"Unlike most browser-based email, which is server-based, Superhuman can store and index gigabytes of email in the web browser itself."
Did I miss something, or what technology can store gigabytes in a web browser?! Unless they are compressing email aggressively (possible) and storing in SessionStorage/LocalStorage, decompressing on the fly... then this sounds like marketing fluff, or just written poorly.
IndexedDB can store a huge amount of data — your browser will allow up to 50% of the free space on your machine to be used. [1] In most cases that would be gigabytes.
IndexedDB doesn't have full browser support yet (Edge is listed as having "partial support" [2]), but Chrome, Firefox, and recent versions of Safari all support it.
For a particularly rare edge case, I periodically have to SIGKILL Chrome so it doesn't crash (due to failed SQLite assertions) when my disk gets full and I have to shuffle things around to make space. In the last instance of this taking place, / had 820KB free.
(Context would probably be useful here: I have a 15+-year long diskspace issue created by being given many many old computers with tiny hard drives and not having the infrastructure/knowhow (when I was younger) to move/sync active projects between machines. I just need to get a couple large HDDs so I can collect and dedupe everything, but I can't work due to health issues so that's proving... fun. This is also blocking all kinds of things such as getting my first smartphone, so I have nowhere to back it up onto!)
You've got no contact details in your profile but in the very small chance that you're in Australia, I've got a number of spare hard drives I could give you.
I just re-ran your test suite[1], and I got 1.325s insertion time with 10k items on IndexedDB on Chromium on GNU/Linux (with lots of tabs open). I'm on a fairly modest 8-core 16GB box. It's still 1 order of magnitude slower than the others, but not as bad as your old results.
Either that specific test (I didn't make it, to clarify) or Chromium has a bug.
Depending on how I fiddle with the browser, the test either takes 134 seconds or 6 (!!!) seconds.
Of course when I ran the test for the first time I did it a few times. I think the repeated tests may have triggered these bugs.
If I go to the test page, click the (i) to the left of the domain, hit Cookies, select the domain (the root of the tree listview) and Remove (to remove the IDB, WebSQL and localStorage bits the page sets up) and then run the test, I consistently get 6 seconds.
My suspicion is that, the page is creating 1000 items in localStorage, THEN adding my 10000 on top of that. That would explain the crazy delays.
However, this does not explain why, when I visited the page for the first time in several months, it completed in 6 seconds without any tinkering required.
Note that the page re-fills localStorage on each load - clearing it after the page has loaded is key.
"Works best in IE 6" wasn't dumb at the time. It was the best browser available. What was bad is those sites continued to work only in IE6 long after it ceased to be the best browser.
The browser ecosystem is much healthier now. If Chrome ceases to innovate there are others ready to take over.
Yeah, except the way I read OP's comment is he thought the whole implementation (server, storage, etc) was all local in the browser. But this is NOT the case (I thought that was the case too initially).
I just made this as a reply in another thread where the user essentially believed you couldn't have a nice GUI (his example was VS Code) with a native toolkit that's also easy to develop in:
Nice.. Though one small niggle: I wanted to bookmark this for later reference, but the git page has no screenshots, and the screenshot has no title or link to the gitpage..
Don't bother with Qt widgets, learn QtQuick and QML.
Install QtCreator, grab the docs and play around in a new project. You can drag and drop components around in design mode and you'll be able to figure out how QML works from there. It's really intuitive.
Also the point of QtQuick as an alternative to Electron is not to look native beyond the menus and dialogs.
And you probably associate Qt with Qt widgets, not QtQuick. Qt widgets actually tries to resemble and behave like native widgets, and it will let you get to that point if you actually care about that.
Most people making cross plat applications don't, which is why popular Qt widgets applications like VirtualBox and VLC don't look native, and QtQuick applications like Telegram for Desktop just ignore the desktop's HIGs completely.
Microsoft has tremendous resources, it's definitely costlier to build a great desktop UI than a great Web UI (but the great
Eat desktop UIs are always better).
Microsoft has tremendous resources, it's definitely costlier to build a great desktop UI than a great Web UI
What? Let's not rewrite history. I has been easy and cheap to create desktop UIs for decades, literally. I was using Borland Delphi 1.0 as a 13 year old and could have a basic Windows UI app up and running in ten minutes.
