[_8j50]

Please HN, let email die. it is unsecurable (universal) in transit or storage (mta's) and because of its reliability and universal adoption a ton of security depends on it like a very rotten and rusted link in a chain even a small child can break. It is an almost 4 decade old tech where any security you find for it is purely opportunistic.

I am very concerned how people here are stating how good, simple and reliable it is. They are not wrong but so is IPv4 and the C language. Sentiment has no place in a building a secure and proper future technology.

[dqv]

I don’t get it. I was waiting for you to say “in favor of…” but you never got to that part. Let email die in favor of what? What is the viable alternative?

Not a single messaging app I’ve used comes close to email. And I can’t use one messaging app, I have to have 6! I would be way more willing to move on from email if a solid viable alternative came along. XMPP, for example, is still too ephemeral and barely anyone uses it.

[zaik]

I decided to delete all messaging apps except an email and an XMPP client (Internet Standards instead of proprietary protocols). 90% of my messages are to relatively few people (close friends or family members). For an acceptable messaging experience you just need to get those people on XMPP. The other 10% can still reach me via email or SMS.

[dqv]

I wish I could get people on XMPP, but I just accepted that, to communicate with my family, I need to use iMessage. I've had businesses try to get us to use their closed source communication thing and it just didn't work. Logging on to their weird thing every week or so to communicate with them and having to do any transactional communication manually just isn't really that great.

As far as XMPP for business, there are still things I really appreciate about email - threading/subjects to isolate different interactions being one. I would still love to be able to have it as a tool for bvb comms. Email is a very nice archival tool for both correspondence and documents. It's one of the few things in my life that is mostly organized and gives me easy access to things I need. Recently someone from a government agency said "you never sent x document" and I was able to go back in my email and say "yes I did on this date, I will send it to you again".

[_8j50]

How can there be a replacement if we can't even acknowledge the problem. Did you see how many people disliked what I said? Should there be solutions awaiting people's recognition of the problem? I remember similar sentiment a decade ago when I was saying similar things about https.

[aero-glide2]

I was suprised to learn WhatsApp uses XMPP. Would be nice if all popular chat applications are interoperable.

[BlueTemplar]

"Is based on" rather than "uses" - AFAIK they deliberately broke compatibility ?

(Ditto with Facebook Messenger and at least one of the Google chats ?)

[pmlnr]

FB uses MQTT; Google chats, who knows.

[cycomanic]

Yes email is old and has lots of issues, it is still by a large margin the best we have. Name one protocol/program/service that comes anywhere close in its usefulness.

[_8j50]

Sort of my point. It is shit but it is neccesary, any replacement is predicated on popular acceptance of the problem.

[diegocg]

And your suggested replacement is...?

You seem to have missed the point of the article. Email is a necessity - there is no alternative.

[fghgg]

Matrix?

But good luck moving people off email

[heresie-dabord]

I agree with the parent.

E-mail is grotesquely expensive to manage because of its weaknesses and its use as a vector of attack.

The best replacement solution is an organisational portal that people use to communicate with the organisation and upload/download documents. Some governments and banks have already been handling interactions with external entities and citizens/customers this way for years.

The upload and download tunnel is secure, the receiver can scan the uploaded information (detonate in a sandbox if necessary), and the sender can trust the messages and documents that are downloaded.