Why use email?

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date: 2022-01-09 23:16:22

categories: messaging

firstPublishDate: 2020-08-08 21:00:48

My reasons for using emails instead other systems:

Decentralized, I run my own mail server

Open and free

There are many clients with many user interface styles: computers: outlooks, thunderbird..., mobiles:android, mail in iOS, web: nextcloud client, terminals: mutt, alpine...

Private, the messages are sent over encrypted channels between trusted servers, the messages themselves can be encrypted and sent through untrusted servers.

More about messaging privacy

and

How I keep my privacy

Instant delivery: mails are delivered within seconds. It is also asynchonous and the destination can be offline for days.

Can read and compose emails offline

Enables group chating with threads

Ubiquitous, I can interact with anybody with an email address

Mailing list are very good for forum discussions with many people

I can organize the messages in anyway I want, most often automatically with filters

I can have multiple account and multiple addresses (aliases)

Email software is lightweight and emails are simple plaintext

Handle large volume of messages

Easy to send emails from tools like: jira, redmine, gerrit, jenkins, scripts, command line...

It is easy to archive mails for long period of time, I save my emails in the maildir format (one file per email) and use

notmuch

for searching my mails

Mail are simple text, it is easy to search in the archive

Many clients allow organizing the mails in a tree like the file systems

Easy to send messages from command line, for example: send status from development tool, I have created lots of tools that send emails to me automatically

Fast, there are even chat applications using email like deltachat

Can use syntax highligting on the messages

Some drawbacks:

Spam, mitigated by spam blockers and filters, I keep the mails from my contact list in my inbox and other mails are moved to another folder

People change email overtime, losing contact. This is like other communication systems

When new people join or are added to a group, they don't get the history of the group unless it is mailing list with a public archive

Large attachments are limited. I propose to split large attachments in multiple mails

No invisible emoji reactions. Clients can add support for this

No voice chat or video chat. Clients can add voice and video services

Delivery is unreliable, the sender doesn't know if the message has been received. Client can send a received message

Leaks metadata. The metadata can be stored in the encrypted part of the message

Lacks identity authentication

Running my own email server doesn't take a lot of time. I installed it in 2019 and since then I didn't need to do any maintenance. Delivery to major email services is good: gmail, microsoft, yahoo.

Why not use Matrix?

The clients and servers are heavy, not efficient

Can't organize messages easily

Can't handle high volume

Specification is too big and not stable

The system is too complex and getting even more complex since p2p will be added soon

Open source but the development requires lots of financial resources

Search is bad

Missing spam filtering

There is no terminal client

The client user interfaces are slow

hashtags: #email

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