Why use email?
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.
and
- 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
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
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