[gdb]

We do use Slack. It's great for real-time communication, and has made us way happier than any other chat system we've tried. (In fact, a year prior we'd tried out lots of chat systems, each time feeling like the switching cost to try was higher than whatever incremental value we were getting. But when we came across Slack, it was so obviously better we decided to try again. We ended up pretty painlessly switching within a day.)

However, email hasn't gone anywhere. As soon as you want to interface with the outside world, it's a hard requirement. It's also pretty hard to beat a lot of the properties of email: arbitrary-sized blobs of text and attachments that are fully searchable, taggable, organizable, and have read/archive states.

I think everyone would love to see an email killer come along (and I'd love if that were indeed Slack), but thus far I haven't seen anything come close.

[chimeracoder]

> I think everyone would love to see an email killer come along

Can you explain this?

I've heard this sentiment before and never really understood it. The common complaints I hear about email are usually inherent in the fact that it's a universal communication mechanism[0], or a symptom of inadequate clients[1].

I can understand the need for better email clients (that's what Gmail originally was, back in the day[2]). But I still haven't been able to find a compelling reason that email itself is fundamentally broken in a way that requires a new system altogether.

EDIT: I should acknowledge that privacy and security are obviously a major issue, and email is by design incompatible with security (Silent Circle tried this and failed, which is why they are creating an alternative protocol). But I generally hear this complaint in other contexts, so I don't think that's the reason.

[0] e.g. "I get too much of it" - thirty years ago, people complained about getting too much physical mail, simply because that's the way all important work was conducted then (dead trees).

[1] Having email clients tailored towards email power users can make up for problems like overwhelming volume - Google's "Inbox" app is an example of this.

[2] Along with providing massive amounts of space (which was itself a hard requirement in order to provide the many client-side improvements it brought).

[grey-area]

But I still haven't been able to find a compelling reason that email itself is fundamentally broken in a way that requires a new system altogether.

I'd love to use something very much like email which had a few things like this:

Verified identity

Public key encryption as standard (of content at least, possibly of most headers too)

TLS everywhere

UTF-8 everywhere

Metadata for social presence so that twitter/fb/github/intranet profiles could be referenced in mails and used for things like identity (see verified identity above)

Standardised globally unique message ids (uris perhaps)?

Attachments uploaded to a server by the sender instead of clogging up mailboxes, not fetched unless required

Maybe even mail uploaded to a server and not sent across the wire unless actually requested - why do we need to send messages when I might be able to infer from metadata that I don't want to read it 50% of the time? An API for email clients which pull data as they wish would be nice, instead of the current broadcast all the data model. This plus identity would make it easier to block spam.

HTML with inline CSS for styling (clients could strip to plain text as required, not send the message twice) - no JS for obvious reasons. We pretty much have this already, but it'd be nice if it were just the standard.

Email is a great tool, but it really is showing its age - it was defined in a different age where there was trust by default of network users and servers, and it's been hugely exploited as a result. If it were proposed now it would never be adopted. You could shoehorn a few of the above points into client changes, but some things would be easier with a new protocol.

[derefr]

> Maybe even mail uploaded to a server and not sent across the wire unless actually requested - why do we need to send messages when I might be able to infer from metadata that I don't want to read it 50% of the time?

If you go there, you're basically talking about something that's more like blogs with RSS feeds, rather than email. To me, half the point of email is that it is "pushed": this allows to send messages to people you don't already have pre-existing relationships with, simply by finding out their contact details.

[grey-area]

You could push the fact there is a message at date n from x with subject y to the recipient servers without wasting bandwidth on the message itself along with attachments before you know it will be read. This would also have other effects (possibly delete/modify after send, invert control from the recipient to the sender etc), so it certainly would change the way email is used - probably not everyone would agree with this particular point.

[derefr]

I would think that if you're already going to do the SMTP transaction, the average (plaintext) email message body is small enough to slide into the same packet as the end of the transaction headers. It's the same as keeping the data of small files inside their directory-entry structures on disk.

On the other hand, it would indeed be interesting if email was simply a "unicast presence notification" channel to allow accounts to publish knowledge of a (private, ephemeral, encrypted, authenticated) message channel to other accounts, and then messages flowed via automated subscription-based pull. You'd still want your MUA to be a web service with active background polling, though (like cloud RSS reader services), since otherwise a user could send a message and then "retract" it from their feed before your own client had retrieved it.

But this would solve at the very least the spam problem: you could simply unfollow a channel that's sending you email, and receive no future messages on it. It'd be like every (sender, receiver) pair having its own dedicated inbox, that the true receiver consumes only voluntarily.

[eikenberry]

IMO you don't experience email's failings until you setup an email server. Compared to any other network service I've setup, email is a huge PITA. Setting up the MTA with proper spf, dkim, IPs with a good reputation, and incoming encryption plus the MDA/Imap server with encryption and spam protection. It is a lot of work.

I've love to see something replace email with something that is simple to setup and administer.

As a user of email I don't really have a problem with it.