There have been many great cross-platform and platform-specific toolkits that are easy to use. E.g. you can teach someone with some Python knowledge how to make basic Qt desktop applications in one hour or so. It's literally as simple as dragging some widgets to a window and writing some lines of wrapper code.
I recommend anyone who thinks that developing applications using web UIs is easier/cheaper to look at some Delphi 1.0 videos. E.g.:
This was how we developed desktop applications 22 years ago on machines with 4 or 8 MB RAM. And it is still a whole lot easier and more efficient than a web app.
Only if your measure for great is "looks and behaves in a bug-compatible manner exactly like the native toolkit". Otherwise, no, I'd very much disagree.
danieldk's response sums it up quite nicely. I will add that around the same age I found Microsoft's own Visual Basic 6 and was doing stuff with it.
Additionally, Microsoft has their own framework similar to what QML offers: WPF. The problem with it is that it doesn't have cross platform support, something they wanted to have for VSCode.
It's all exhorbitantly easy to use. Cost is not the issue, specially since they already have a lot of really talented people working on VS Code.
I have been doing native GUI development starting with Turbo Vision in Turbo Pascal 6 and started with Web development in about 1997.
I have used quite a few UI toolkits since those days and am yet to agree with the opinion that the Frankenstein mixture of HTML, CSS and JavaScript is a better UI toolkit.
A lot of people think the earth is flat and landing on the moon is fake. Call me a misanthropist, but I generally have little faith in 'a lot of people' ;-)
The thing about efficient language wasn't 100% targeted at web technologies alone, but at the general waste of computing resources for something as trivial as a mail client. Just because we have SSDs, gigabytes of RAM and CPUs that do a whole lot of cycles doesn't mean wasting a good portion of it is a good idea.
I wasn't saying it was good because it was popular, not making an argument from popularity, since I also think most people are stupid.
I was saying that's the right trade-off to choose in a lot of common use cases. Because most UI toolkits are pretty limiting, and the web toolkit can be amazingly powerful and productive. Of course, if you follow the latest fads in the awful js community they are a nightmare, but lets not pretend that's the only way to use the platform when it makes sense to pay the efficiency cost.
I have found Chromium to be a nice alternative to keep local browser apps working as it freezes the browser version instead of automatic upgrades, which have regularly broken web based line of business applications I have been around the past few years.
Most PSD templates for screenshots are Macbook screens + Safari. Having designed a number of landing pages for startups I'm really not surprised that the designer they hired for their website chose to use that (without considering the current browser support).
As the other commenter pointed out it's a safe bet for marketing purposes and looks best aesthetically. But the confusion here could be a real problem for early adopters.
Designer here. This is accurate. The long story is, this site was mocked a bit before all the final technical details were scoped out for the project. It's in need of a visual refresh to more accurately represent the platforms we use.
I don't know whether Superhuman will be a plugin or not, but there's no reason it would have to be; IndexedDB can provide gigabytes of space, and it's standardized, and current versions of Chrome, FF, and Safari all support it.
Depends if you consider IE and Mobile Safari as a required target. They have 250MB and 50MB limits, respectively. But yes, if these can be omitted then IndexedDB API seems fine nowadays.
Edit: MS Edge also has 250MB-500MB; they're just always playing catch up, even when their market share has dwindled...
in the manifest.json then "The size of unlimited storage is limited only by the availability of space in the user's hard drive." Not quite sure if that's how they do it.
> “We decided it would be blazingly fast; it would be visually gorgeous; the whole thing would work offline; you wouldn’t need a multitude of browser extensions to get things done; and people would be materially faster at doing their email.”
I've not used the previous product(s) this guy has worked on, but from reading TFA, and notably the way they reiterate those claims a few times, I'm confused.
First, general nomenclature grumble, using an existing english word as a product name.
They seem to be positioning as a superior option to gmail, for current gmail users. Disclaimer - I've been using email since the late 1980's, and gmail since 2004. I've also used a bundle of other mail clients (kmail/kontact, outlook, thunderbird, etc).
