And I do not want an infinite thread conversation. I want to be able to split off - and perhaps archive and export - different conversations by topic.
I recently had to some legal things, which included forwarding copies of a certain conversation to a lawyer. This turns out to be unreasonably difficult because email clients quote previous conversations. You want a clean thread of comment and reply about a specific topic. You don't get that.
You do get it on chat services, but there's no option there to create sub-conversations.
If I was redesigning email I would think long and hard about different use cases and workflows and start with an RFC. Protocols are far downstream of that.
Keep in mind that many people around the world already use this solution.
In my case, I give senders a mechanism to go into my inbox without my explicit approval. The server sends them an email with a URL. They follow the instructions, and their email gets whitelisted.
https://blog.nawaz.org/posts/2018/Sep/solving-my-email-probl...
I feel like every one of these suggested changes to email comes with a functionally equivalent parody magic trick.
For this one, a magician has two stacks of cards: a tall stack of "spam" cards, and a small stack of "inbox" cards.
The magician moves the stacks apart to make a spot for a new "request" stack.
To start the stack, they pick up five "request" cards from the inbox stack with one hand while subtly pushing the entire stack of "spam" cards with the other hand to spot they made for the "request" stack.
They then pass the five cards they were holding behind their back, revealing them with the opposite hand and finally shuffling them into the now tall stack of "request" cards.
Ta da!
> If I was redesigning email I would think long and hard about different use cases and workflows and start with an RFC.
A magician sweeps 17 sloppy stacks of cards off the table. They then show how the first 15 cards they pick up can more easily be arranged in only three stacks. Voila! Everybody claps.
While the audience members put money in the hat, the pedants stick around and watch the magician pick up the rest of the cards and end up with 18 sloppy stacks by the time the audience for the next show arrives.
Edit: clarification
Edit 2: I forgot this part: "Protocols are far downstream of that." So imagine 8 tiny tables below the main one which somehow end up with more than 52 cards in each of their 17 sloppy stacks.
Surely only if you configure them that way. At least I can turn that off in my email client, Thunderbird.
Nina xx
It's called threads - even Matrix has these
https://blog.nawaz.org/posts/2018/Sep/solving-my-email-probl...
(Not answering your question, but referring to the approach).
Deltachat
Honestly, I'd want this as a default. I wonder if a mailserver can be configure like this. Doesn't sound too hard, does it?
Greylisting is not perfect, not even close, but it allows servers to reject huge amounts of garbage mail while allowing new mail from unexpected parties without user intervention.
What parent wants is also possible and I remember people doing it as far back as the early 2000s. You would basically manually whitelist an email or have them bypass the list (once or always) with something like a key word or token sort of like a captcha which can be shared off band.
https://blog.nawaz.org/posts/2018/Sep/solving-my-email-probl...
1. "The recipient will not get this message until you authenticate yourself as a legitimate sender at this URL [...]" - resulted in people never getting mail from no-reply addresses they cared about (banks, e-com, etc.)
2. "This sender has sent you an email, with this subject and this first paragraph. Click here to whitelist, here to blacklist" - created a lot of churn on first setup that users didn't like as a UX
Baking it into the protocol - even now in SMTP and IMAP land - is doable, but would be resisted by email providers who, for example, make their money selling data to marketing agencies. Like, you know, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo...
I've seen other approaches proposed - even at IETF level - over the years, including digital postage stamps (sender pays to send email, your server gets paid, and may reject non-stamped/paying email), but it's the usual network effect: until it becomes widely supported it won't "stick". The stuff that has been adopted has basically been stuff that Google likes, period.
at one point Gmail had a service for this - if I remember well - but google being google - I guess it was just a promotion project for someone.