[mcs_]

Disclaimer, 26 years using emails.

What I love about emails is that no ads are pushed into it, one of the few places where you can read information without Javascript and decide when and if to load external content.

I think innovations should be welcome, but they should have their own name and avoid considering a legacy system wrong by default.

Reinvent the wheel is hard,however I hope to see something great in the future (gpg for everyone for example).

[Nextgrid]

What I like about email is that it's one of the last bastions that are still under your control and work for you, not against you. It's not siloed in some "app" who wants to "engage" you, it lets you set up rules even against other companies' will (I'm sure no company out there wants me to be able to automatically filter out their marketing spam - or worse, redirect it back to some high-level employee and waste their time) and all your data is still within your control and you can build custom software to deal with it if needed.

I pretty much always opt for email notifications as opposed to some proprietary system - this allows me to decide what to do with them (including turning them back into a push notification by using something like Pushover, while the official app's push is disabled because they mix in marketing spam with useful notifications) even when the sender would rather not have me do that.

[danuker]

> no ads are pushed into it

Believe it or not, I receive more spam than non-spam email each month.

[b112]

Wanted to downvote, but instead I'll reply by saying, obviously parent was speaking of ads in a valid message, not spam.

[InGoodFaith]

Nowadays when signing up for valid services, some don't let you opt-out of the marketing emails until much later in the flow; the worst offenders ignore your opting out options by including a new category of marketing-type emails every couple of months that you have to go in and untick.

Wouldn't that be classified as spammy ads from a valid message (when done using dark patterns with no one-click unsubscribe option)?

[MereInterest]

Honestly, I'd classify those as spam, without any additional qualifications. Giving my email address to a service is permission to send emails related to that service. It is not permission to send advertisements for other services, nor is it permission for affiliates to send advertisements.

Recently, I gave my email address when having my car serviced. The next day, I received an email from Sirius XM, because the shop has a partnership trial deal with Sirius. I marked that email as spam, because it was entirely unrelated to any legitimate use for which I had provided the email address. That it was being sent by a legitimate company doesn't change the fact that it was spam.

[nicoburns]

I've actually had decent experiences in the last few years. The vast majority of services have a clear opt-out link, and pretty much everything else has an unsubscribe link in the emails that works. I think legit senders are terrified of getting spam blacklisted, so they have to offer than option.

The only exception I found was the democratic party mailing list. No idea how I even ended up on that as I don't live in the US, but NEVER give them your real/main email address. The spam is relentless and impossible to block because they are continually setting up new domain names.

[danuker]

Some "legit" senders only have a "snipe"-unsubscribe: you can only unsubscribe from a given "list", which often has just one message.

When a new ad campaign occurs, they create a new "list" and mail everyone again.

This is spam.

[nelsondev]

Did you read the linked article? It’s not proposing a new tool, just using rules/filtering to categorize into inbox (humans), paper trail, news letters.

[brightball]

That’s basically what Hey.com does. Inbox, Newsfeed and Receipts.

[neilparikh]

Yup, the article mentions that the author was inspired by Hey.com