Gmail is blazingly fast - I've not seen it stall or choke or any tasks
Visually gmail looks clean and effective to my eye -- and I don't think gorgeousness would be a compelling reason to move away.
Gmail can work fine offline - either mobile device, or the wonderful Gmail Offline extension[1] -- sure, it's Chrom* only, but I gather the 'gigabytes of offline' in this thing is Chrom* only also(?). That extension is fantastic for flights or when I'm working in remote regions, and don't want to deal with a mobile device.
Apart from that, I don't have any other gmail-specific extensions - but even if I did, is it believed these are harder to set up and learn than a different mail client?
Really at a loss how I could be faster 'at doing my email' -- for people I see who struggle with email, a small portion of their problem is familiarity with the features of their client, but most of it is because their workflow is poor. Rarely is it because the mail client is actually broken and working against you. (Outlook being the obvious exception.)
> Gmail is blazingly fast - I've not seen it stall or choke or any tasks
Try to delete a few thousand messages at a time, and see it not just choke, but cause timeouts or 500 errors when you try to reload the inbox in another tab.
At least it consistently does this for me over several accounts, both regular Gmail and paid apps accounts.
Server notifications gone berserk. Cleaning up old tags, seeing as Gmail is so very fond of encouraging archival instead of deletion.
I've developed habits of using mail for all kinds of notifications because it tends to work with other services, and it mostly works with Gmail too, exception deletion it a totally pathological case. All they'd needed to do would be to queue large operations in the background...
One issue I have with gmail is that it takes a million clicks and like 10 seconds to filter email so that I never see that sender/subject/whatever again. Do you have a solution?
I use gmail app on mobile (and Nine for talking to work Exchange server). I don't use Priority inbox feature. I use incoming filters to apply labels. I try to process each message once - and am happy to archive anything non-actionable.
For mail I don't wish to receive or keep, I'll take the time to stop it being sent to me, rather than set up a filter/blocker at my end. For mail I only want to be able to search for later I'll filter to auto-archive on receipt.
I try to avoid using my inbox as a todo list - having a separate task tracker makes this possible (different tools vary the ease of this, of course).
I suspect most people who struggle with email don't have a task tracker (or if they do, they aren't using that properly either) but that's based on a relatively small set of anecdata.
When you say it takes a million clicks and 10 seconds to filter email - do you mean to create a new filter on an arbitrary email? How often are you creating new filters?
For mail I don't wish to receive or keep, I'll take the time to stop it being sent to me, rather than set up a filter/blocker at my end.
How? Through unsubscribes?
I try to avoid using my inbox as a todo list - having a separate task tracker makes this possible (different tools vary the ease of this, of course).
So on mobile you are switching back and forth between apps a bunch? While you process email?
I just want to understand the workflow a bit better.
I suspect most people who struggle with email don't have a task tracker (or if they do, they aren't using that properly either)
How do you use a task tracker correctly/incorrectly?
* When you say it takes a million clicks and 10 seconds to filter email - do you mean to create a new filter on an arbitrary email? How often are you creating new filters?*
Yeah. I have a lot of transactional emails that I want to archive. Maybe if I sat down for two hours I'd be done. My personal inbox is a mess.
I should mention I'm not fantastic at this stuff - it takes consistent effort to maintain, and of course we all have our unique challenges and preferences. I'd recommend searching around for some blogs that go into more detail on workflows, and reading Getting Things Done (Dave Allen). I've tried to adopt some of the key habits he describes.
Yes - I take the effort to unsubscribe from unwanted mail. These days much easier, as the unsubscribe link is usually to be found in the email itself. (In the olden days it was a bit trickier, getting yourself off lists.) Worst case I'll mark it as spam. The intent is to not have my mail archive crufted up with stuff I don't want - it reduces search efficacy later.
On mobile I usually don't do a lot of mail 'processing' -- phones frustrate me, and I defer most things to when I have a decent keyboard & screen in front of me. I do have trello and trello-add-card (widget) on my phone's home page, and the latter is a fast way to cut-n-paste new items into. There's also the option to forward email to your private trello board/inbox using the obfuscated email address they provide for each board. During your nightly task review you would then tidy up the card title & description.
