always the risk the service changes in some problematic (for you) way or disappears altogether (OK, Facebook isn't going anywhere anytime soon but we've all had services we like get bought out and sunsetted). Email addresses are mostly non-portable. You can have your own domain and have a portable address but most people don't. Just like a phone number has limited portability (eg only within the same country). Changing phone numbers and email addresses seems to be an infrequent enough occurrence for most people that they don't really care about it (as a whole). Certain services provide useful value-adds to email. Spam filtering on GMail is a prime example. There are ads on the Web UI but hey you don't have to use it (there are POP3/IMAP interfaces) and they aren't that offensive (as, say, Facebook ads are). The fundamental use case of both SMS and email is one person sending a message to another person. Think of this like IP (the protocol). People find each other with contacts. Think of this like DNS (kinda). Every "email killer" I've seen has made this most important use case harder or just more complicated and, more to the point, for this use case provides no tangible benefits (that anyone cares about). And in all cases you're giving up the decentralized nature of email so someone has control over your messages and your experience. Why would anyone make that tradeoff? It doesn't make any sense. So forever? Well that's tough to argue. But for a really long time? Sure, absolutely.

mrborgen 12y ago
The "fixing email" / "email is broken" are quotes you only hear from startup guys and UX geeks. Email is indeed working really well. Most people outside of this niche seems to have no fundamental problems with it. Just an example: I recently needed to send a script to an 8 year old kid and a grandma at around 75. Couldn't have done it any other way than email. The point being that email is an enormously broad platform. Its so broad that the second you turn to mobile to solve email, you have limited your way out the competition.

lasermike026 12y ago

It's insecure and it must die. To be more correct, email can not continue in its current form.

JoeAltmaier 12y ago
Right! Most of the problem is unauthentic email - spam. Why oh why don't my peers sign their email, so I can test the signature and even file them by source/topic? This seems dead obvious.

LeicaLatte 12y ago

I hate the tight coupling slack introduces. It should have been called leash instead. Glad to see it slowly going away. Email is a product of the 60s predating HTTP itself and built to stand on its own. Its non-invasive and loosely coupled which scales across all kinds of people. Not just for ADD nerds like us.

azinman2 12y ago

News flash: startup working on email product says email will last forever.

edpichler 12y ago

When Google Wave appeared on public I really liked and believed it would replace the email. I think one day the, now open sourced, Apache Wave Project will rebirth with: - a fast user interface (today really sucks); - decentralized and easy to install servers; - Features that are missing;

AndrewDucker 12y ago

The reason email will last forever is that nobody owns it. If Twitter goes bust then you lose all of your tweets. If Facebook goes bust then all of your status updates go out of the window. But email is an open, free protocol that anyone can implement and is deliberately designed to be decentralised. And so the ecosystem will last as long as a few people find it useful.

Walkman 12y ago
Facebook is more likely to stay than email IMO.
ldng 12y ago
Exactly. Email is so resilient because it's an open decentralized protocol. Every other alternatives I've seen is closed and/or centralized in a way or another. No wonder they fail.

LizVerano 12y ago

if you will not delete it so it will last forever.lol

spammy_throw1 12y ago

https://zulip.com/hello https://zulip.com/hello

Mustafabei 12y ago

Made me remember the quote by Reinhold Niebuhr: "Frantic orthodoxy is never rooted in faith but in doubt. It is when we are unsure that we are doubly sure."

