Why use email?

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date: 2021-05-15 12:04:29

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.
• 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

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