from Hacker News

Email Is Not Broken

by thereyougo on 7/1/20, 6:17 AM with 12 comments

  • by Nasreddin_Hodja on 7/1/20, 8:03 AM

    > Spam is by far the biggest problem

    It's not. The biggest problem is big email providers such like Gmail.

  • by qwerty456127 on 7/1/20, 9:39 AM

    There is a small number of things which, I believe, should be done to make email great again:

    1. Deprecate the 7-bit stuff and make UTF-8 the default codepage.

    2. Give up the practice of overquoting (including full text of previous messages into each message - clear message ID and relation tracking is enough).

    4. Ban antivirus etc software signatures - misleading statements saying "the message has been checked by an antivirus".

    5. Standardize the way inline pictures are attached.

    6. Stop prepending countless prefixes like Re:Fwd:RE: in the subject line

    7. Give up the practice of discouraging subject specification omission - this leads to uninformative, irrelevant and misleading subject fields in many cases when subject changes, is not clearly defined from the beginning or is hard to describe concisely

    8. Standardize supported HTML&CSS subsets.

    9. Add support for MarkDown, AsciiDoc or some other lightweight markup.

    10. Disallow quoting an forwarding of decrypted versions of previously encrypted content by default.

  • by catsarebetter on 7/1/20, 7:26 AM

    Email is an enormous market with probably thousands of use cases. I share his perspective that email (for the most part) isn't broken FOR ME. B/c the way I use email is pretty straightforward, it's basically another messaging platform for my life. But I have a ton of friends that would kill for better email clients b/c they have different use cases. And instead of killing, they are paying for Superhuman, Hey, Front, etc. I always appreciate a different perspective, that was an insightful read, thanks for sharing.

  • by kevsim on 7/1/20, 1:31 PM

    Wonder what the chances are that Hey eventually renames the Imbox. I don't think it's going to be a cultural phenomenon and I think they'll probably get tired of writing "Imbox (not a typo)".

  • by hellofunk on 7/1/20, 12:09 PM

    I think it’s appropriate for a service that allows you to permanently block senders, to make those senders know they couldn’t reach you. It’s just like if someone calls you and you never answer the phone, they leave you a message. They assume you got the message. But in this case, you don’t. I think there are some things for what you’d like to be notified if someone could not receive your email.

  • by marmot777 on 7/1/20, 4:30 PM

    Email for interacting with clients (customers) has kind of replaced the phone as the most important channel for businesses.