Just Use Email

While I’ve been sleeping, the references to email in the news have not let up.

AMP Email could be dead.

First, let’s celebrate. AMP Email looks to be dead. Buttondown, an email newsletter service provider, wrote an article that made the rounds just this past week. Let’s all hope Ryan Farley, who is somehow writing in Thailand and probably enjoying life that way, is correct that Google has abandoned AMP Email.

In his article titled “AMP and why emails are not (and should never be) interactive”, which alone could stand as a war cry, he bests it only by his subtitle: “Google tried to reinvent email. Everyone said no.”

Apparently, there may be more of us out there than we thought. One of these days, when we get enough wrong-headed approaches to email laying quietly in their graves, I should add a page to Just Use Email called “Email Survived. These did not.” and have it serve as a bit of digital graveyard wherein we don’t mourn the dead, but celebrate their untimely demise.

It’s not all good news

Google, however, just a few weeks earlier, is “amping” up their approach to build automatic encryption into Gmail. The Verge writes that Gmail is making it easier for businesses to send encrypted emails to anyone.

It’s more than I really want to talk about at the moment.

Let’s talk about the logic of email encryption, however. As you know, one of email’s superpowers is that it is unencrypted by default.

So, let’s follow the rabbit trail.

1. Email is unencrypted. Any man-in-the-middle could read your emails. That is how it was designed.
2. We can’t have unencrypted email because any man-in-the-middle could read your emails.
3. Here’s a suspicious, proprietary, or complex way to encrypt your emails. Probably all three. Your banks will use it to send you “encrypted” emails that you’ll spend a half-hour trying to read and be unable to “reply” or “reply to all” due to their nifty custom interface they force you to use. It’s pretty much no longer email but a web forum for banks.
4. Therefore, we need big email companies to all agree and make their own encryption and share it amongst themselves as a new standard (but not really a standard) so that everyone can just happily send and receive encrypted email without a care in the world.
5. Of course, like this new Gmail approach, it won’t be truly end-to-end encrypted. It won’t be Signal or Telegram or WhatsApp. Not that we truly trust those either. But it’ll be… better… as along as a bunch of things hold true that no user will ever really grasp. The exclusions will be more difficult to understand — and longer — than the exclusions on your auto insurance policies.
6. Immediately, however, the government will demand back doors to this encryption. They’ve solved nearly zero crimes monitoring all the unencrypted email for 50 years, but they’ll now demand that they can still keep monitoring all our email or else the sea will consume us.
7. So, email will be viewable by government, by all the big tech companies, their assigns, their contractors (overseas, too), their key staff, and a few hackers.
8. So email will remain unencrypted by default still, but just not in name. Instead, you’ll get cute lock icons on your emails and half of your functionality won’t work as it did before. One day, all the cryptographic keys, which will be tied to your email provider, will disappear when they do, or when someone rotates the keys and forgets some checkbox, and all your old email will be unreadable forever.
9. You now will have email that once was read by everyone (unencrypted by default), that was then still readable by everyone unless you pay and keep your email provider happy (which can be hard to do for certain censorship-minded providers), and when they disappear as half of my old email providers have, you’ll be unable to read your own email.
10. We’ve now gone full circle but have expended the equivalent caloric energy of WWII over the next ten years, accomplishing nothing of long-term value, meanwhile delaying time travel and trips to Mars because we had to usurp engineers on “the encrypted email problem”.

All in all, to be less sarcastic, I understand that Google enterprise users of their Google Workspace and Gmail services, would appreciate this service.

But the rest of us? Beat it. Get lost.

Email is unencrypted by default

I’ve said it before and claimed it is one of email’s superpowers. I just see no benefit to either all-encryption (everyone is doing it) or sometimes encryption. As argued by attorney Sara Kropf in a post entitled It’s not what you say; it’s how you say it, it’s sometimes argued by prosecutors — and allowed by courts — that the mere fact you switched to an encrypted communication medium is evidence you were wishing to do some wrong.

She cites an actual ongoing case where the Department of Justice was hoping to introduce evidence that the use of WhatsApp (E2E) was tantamount to sneaky behavior. Look, they got the messages anyway (as the government is almost always going to do, either through breaking the encryption or coercion of a party to the conversation).

Here’s an interesting read on the same subject. Some mystery person behind this blog wrote a short post in January called End-to-End encrypted email is bad for you. He (she?) argues that you are fine just using POP3 if you are concerned about privacy.