How do you use a task-tracker correctly ... now that's a big question :) Biggest thing for me is that I trust that when something goes into my task tracker, I can get rid of it from email, my brain, post-it notes, etc. Sensible columns categories, thoughtful card names, learn the keyboard shortcuts (desktop web trello client in my case), colour coding, try to make cards describe actionable steps, 'next steps' should be do-able right now (cards with dependencies can't be 'in progress', f.e.).
Is there a requirement that you observe or interact with each of the transactional emails you're receiving? Is it something that could be handled by a script, log analyser, etc? Or when you say you want to archive them, do you mean the time-consuming process is identifying candidates for manual or automatic archival?
I've seen this claim several times in this thread now. Having used Fastmail since 2013, how is it blazingly fast since its UI will randomly perform a full reload when you switch back to its tab? It happens multiple times a day.
The last time I've had Gmail suddenly decide to reload the page the moment I need to use it? Never.
Uhm, people think gmail is fast? I can fetch a brand new page on my phone over 4G faster than browsing gmail on an i7 desktop. And fast search? Only if you don't have any desire to find anything.
That's pretty much all of TechCrunch's startup section.[0] As far as I know, it's not sponsored content: some editor still rifles through PR agency submissions until she find something that she feels will pique readers' interest.
For example, here are the last 10 headlines for that category:
- Tracking viewer responses to media, Cinemmerse wants to set the stage for ‘responsive’ entertainment
- Rapportive founder’s new startup Superhuman is what Gmail would be if built today
- Y Combinator-backed VIDA turns artwork into fashion, accessories and more
- Immersv raises $10.5M to shake up mobile advertising with some VR flair
- Virtual telescope company Slooh is ready for the eclipse
- Original Tech helps banks offer better loan applications
- ‘Airbnb for boats’ startup Boatsetter buys competitor Boatbound
- LiftIgniter raises $6.4M to bring website personalization to the rest of the internet
- Bitcoin wallet ‘Blockchain’ adds Ethereum support
- B2B platform Releaf helps African businesses by taking the guesswork out of networking
Does it have an equivalent for Bundles (specifically bundles in the inbox) - the one feature that distinguishes Google Inbox ( https://inbox.google.com ) from every other client as far as I know.
I'd be very interested in a competitor for that feature as I couldn't do without it now and I'd like to know I have options if Google retires it or modify it beyond recognition.
(Brief summary - they are like smart folders but they appear as a single item in your inbox. It enables me to bundle up various newsletters, server alerts and more broadly themed collections of mail and decide which ones should appear in my inbox immediately, daily or never. If I used traditional folders or labels then they end up forgotten or ignored. It allows you to file/categorize but still maintains the "my inbox is my todo list" paradigm.)
Spark has something similar. In any case, I've found the tool useful not to triage incoming mail into "read now", and "read later", but into "read at some point", and "unsubscribe immediately".
Spark also has the flaw of being MacOS and iOS only. Sadly I need Android, Windows and MacOS at the very least but I'm much more comfortable knowing something is fully cross-platform wherever possible. Realistically this means browser + Android native + iOS native (unless the browser version is extremely well coded and runs satisfactorily on a mobile browser)
And I can't find pricing, TOS, talk about data access (from the features, it appears they want to pull my mail through their servers?) - and a few features that breaks with good email/netiquette (read notifications, links in email that rely on http(s)).
What is this product? What's the monetization plan?
> Superhuman, however, is only targeting a fraction of the email market: business users who will pay a subscription for a more powerful client. For this reason, the browser version of the email app only works in Google Chrome.
If they're only targeting business users... why don't they also support Edge? Weird. Doubly weird that all their screenshots are in MacOS, which has plenty of safari users, and isn't enterprise-friendly.
So they really are carving out a very small niche - small upmarket businesses that are willing to pay for something other than gmail (when paid gmail also gets you the rest of the google apps suite). Feels like a shonky business-case to me - I can't see how they'd competitively price the accounts if they're basically ruling out companies with large user-bases.
Thanks for pointing that out: that at least gives me an idea of what this thing is, beyond the marketing fluff.
Now, what kind of email servers/hosts do they support? Exchange? Only Gmail? Any Imap? Pop3? Do they have a policy on tls support?
