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0 pointsdngray6y ago0 comments

> But the idea that Email can't evolve and change and should stay exactly the way it was, pretty much assures its death in the dust bin of history, the same way we lost USENET, LISTSERV, or even XMPP. Old standards didn't evolve quickly, users wanted silly features while neckbeards said don't violate purity of my abstraction.

Also the things you've mentioned there are different things. XMPP was never as widespread as email and is not in any way related to the other two. I am hoping Matrix picks up here.

LISTSERV is simply mailing list software, these do exist today as they did and are used by many open source projects. The most popular one being https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Mailman

USENET, does still exist, particularly for binaries. It's decline was mostly because of the cost to run the services, spam and the fact that smaller web forums were an alternative.

> And today, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, WeChat, iMessage, et al, are the predominant messaging platforms, and email is for spam, receipts, and grand parents.

Not in business it's not, particularly where both parties want to have a conversation and not let those platforms in on the conversation. That is the majority of business and government conversation.

Email is not going anywhere.

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cromwellian6y ago

You don't have to explain what those things are, I've been on the internet since the 80s, and my teen years were literally forged on those platforms. Yes, smaller web forums killed USENET, and the reason they did so is that it was far easier to evolve controls for spam, for toxic posters, for adding features like voting, inline images, inline markup, custom headers/landing/etc than it was on a federated system like USENET. When the Web arrived, user expectations in terms of the ease of use and richness of the interface changed, which is exactly what's happening with email.

If business really wanted end to end un-eaves-droppable confidentiality they would have mandated S/MIME years ago. The very nature of a store-and-forward protocol without end to end encryption pretty much guarantees you don't have confidentiality unless the entirely of your communication is within your organization, and even then, it's not really secure because most business organizations did not run internal encryption.

The number of firms outsourcing to cloud services continues to rise.

Yes, Email is not going to die for internal business communication, but it will transform, and interactivity and dynamism are inevitable. Lotus Notes is a great example of this. Email is often used for workflow, for updates of real time information, and spamming people with status messages that link to dashboards is a productivity hit and produces information overload.

dngrayOP6y ago

> If business really wanted end to end un-eaves-droppable confidentiality they would have mandated S/MIME years ago. The very nature of a store-and-forward protocol without end to end encryption pretty much guarantees you don't have confidentiality unless the entirely of your communication is within your organization, and even then, it's not really secure because most business organizations did not run internal encryption.

The problem with S/MIME is that it requires a CA to sign that certificate. There's actually very few S/MIME CAs out there. Part of the reason S/MIME was always preferred in a corporate setting (over PGP) was that it could be decrypted by gateway border systems, ie administrators. Office 365 also introduces Office Messsage Encryption (OME) which is basically a temporary mailbox on their server. (Like Tutanota, or OpenExchange mail Guard) for external communication.

Encryption is also not really needed when you're all emailing each other on the same company server, which is most often the case. Even when stuff is outsourced there's usually legal service level agreements to maintain basic confidentiality.

> Yes, Email is not going to die for internal business communication, but it will transform, and interactivity and dynamism are inevitable. Lotus Notes is a great example of this. Email is often used for workflow, for updates of real time information, and spamming people with status messages that link to dashboards is a productivity hit and produces information overload.

I don't think it will. Just because Google wants to do amp4email doesn't mean everyone else will. Email has been getting more secure with things like MTA-STS, but those have gone through the IETF. I don't think it will see any adoption outside of the Google ecosystem, particularly without a RFC.

Email is very much has a "you said this on this date", and it is as if someone sent you a letter in the postal mail. I don't see amp4email getting any use in the business world. I think it will mostly be for "promotional email" aka spam you've agreed to get from companies that you've done business with before and didn't uncheck that box that says "notify me of all your offers...".

Google also has a history of trying things out then canning them in the future. Anyone remember Google Wave? that was 'totally going to replace email as we know it'.

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