With POP3 you gain the freedom to secure your emails with your choice of local disk encryption. You “own” your emails forever, and are free to search and analyse privately. Compare this to encrypted services where you must reach a cloud through proprietary protocols just to download your data (usually even advertised as a super premium “feature” behind a paywall).

It’s worth a read. I especially like his first three points.

Email as the interface?

Here’s an oldie from 2013 I recently found. Matt Swanson points out that a lot of software development is spent (wasted?) on fancy user interfaces. Why couldn’t a case be made for using email as the interface itself? This makes a lot of sense.

Email already has input and output. People already use email as a reminder system. There’s really no limit. It’s not likely to fly in large corporate environments, but for simple input/process/output tools, email could be just the trick to accelerate the its release.

Can we just do email? Seriously?

We all heard the news from 2024 that glorified note-taking app Notion has released their own inbox for email. Of course they did.

Project Management tool Basecamp released their own inbox and email service called Hey, which I felt was unnecessary.

And now open-source email client Thunderbird can’t seem to leave well enough alone and wants to add some “pro services” to its offerings, claiming it will soon have large file sharing, an AI assistant (sigh…), an appointment booking service, and something called Thundermail, an email service.

I see many things with all these approaches:

1. The first Unix Philosophy to “make each program do one thing well” is being ignored. We know behemoths like Microsoft and Adobe ignore this all the time. But they have billions and you don’t.
2. There’s nothing new or innovative about these features. It’s just add-on. It’s not like Thunderbird is going to revolutionize the calendar appointment market; they’re just playing me-too. Even Basecamp’s Hey, which tried to claim innovation, was just really bundling and displaying features most of us have already.
3. It’s arrogance. As any seasoned software developer will tell you, it’s the little things that block innovation. Things like dates of birth, email address patterns, time zones, different names of humans… the moment you get into a new project, all these decisions and libraries and patterns have to be discussed and addressed and programmed for your particular little app. And for what? Time travel? Nope.
4. It’s a waste of developer time, in the aggregate. Sure, any company can toil away at an app that no one will buy. That happens every day. I’m just saying here that we could advance civilization and move the needle on important issues if everyone and their cousin would stop building the same functionality and bloat into every tool imaginable. Perhaps that’s a corollary to Unix Philosophy #1: stop re-inventing the wheel.

Of course, we know that these decisions aren’t based on the above. They’re based on the need to acquire users, to lock users in, to keep them from slipping off into some other void. I mean, what if calendar booking apps started offering email? Oh no! We’d better capture that edge case first!

Look, email is hard enough. Make it faster. Make it work better. Keep refining the interface — or not. But stop adding other tabs and features to everything.

I can just see it now. The new Microsoft Outlook! It’s got email and calendars and an address book, but now you can do simple spreadsheets and calculus right from Outlook. Or play Frogger while you wait for your email to be fetched. For those who like to code, we’ve put all of Visual Studio Code right inside Outlook! No more switching apps (well, you’ll still have to switch tabs inside Outlook), but you can quickly drum up some python algorithms right from within Outlook and send them to a friend with a single click! We’ll even format that part of your email with our new Cascadia code font! But wait, there’s more… we’ve turned all your emails into ebooks. Simply click and we’ll upload them right to your Kindle so you can read them on the tube. Or better yet, we’ve add Cortana and Alexa and Siri all into Outlook, along with Clippy, and they can read your emails outloud, even laugh at your stupid friend’s jokes, or argue with each other about which of your emails is truly the most important one. Clippy can even juggle emails in the corner and let you grab one from him at random. Lastly, we’ve also brought in PowerPoint to Outlook. No more reading emails on a plain ol’ boring email interface. Now you can have our built-in AI turn your Mom’s happy birthday email into a full-blown PowerPoint presentation. Outlook even prepares a “stats” slide to help you see which of your friends are emailing you the most and which clearly don’t love you. With a single click, you can remove those unloving contacts and have them go to the Recycle Bin, or if you choose, just ask Siri to sign them up for 1,000 email newsletters as punishment. This new Outlook release will be out this fall. It has taken us six months to compile all this code into one giant executable. As soon as it’s released, you’ll need to be a 4 Tb hard drive to store it, and once you open the new Outlook, you’ll also need to wait six months for it to be “up and running” as our AI LLM NLP bot analyzes your entire history of email, sends it all to a secret Microsoft Exchange server, and then returns an impressive summary you didn’t ask for of all your emails ever received. Get ready!