As for market/product/niche - I actually think carving a thin slice out of the business market is a great idea. You could probably get target/interested businesses to pay a pretty premium for a "good email solution", whatever that means for any particular business. I don't think neither exchange nor Gmail would be particularly hard to compete with as a product. Much like some will pay a pretty premium for an ide that boost productivity and/or happiness...
That said, I'm now pretty sure I'm not a target customer for superhuman. But that's fine, I whish them best of luck.
Almost all, if not all functionality on their front page is available in Newton email client(s) today. Of course, their main claim, speed is what should set them apart. All the others are not really things that would turn me over. Gmail, Newton (exchange work client) are clean enough. Newton has all other features as superchargers. One thing that I miss in superhuman is integration with Evernote, todoist, you name it. They don't talk about it (or I missed it). Also, for a super clean interface that landing page is not the example I hope.
P.s. I hope it will not be exactly like Gmail and have their own email domains. [Name]@superhuman.com is even less professional than Gmail. It's borderline unusable.
For those who want to sign up for early access. It is an option to join the paid early access. They forgot to mention this on their sign up page. So take care.
I don't see any improvement here. Not visually at least. It's just like Gmail web interface; a bit different, not necessarily a bit better. Also, if adding all the social/people widgets on the sidebar isn't clutter then I wonder what would clutter be.
I don't get this idea - "gmail is cluttered". I would like to know if there's something I am missing. It looks sufficiently clean and uncluttered to me at least. And with a decent Internet connection it's fast too. Well, it's definitely not slow.
For me the latest source clutter are all these hundreds of new apps/services claiming to fix things which aren't really broken or not fix anything at all.
Side-note: Just wondering (it may not be the case), is it common for tech blogs/portals like TC publish sponsored/PR posts without marking the post as such?
I've been lucky enough to have been able to use it for a while now and I'm addicted. The team is super responsive to feedback and take the science of email to the next level.
I can't tell if the comment to which you answer (and its other reply) is serious or sarcastic: great, lucky, be able to, addicted, team, super, responsive, science of email, next level. Sounds like a bingo (I almost had to keep 50% of the text in my selection...).
The reply is of the same kind: changed completely, my relationship (with email!), become indispensable. Plus the "200 mails a day, wow".
It reminds me of my former manager, who couldn't be arsed not to destroy the emails I sent him (must have been a zero-inbox maniac): "You know, I have to manage 80, sometimes 100 mails a day." and forced me to recompose them to send them again (because he suddenly couldn't wait that I come back on the machine on which I typed the original mail).
Yeah, well, I've been getting 300 to 800 mails a day for the last 25 years
and I have them all archived (OK, for the 20 years old ones, they must be on a hard drive... somewhere :-) but you could ask me anything for the last couple of years and I would find it after a few minutes, worst case. I even found my Fidonet netmails a couple of years ago). I never lost a mail since I don't delete any (except the occasional spam which got through anti-spam layers).
I once saw a guy first hand with visible addiction to email. He was addicted to email like I was addicted to HN and tech news or other people are addicted to Facebook (news).
There's no more news to read yet you still check. There is no more Facebook post yet you still check. There are no more emails for the day yet you still check.
I second this. It's completely changed my relationship with email. I have to process around 200 emails a day as part of my work (full time manager) and Superhuman has become basically indispensable.
Is this just marketing copy they asked you to post in the comments? Few times have a ever spoken so highly of a product. What specifically makes Superhuman "indispensable"? It doesn't really seem like they've innovated that much (nor could they as email is still email)/
Doesn't appear to have folders, or am I missing something?
Filters and folders are a god send for me. I get > 1000 emails a day, so inbox zero using the traditional methods (ie sit there and go though them all) are both stupid and impractical.
Google Inbox has this feature. There, after sending an email, a small notification appears, allowing you to 'undo' the send for a few seconds. For the small number of times you are too trigger-happy with the Send button, the ability to undo is great.
Gmail has this feature, too. It basically holds the message for up to a minute after you press send. During that time you can click the undo button and edit the message. After the time, the message is sent and you can't undo it.
