The Future of Email

sverhagen

I find it hard to judge how much, if at all, this will help, but I'm all for email being more secure, to the point that organizations (banks, governments, insurance companies) stop creating walled-email alternatives: please log in to our secure message center, where you can only see our messages poorly formatted, and for a short time, until we permanently delete them . I like that my Inbox is a somewhat-searchable, historical record of my life, and these alternatives break that.

w3ll_w3ll_w3ll

What's the point of the article?

zhouzhao

Bit of a nothing burger. Big title, little content.

oakinnagbe

We’re basically outsourcing email judgment to AI, then trying to compensate by strengthening SPF/DKIM. That feels like hardening the locks while handing out more master keys.

itskokeh

Emails are very important especially at this age of rapidly changing technological landscape. It's important that they're secure. Is it possible to have E2E encryption on emails?

collabs

I was hoping this would be about JMAP.

internet_points

I've been a happy Fastmail customer for years, and one of the best things about Fastmail has been how they just incrementally make things slightly better, as if they somehow haven't learnt how to enshittify. So on seeing this title, I was a bit worried. > It’s worth being transparent about what that looks like at Fastmail: we haven’t integrated AI into your inbox, and your mail isn’t being processed by a model in the background. Our MCP server is simply an API endpoint available if you want to connect an AI client of your choosing with your explicit authorization, and nothing changes if you don’t. Phew.

arpinum

BIMI certificates cost over $1,000 / yr right now. For me that's a feature. I wish the fallback in my mail client was a big untrusted symbol rather than sender initials when they aren't in my address book.

danielhep

I love fastmail, I switched from Proton a couple years ago after deciding the trade offs to have encrypted email were not worth it, since even if I fully trust Proton, most emails come from or go to AWS, Outlook, or Gmail anyway. I have been extremely happy with the service. Fairly priced, very fast even with a huge inbox, and they don’t add unnecessary features or bloat. I thought I would use my OS’s mail apps but the fastmail app and website are so good I just use that.

throwwwll

The Future of Email is obsolescence.

zazuke

The easiest and best filter is to screen emails. Only emails that were screened in once go to your inbox. It's that easy. HEY.com introduced it, and I can't see email without it; that's why I integrated it into my TUI email client, neomd [1]. Since then, when I get an email from Amazon that lands in my "To Screen" box, I am automatically alerted and know it is potentially spam, because I have approved Amazon and legit emails land in my inbox. Check it out, it's that easy. Neomd works with Fastmail or any other IMAP/SMTP email provider. No AI needed, and also no stupid AI summary, as you only get a few legit emails to your inbox, never spam anymore. [1] https://neomd.ssp.sh

jdw64

These days, it seems that what they call security is just isolating oneself

sph

A lot of nonsense about AI and this The inbox of the future will be faster, smarter, and more capable than what most of us use today Please, Fastmail, don't fuck this up. I have been a happy customer for years. Do not fuck this up with idiotic AI systems. I just want reliable email.

upofadown

>Anyone can put anything in the “From” field of an email. ... and then the article goes on to talk about SPF, DKIM and DMARC which authenticates only the domain part of the "From" field. So just the reputation of the email server, not the entity that sent you the email. If things get as bad with AI generated deception as suggested by the article this wouldn't be good enough, we would have to start signing our emails again. Emails from entities we don't know would have to be treated with a high level of suspicion. I am not convinced that things will for sure really get that bad. How can a AI figure out the email addresses of our correspondents? They are not magic.

greengreengrass

What's the point of this article? The most I got was "email is here to stay," followed by some discussion of an MCP server for their proprietary mail platform. I particularly don't understand the constant fanfare around discussions of SPF/DKIM/DMARC. They're widely understood, published RFCs that have been around for at least 10-15 years, some of them longer. They're not obscure folk wisdom passed down through generations of sysadmins, yet I read so many documents and articles that make it sound like a proprietary trade secret that the authors of such articles are graciously revealing to the world.

TitaRusell

Paying for email will never be the future of email. Another subscription for software- and people outside HN hate paying for software- when outlook, apple and Gmail exist?

upofadown

The article makes a reference to the failed ARC (Authenticated Received Chain) proposal which was intended to help DKIM not break email forwarding: https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-adams-arc-experiment-c... It will be interesting to see if Google can be convinced to move away from ARC to something else. Gmail is all about email server reputation these days so they can reliably treat email servers they don't like badly.

thelastgallon

Recent discussion: Gmail Thinks I'm Stupid, So I Left: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48375016

thelastgallon

Are there any options left at all to self host email?