[jhferris3]

Yes, the email system could be better. But for something that was designed decades ago it works surprisingly well.

Should somebody try to do some smart parsing of failure notifications to make them more readable? Sure, I don't see why not. But don't pitch the baby out with the bathwater here. The underlying system is not that bad.

[jrockway]

The underlying problem is that SMTP only has a few error codes, and so there is no way the MUA can understand (in a standard way) why the MTA rejected the message. HTTP ended up having richer errors, and so clients can provide nice messages if they feel like it. (IE does this for 404s and 500s, though it's not a nice message and it seems to upset most web developers.)

[autarch]

And an HTTP server can return a custom body for most errors, so the server can provide even more info if it wants.

[jrockway]

SMTP MTAs can also "provide more info if it wants", but that's what the article considers a problem. What the author of the article wants is a way to dumb down error messages (or, less cynically, automatically correct errors), which is not easy with free-form responses. Imagine a web page that returns a page that says "404 Not found" with a 200 status code. Brokenness ensues.

[fredoliveira]

It is that bad. Email works and gets stuff done, yes, but at the expense of your time, server time, storage, network throughput. It is used for much more than it should, and is long past its expiration date. Sadly, we've all come to depend so much on email and how it works today that changing it would be like suddenly having to breathe underwater. It'll take a load of time to get used to whatever comes next.

[quanticle]

Okay, email works at the expense of my time, server time, storage and network throughput. So what's your brilliant e-mail replacement? Heck, pg himself has talked about these very same issues and has noted that YCombinator would jump at funding any startup that came up with a credible replacement to e-mail.

E-mail is like democracy. It's the worst messaging system, except for all the others.

[jsprinkles]

Actually, the underlying system is absolutely putrid, a sentiment that pg agrees with based on his latest talk at PyCon. Mail is, unequivocally, the worst part of my daily existence and you are kidding yourself if you're calling it "not that bad".

Using pg's words, mail is a to-do list that anybody can put shit on, and I don't have any control over who puts things on it. We live in an era of technology that can do e-mail so much better, and replacing it must happen in my lifetime. Everything, from the architecture to the messages themselves, need an overhaul. The extraneous shit we bolt on to e-mail (SPF, DKIM, PGP)...it's just making it a big, unwieldy mess.

[vog]

> mail is a to-do list that anybody can put shit on, and I don't have any control over who puts things on it

That's a misuse of email on the receipient's side, not on the system's side. Email is about messages, not about tasks. Although there might be more comfortable (i.e., more automatic) ways, there's nothing wrong with maintaining a TODO list that is 100% separate from the INBOX.

For example, in my TODO list I describe shortly (and in my own words) what I consider to be important. Why should I waste my time scanning through the INBOX everytime I want to check what needs to be done?

In other words: It's me who decides what gets on my TODO list, nobody else! I'm in total control because I'm a free citizen living in a democracy, and as such it's my responsibility to organize my life. In particular, to decide what to do (to-do) in my life.

If you decide to give other people access to your TODO list (e.g. by defining your INBOX to be your TODO list), you're voluntarily giving up control of an important part of your life. Nobody forces you to do that. In fact, almost every organization guideline strongly advises against that kind of nonsense. (The most famous one being the "Inbox zero" series at http://www.43folders.com/izero)

[ssebro]

I think that part of the idea is that reading a message, replying to a message & all other things that you do with mail can be considered as "tasks".

[MatthewPhillips]

Email isn’t the problem, the problem is the client. Here’s just a few of the things we use email for today:

  Todo list
  Social networking notifications
  Text messaging
  Planning meetings
  Planning vacation
  Discussing issues with colleagues (mailing list)
  Bill notifications
  Newsletters / grey mail
  File sharing

We do all of those different things and shove them into a single client that was designed (with minor alterations) over 30 years ago. What were they using email for then? To send “holy shit, this is cool!” messages to other neckbeards.

We should be using a separate client for all of these uses. Email is nothing more than a messaging protocol. You could launch a group texting app and use email as the delivery protocol. Your user base would instantly be every person with an internet connection. It wouldn’t matter that person A has your app and person B doesn’t, you could make it transparent to the person that has the app and pitch to the person that doesn’t.

The biggest obstacle to this is that we all use regular old email clients today and increasing the already incredible noise would not be without backlash. I think you have to start out with apps that don’t require adding to your message count (a notification app that scrapes your inbox, for example).

Meanwhile startups are trying and failing to make every service its own silo that travels over port 80. This is what is most sickening about startup culture today, no one is creative about using the stuff that has been around forever and is used by everyone.

[Niten]

> mail is a to-do list that anybody can put shit on, and I don't have any control over who puts things on it.

If that's your complaint, then your beef isn't with email in particular, but with the mailbox paradigm in general. But I for one find that paradigm useful, and I respectfully disagree.