In reality, I think the only way to do this is just not to let the email leave the bounds of their own servers for x seconds, and then only if the user hasn't canceled in the meantime. Maybe it's possible to do if you host the email for both sender and receiver, but even then, it seems unlikely given the implications of being able to see an email literally disappear from your inbox.
Exchange offers this functionality - retract an email sent to internal senders. It sometimes fails with "The sender would like to retract this message" shown above the email.
I once worked with a guy who had an Outlook rule that immediately marked new mail as read ( and flagged 'to action' or something like that ) specifically to defeat Exchange recall.
Admittedly he did manage to harvest some interesting information but mainly it was just managers trying to correct typos.
It was effective before blackberries (and the iphones that killed them). Basically it worked when there was a chance that you'd hit recall before anyone's mail client would have actually pulled it down.
Maybe it's the Unix fan in me talking, but I don't get the point of "undo send". Why are you hitting "send" if you have doubts about sending, instead of putting it into the Drafts folder and taking a 10 minute break? If you're afraid of sending an email with a typo, why not get into the habit of proofreading to your satisfaction before sending the email?
"Undo send" seems to me to be inherently inferior to having some self-discipline and patience. Whatever last second doubts you've had are now simply pushed forward. Except now you've set a timer, which creates additional chance for failure -- either on the back end or on the user side, e.g. the timer expiring just as you try to panic cancel -- that there isn't when you just don't hit send in the first place.
I get that products have to be designed for human comfort over pure technical effectiveness, but this is design that appeases -- at a very surface level -- one of our least helpful indiscretions.
> Undo send" seems to me to be inherently inferior to having some self-discipline and patience
I eagerly await your new email client which provides both self discipline and patience to users. Until it releases, I suspect the Undo Send option will continue to be used.
But email has been this way for a very long time. And aren't many other common user-to-user messaging systems this way? iOS messages and old-fashioned texting/SMS, for instance. And postal mail and phone calls and answering machines and face-to-face interactions, for that matter.
I think of it as more important when email is being used as an announcement medium - I'm ok leaving a mistake/sending a correction to one or two people, but not 1100.
Presumably you also put more time and focus into emails that are being sent to 1,100 recipients versus emails to 1 recipient, and you send more of the latter than you do the former. But the "undo send" gives you 10 minutes of extra-edit time to that important announcement as well as every other email you send.
If "undo send" gives a psych boost to being obsessive-compulsive, this still doesn't address the additional layer of possible failure. You have better control over your ability to not hit "Send" then you do to do a panic cancel as you do a last second proofread.
I've done that too. For emails and for things that have an undo/delete option since their inception (Twitter, Facebook, Slack). With email I've accepted to be more careful about when sending very important emails. And for less important emails, be OK with sending an addendum, even when it's on a mailing list.
Your method requires putting extra time and effort into every email you write. "Undo send" requires extra time and effort only when something goes wrong. Email isn't for instant communication, so adding a short delay to make it easier is a good tradeoff.
I'm sure there's a law that no matter how carefully you proofread something, you'll find at least one typo the first time you read it after it's been published.
I use Mail.app also, but man is the search horrendous. I understand that it's supposed to get a lot better (faster, more accurate) in High Sierra, but even Apple employees I know complain about it (and iOS mail search, which is also slow/inaccurate).
OT: As a former PINE/ALPINE User I found that reliable Email clients seem to be rare. There seems not to be much besides Thunderbird and Evolution. I neither got Claws Mail nor iScribe to work with my servers under Linux. Any other email client recommendation for Linux?
Personally I've found myself fairly happy using the combo of mutt and mbsync (with gmail). It does unfortunately require downloading all your mail (Which is a bit messy in the beginning since Google sets a limit for how much you can download per month IIRC), but mbsync has been by far the best mail downloader/syncer I've found. I set it up probably well over a year ago now and haven't had to touch my setup or configuration at all, and it has worked perfectly the entire time.
It is definitely true that mutt takes a bit of work to tame, but most of my .muttrc is just stuff I copied after googling so it really isn't too crazy. There's tons of basic 'Gmail' .muttrc's out there that you can just modify to use the maildir from mbsync rather then IMAP from gmail.
