I work in B2B IT support, and email is designed to be very async, and for the most part it still is. What I can say with certainty is that business folks expect email to be instant like synchronous platforms are… It’s not, it never will be… It’s gotten about as close as it can be, but it is not, and will never be, instant delivery, no matter how much they want it to be.
I still have a weird email friend who refuses to chat over any apps and I totally can respect that. :)
cool of you to keep in contact with them :) i have always wanted to do this but i know it would isolate me and inconvenience others just to communicate with me
asynchronous
Any form of text based communication is asynchronous
For the people, yes.
With email, message delivery can be async as well.
as in the server chats with another
Centralized servers in which 2 users talk can be considered “synchronous” because they get the message nearly instantly, but yea, we often use NoSQL async calls for instant messaging apps
Oh on a technical level yes. But on the surface it’s still asynchronous, as long as you can’t tell whether the other person has read your message (which, to be fair, a lot of messaging applications have as a feature)
I guess that’s why someone decided to build a chat app on the email protocol and infrastructure.
Several people have tried to do this.
Delta was first one I have heard of, but when you think about it, it would be surprising if it was the first one when email over network has existed over 50 years. What other ones are there?
I love that this exists but never have used it.
You can do it from a terminal. Us Linux kids will never let it die.
yeah, aerc and neomutt are two decent options
telnet email_server_ip_addr 25
Helo server.net
ehlo
Sidenote: Remember when having an email address was enough, you didn’t have to have a fucking phone number as well? Stop trying to de-anonymize the internet, you’re making more problems than you’re solving
They’re not trying to solve any problem beyond their own, potential resistance to false authority.
or at least fill out the online forms for us
why put it on my web browser since they have us all pretty pretty pretty pegged my friend
Mail has the big advantage of being totally cross platform. And it works, basically everywhere.
All the application protocols were supposed to be cross-platform! It’s something the corporatisation of the net undermined to an extent
It’s why SMS still exists too. It’s from an era where everyone just used open standards instead of trying to create their own thing for money. Big tech conglomerates like we have now didn’t exist. The state of the tech industry and it’s proprietary standards is absolutely fucked.
SMS was never intended to be available to end users. It was built as a side channel to help field techs with diagnostics. When consumer handsets started to add features, it was co-opted to provide what we know it as today.
That explains why way back when I tried to read the GSM (1.x) specification out of curiosity, it turned out SMS were going via a “control channel”.
Always wondered why the data for those was going via a control channel rather than some kind of data channel.
Google is trying to kill SMS. My new android by default has sms disabled, defaulting to RCS with “try sending sms instead if rcs fails to send” option being off by default, which makes no sense from user perspective
RCS is actually a huge improvement over SMS, as it is fully encrypted. One of the few times I’ve ever approved of something Google did…
If only it was an open standard…
It… is? It’s an open standard that anyone can use and implement. The main provider is Google and there has been a huge push from them to get Apple to adopt, which they mostly have. It’s not ‘owned’ by any company. It’s predominantly serviced by Google, but is in fact an open standard. Google and others have their own format which is how they and their apps interpret and interact with each other, but it is an open standard. There are some backend and requirements for it which stops most from setting it up and implementing off the shelf and just going with Google, but you absolutely could use and make your own format with the standard.
Yep, main reason it’s associated with Google because they bought a company (Jibe Mobile) making one of the main backend service offerings and offered cloud hosting of it, so providers just went with that rather than rolling out their own software.
Also with Apple ignoring it in favour of iMessage, Google was the only one supporting it on handsets. Google client + Google backend = people think it’s Google’s iMessage competitor.
which makes no sense from user perspective
I’d say it does have some merit from a security perspective though.
I agree it should be something that’s at least more clear for users to enable/disable on setup, but I personally don’t think having it enabled by default is ideal, considering how insecure SMS is.
…but I can literally send infected files thru RCS to my grandma.
True, as is the case with almost any messaging service. But the benefits of RCS do include:
- Not having a government/telecom company be capable of snooping on your messages
- Branded messages that clearly distinguish real companies from fake ones, which can prevent an untold number of scams as it becomes more commonplace
- Uses more modern protocols instead of still being capable of sending over old, insecure ones like 2G.
It’s purely an improvement over SMS in terms of security and privacy, and personally, I don’t think users should be defaulted into having their phone downgrade to insecure protocols. It should always be an opt-in decision they have to make. (although they could definitely make it clearer that someone could enable it if their messages are failing to send with RCS)
It’s from an era where everyone just used open standards instead of trying to create their own thing for money.
SMS is literally from a time when every mobile phone manufacturer had their on charger plug. And some tried pushing proprietary headphone jacks.
Vendors LOVE vendor lock-in.
Yeah that’s because vendor lockin for hardware had already started. It’s kind of a miracle we got everyone to agree to USB. Look at cars, same thing. Everyone agreed to the same gas pump, but it’s been decades and we can’t agree on a standard for electric car chargers. That’s what happens when industries mature under capitalism
The GSM protocol was an actual standard enforced on operators across Europe, which is why back when mobile telephony took off, it very much exploded in Europe (in turn propelling companies such as Nokia and Ericcson) but was much slower to take of in the US were there were various private and competing mobile telephony protocols.