deathanatos 12y ago

> The email protocol is simple and flexible. Ha, okay. I'm going to include actual emails in "the email protocol", because if you just count the network protocols you're not doing anything useful. Emails are anything but simple. They were born in the early days of the Internet, and no doubt time and the impossibility of predicting the future is responsible for how things turned out — but they are anything but simple. Email messages are ASCII only. You can put non-ASCII characters into a header however. It looks like this: Subject: =?UTF-8?B?SMOpbGzDtOKApgo=?= Writing a parser for this is an unnecessary challenge in this day. (If you ever need to do email, for parsing or outputting, get a library.) Watching a coworker unwilling to take the time to the read the RFC try to write a parser for this… is a very special hell.¹ The body also has to be ASCII, so just about every email client out there has to do: Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64 And then encode the body in base64, wasting space and network bandwidth. Technically, you can send full 8-bit message bodies, but the sender and receiver have to agree ahead of time. Either GMail doesn't support it, or it just doesn't bother even when the email destinations are all GMail. (Or, it could be because some IMAP client might get the message, and not support it.) There's also that every message has a text version and an HTML version — hopefully semantically similar — but HTML support in email clients (at least the big ones) is terrible. (see for example http://www.email-standards.org/ http://www.email-standards.org/ ) You'll think support is great on the web after you're done. I've not covered un-wrapping headers. Or the things people think aren't valid email addresses. (Your average Joe thinks [a-zA-Z0-9]+@<a domain name> matches all valid emails. Oh, and that they're case insensitive too.) Or IMAP. Or encryption. Or even whether email gets encrypted while on the wire from Hotmail to Comcast. > Slack pretends to be “an email killer” I'm not sure they're out to kill all emails… just the ones that would be better as a real-time communication. ¹Don't test your library's output email on Gmail, either. Gmail is creepy good at correcting bad input. "It works on Gmail" != it's correct. I do wish I could send restructured text emails and have the client just render them. In theory, email has everything I need. Clients just need to support it, that's all. I'll admit, that is kinda cool.

EntiPag 12y ago
> Email messages are ASCII only. You can put non-ASCII characters into a header however. It looks like this: To me that is a good example of how email is flexible, and also simple. It's flexible because it could support non-ascii text strings, without changing a thing. It's simple because the protocol doesn't care what the subject says. It only cares that it's an ASCII string. That sounds like good engineering to me, as well. You could argue that a new version of the email protocol could be improved to do away with those hacks, but that doesn't take anything away from email's simplicity and flexibility.

exodust 12y ago

I like email and can't see it dying at all. I have several email addresses for various purposes and it's no hassle to manage. I have about 5 email addresses and 1 work email. It's good having a dedicated "website sign-up" email address for forums and so on, where you don't care about the spam level. The flexibility in setting up your in-box how you want is a great thing about email. I don't understand people who constantly complain about their in-boxes. Learn to manage your in-box, I say, and stop crying about your first-world inbox clutter problem! I'm interested in secure online collaboration tools, and it's great to see so many options emerging. These secure tools can easily coexist with email and keep everyone happy. Email is a familiar, reliable, predictable service that everyone knows about. It doesn't get "updated" every 3 months by some agenda-driven tech giant with ideas about how we ought to be communicating.

adnsr 12y ago

Something is weird about email: Everyone can pretend to be someone else. It would be sane to reject all emails from a domain, that has no SPF record. I was asthonished when i realized that this is not already happening. Designing a large communication system it is just pure insanity to not include a sentence like this in the spec: "One can only send messages as one of the names he has power over." This could be ensured simply by SPF. It should be safe to assume, that a domain that has no SPF-record is not used for sending emails. I know that this is not the case right now, but it would change really fast, if you would push an update to the SPF-checkers, to enforce that rule. SPAM would be much less of problem than it is right now. Today you have to block ip-addresses, which is a large mess. With this rule enforced, you could block domains. Which are much harder to obtain and have a way smaller quantity.

jonifico 12y ago

Dude, if IE6 is still around, there's not chance email is going out of business any time soon. Period. However, with the rising of new communication channels, we might get better at communicating certain pieces of information over time, that's what it's all about, anyway.

akrymski 12y ago

Any argument around "Email" should first define what email is. Does the author mean SMTP will last forever? MIME? IMAP? Email is a way of sending a message using a number of old, insecure and inefficient protocols. Will better alternatives to these protocols gain traction one day? Most definitely. What will remain of "Email" as we know it today is the addressing scheme IMO. The universally acceptable way of messaging a user@any-host is the real power of email, and will remain for the foreseeable future whilst transport and encoding protocols come and go (eg VoIP succeeding PSTN). In fact, email should last as long as the DNS system exists, given that the addressing system is directly tied to it. Being a flexible P2P messaging system, email can be easily extended to provide features of any "email-killer" app out there (including realtime communication) if need be. These innovations haven't happened simply because major email server providers dominate their existing markets (Exchange!) and have little incentive to innovate given the high barrier to entry for startups selling email servers to corporates. Email clients have seen more innovation, but there's only so much a client can do to extend capabilities of email. plug: for this reason we're developing a full-stack email service in Node comprising client and server apps (end plug)

Mad_Dud 12y ago

Couple of years ago RJBS gave a great talk about email, it's complexity and issues - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JENdgiAPD6c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JENdgiAPD6c