If you liked Pine/Alpine, you might want to consider mu4e, notmutch-emacs, or mutt-kz. All three are highly customizable text clients that use indexing to get speedy searches and virtual mailboxes in the vain of Google Mail or Fastmail. The Emacs-based clients (mu4e and notmuch-emacs) can also use shr to render HTML mails.
(I use mu4e, coming from a mixture of Apple's Mail.app, Google/Fastmail web interface, and mutt.)
I've been using Geary, but it isn't something I'd recommend. Still feels unpolished (you can't create labels for eg). I also tried out Nylas, which is now open source, but it doesn't support plain text emails.
I'm considering moving to evolution or Thunderbird
Right. From the looks of it that is not true; when Gmail came out and I got an invite, I started by 'importing' all my mail and using it as I was using my own mail server; back then my life was my mailbox and I received 10000 messages a day in folders like spam, server telemetry and so on. Gmail promised scalability and good spam control and 'never delete mail'. I did just that; over the years I have worked with Google engineers to make Gmail better as my particular inbox clogged up stuff regularly especially after the public at large got Gmail. Now it works perfectly and nothing else seems to work for me as it all just dies. But this was a feature and use case for Gmail; not for these guys it seems. Which is fine by the way. Different use case.
Outside the workplace, it's rarely used for personal messages anymore. It's limited to confirmation messages, promotional mailings, forgot password links and that's about it.
The days of email are over. Everything moved into silos like WhatsApp because they offer instant responses email could never offer and a nicer UI.
Well good news, workplaces are still a thing and where a lot of economic activity happens.
Email provides ubiquitous, traceable, asynchronous, storable messaging. Until something can entirely supplant it I don't see it disappearing anytime soon.
> Email provides ubiquitous, traceable, asynchronous, storable messaging. Until something can entirely supplant it I don't see it disappearing anytime soon.
Long live email. Anything that replaces it will probably be a closed proprietary protocol and I don't look forward to that at all.
I've often wondered: what's preventing someone from building an IM client on top of e-mail? While it's very inefficient for short messages, we're not using dial-up anymore (and I'd argue it wouldn't be that bad even on dial-up). Furthermore, e-mail could serve as only the slow, max-compatibility path, with some fast path (IMAP public folders? Or even a completely unrelated protocol) when the users are using compatible clients.
Okay, so I guess the idea is not so much IM-over-e-mail, but rather a schema that maps IM operations into e-mail operations.
I've had this thought very often, and (using your comment as motivation) I think I might use this weekend as an opportunity to try hacking something together. Maybe even add SMS fallback using Twilio or something.
I still use and prefer Email. If I want instant communication, I use sms or a phone call... And I almost never use those. At work, I use slack for instant communication, but again, I try to keep it to a minimum.
What are you imagining the hayday of email to have been like? It sounds like you're describing AIM in the 90s, or SMS in the early 00's. Before that there was IRC if you wanted realtime responses. Email has always been async.
Mind you, nobody has ever introduced me to a friend via social media.
Meanwhile, SMS is still going strong. Who needs an app?
ok, I feel a little bad adding to the dogpile here, but . . . one of the great things about email is that it's an open standard -- you can use whatever software you want, or even write your own. the very article we're commenting on is about a new email client offering, among other things, an extremely shiny UI. :p
The standard doesn't allow you to implement things for a great UX.
For example, you can't search for people if you don't know their email address. You can't know if an email was successfully delivered or read. The "quoting" of replies is a mess with no standard for doing it.
Asynchronous communication has some huge advantages. For example you tend to put a little more thought into your words since any clarifications will have to wait for a whole round-trip. It's a different mode of communication.
And of course not being siloed is also an advantage in itself.
Exactly. WhatsApp etc are great for exchanging 2 sentence messages with your friends but how do you talk to people outside of your circle?
If you want to message a company or government dept asking about something how would you do that? Worse still how would you contact a specific person that you didn't already know (say an academic at a university)?
Did I miss something, or what technology can store gigabytes in a web browser?! Unless they are compressing email aggressively (possible) and storing in SessionStorage/LocalStorage, decompressing on the fly... then this sounds like marketing fluff, or just written poorly.