The vendors didn’t agree on anything on their own, they were forced to agree as part of the conditions of the various radio spectrum auctions all over Europe. The US then finally followed at around GSM v3.
You see a similar thing for USB - it’s an international standard and standardization around USB 3 and the USB-C connector it is being forced on vendors by the EU.
Rather than build for humanity they build for the demon capital.
Reality is everyone has an email, and everyone will keep having an email. My 10 year old has an email so they could sign up to epic and steam. You basically need it to use the internet at all. So of course it will survive.
Outside of business though, when was the last time you sent an email to someone you know?
I forwarded tickets to my wife. But for “normal” communication I emailed the city about a citation they gave me for my yard.
My ex emailed me from a new account when he thought I’d blocked him everywhere else. I hadn’t, but I did after that!
Work Accountant Lawyer Contractor Community org
Yeah basically just for transactions, management
It’s reliable, it’s simple, it’s free, and virtually everyone who uses the internet has one. Email won’t be replaced for a LONG time.
I think WhatsApp has done it already in places like India
I wouldn’t call it reliable at all but it works good enough. All the other points are so big that they make up the flaws more than once.
Finally someone who understands email is a best effort model.
IRC and forums as well to a lesser extent.
Much much lesser. IRC has basically died to successors. Everybody still uses email sometimes.
Forums are still banging around however. Lots of places still use them, and thank god for that.
Not so much though.
There was a moment when forums were the only kind of community but now forum use is dwarved by discord and reddit.
IRC is still a pretty strong backbone for Twitch chat. At least it was a couple of years ago.
IRC is mainly a thing for hardcore 2000s re-livers and lobste.rs users nowadays lol
Everyone has to provide an email to make an account somewhere, if they don’t do the whole integration with Google/Facebook/etc
I’m using cpanel email and it’s terrible. Can someone recommend something cheap but better than cpanel?
What’s wrong with cpanel?
Some places block email coming from my cpanel email.
This is why I kind of hate microblogging platforms. This could just be part of a conversation, but shown of context every post is turned into a soundbite and takes on levels of faux-profundity that they can’t possibly support. Yeah, email has been around forever; so what?
What faux-profundity is on display here? Sometimes people just talk. Sometimes this includes observations. Kinda like what you did with your comment. I don’t understand why you’re bringing hate to a tea chat, but I suppose it can be good to get off your chest.
Thousands of years after humanity has destroyed itself with nuclear weapons…
As the sun peeks through the gray clouds and lights up a solar panel…
A long-forgotten server hums to life…
And sends an email…
“Attention Required: Your Order is Delayed”
We’ve been trying to reach you about your car insurance
See my h0t n4ked body here ---->
getallmylinkscom/usr/urieoop0oooojwhwhfb
It’s because it isn’t a silo?
Discord, Slack and a bajillion similar apps do not meld with other apps. Email just happened to hit critical mass before “let’s try to get a monopoly” became the slogan of all tech, and collectively Big Tech is too stupid/hostile to replace it with some cooperative protocol.
iMessage is another pure example of this.
There are tons of open messaging protocols that have been replaced by closed ones. For instance, Discord shouldn’t be a thing since IRC exists, but Discord exists and is very successful.
For some reason, likely tied to how it is used, email survived as an open protocol.
For instance, Discord shouldn’t be a thing since IRC exists, but Discord exists and is very successful.
IRC lacks a massive amount of features that discord users typically want. Screensharing, VCs with group and camera support, built-in history (don’t need to use a bouncer like on IRC), built-in online GIF searcher and sender with one click, huge community of bots that use discord’s API to do anything from games to moderation.
It isn’t even close.
ICQ and AIM managed to draw a huge crowd in the early (ish) days of home Internet.
It’s not about features…it’s about ease of use.
Also, IRC wasn’t as decentralized as email to begin with, there were several isolated networks that would not communicate with each other (dalnet, EFnet, undernet, etc)
It’s not about features…it’s about ease of use.
Its absolutely about both features and ease of use. If your program doesn’t do what people want from it, then good luck.
Its also irrelevant to talk about considering I have used IRC and highly doubt that people are going to consider it easier to use than discord.
Yeah I’m giving the ease-of-use points to Discord.
I’d agree that both are big, sure…but ICQ and AIM didn’t have attachments or GIFs or screensharing, They barely had text formatting. Yet they were still bigger than the semi-decentralized (but at least standards-based) IRC. The features weren’t the big lure, it was the ease of use.
Discord (to me) has better UX than any IRC I’ve ever experienced.
Email, on the other hand, is total baloney if it’s not interoperable. It’s why SMS/MMS is like a zombie that just won’t die, and telecoms are more cooperative than most of Big Tech.
I highlight IRC because being an open protocol doesn’t mean it gets adopted.
Yeah, it’s the widespread adoption/necessity that made email what it is. Discord was able to largely replace IRC because not a lot of people were using IRC. Everybody has an email account though-- you need one to order a pizza ffs
