Ask HN: [email] what is the solution?

by killnine on 4/15/2012, 3:55 PM with 1 comments

I put some thought into email solutions vs. email improvements after PG posted this: http://paulgraham.com/ambitious.html

I have to state that I know I receive nowhere near the quantity of emails I imagine PG does in a day. That being said, I am still able to see the waste that is the back and forth on projects, the waste that is reading useless content in order to get to useful content, and I can see the waste that is incoming message after incoming message with none to little organization.

Then, I read these:

1- http://blog.killtheradio.net/technology/email-is-not-broken-its-a-framework-not-an-application/

2- http://gd0t.com/node/23 (“how to fix email while still keeping email”)

3- http://dewith.com/2012/this-is-the-mail-system/

4- https://joncalhoun.posterous.com/email-sucks-this-is-how-we-fix-it

Now I am seriously curious; not only to who/what is correct, not only to what the future will bring and who will bring it, but mostly to what PG’s thoughts are to the notion that email is not broken.

Where does the solution that solves his email issues fit into all of this?

  • by read_wharf on 4/15/2012, 4:47 PM

    I think your first reference is generally correct. Email the protocol is mostly not broken, and the most fruitful improvements to email are in the client, not the protocol. An RFC can be improved (and most have), but that should be a matter of tweaking, not replacement.

    I would like to see an additional kind of email built on RSS or something like it. I only get your "r-mail" if I both subscribe and poll. Maybe that can be had right now with better/different rss clients, and make (virtual) rss servers more available at an individual level.

    The benefit is that I only get what I want, when I want it. Although a roughly similar result can be had through email whitelisting.