Fixing vs. replacing email

Why we started crafting a new communication protocol.

The story dates back to 2012, when Gergely (opp.io co-founder and CTO) and I decided to work on a problem that was frustrating both of us: email.

We have both experienced the severe drawbacks of online collaboration and teamwork. I participated in a myriad of collaborative projects, and have organized several cultural events and co-creation workshops myself. Gergely, until recently, was a project manager at a software company. We both know what it’s like to receive 100+ emails each day.

Every email is a todo

Back then, we were more concerned about fixing email using email/Chrome/Gmail extension/add-on/whatever-hack. It was partly based on my former habit of using the ‘+’ sign to tag emails and match relevant actions with the messages. For instance, if I (or someone) sent an email to bujatt+read@gmail.com address, it was filtered and labeled by Gmail with the “to read” tag.

Then, I adopted a more useful tool, IFTTT, to sync emails across services like Evernote or Delicious. This helped me mark articles as “Read Later”, bookmark sites and video links: things that I would later revisit. Still, two issues persisted to intrigue me. First, whether other people could adopt this method, for example sending me links to articles they would like me to read. The second issue was whether any kind of todo could be communicated via email.

I like thinking of emails as todos; because you have to reply to them. Even if it is a very nice email, let’s say your mother asking whether you wanted some pancake. You have to reply, unless you want to upset her. Uninteresting emails or those that do not require a reply are also, in my view, todos. You need to archive, delete or mark them as spam, by the least. These are similar to the brochures that you unwillingly receive in your post box. Even if they are spam, you have to deal with them: you have to put them to the trash bin.

I remember when I googled the term “every email is a todo”. There was, and still is, only one single hit: a discussion on Hacker News. It was funny, because I haven’t had heard about HN at that time — I had only heard about Ycombinator. Alas, I faced an online discussion on this very topic. It was less than two weeks old, and the only hit on Google. This was when I personally got more excited.

Together with Gergely, we started brainstorming, and when I confined Joseph Perla (@jperla) he summarized the topic quite well. Our initial idea was to fix email. Later, months into our research of email’s history and evolution it became clear to us

why email can’t be fixed and shouldn’t be fixed.

Let me give you an insight into how we conceive email and what changed our mind about email’s problem.

The essential quality of email

I think the most important feature of email is that an email address works like a valid postal address; a physical postal address. (I wonder if teens today know what that is.) You can address a letter and the recipient will receive it — with a great certainty. This is partly because you can uniquely identify someone with a name and a postal address, and more importantly, the daily routine of checking our post boxes ensures receipt of your letter. Having a postal address means that it allows people to connect to you but it also implies that you are willing to pick your post box every now and then. I think we underestimate how much the 20th century societies rely on a postal address. The same analogy applies to email.

Today, email has become the common denominator.
Everyone online possesses an email address.

You can identify someone with an email address. This is the reason why most online services require an email address for signing up. In addition to that, because we have developed the habit to checking our email inbox regularly, similarly to snail mail, it has become, de facto, the primary means to reach out to someone (or their assistant). Email has thus become the standard for online communication and a pain for so many users, hence the urge to fix email.

It is easy to argue against email, but that wouldn’t be fair. Let’s reduce our argument to emails being outdated.

Email was designed to replace letters with a sealed envelope and a post stamp. Recall Gmail’s icon: appositely, an envelope.

It is not really about email

We realized later that the main reason behind ineffectiveness in teamwork today is the redundancy present in online collaboration and communication. While plenty of project management tools exist, communication often reverts back to email because it remains our common denominator today.

Email excels in person-to-person communication, but when it infiltrates teamwork, it becomes virtual hell.

Email, by design, makes communication redundant.

This is not so surprising given the fact it was the child of the 1960’s. Only forwarding one email already creates two (!) new copies of the same content, which obviously made sense in the Xerox Era but not anymore today. When everybody has the uncontrollable urge to cceveryone else, we all end up receiving hundreds of emails a day.

The more advanced email clients focus on fixing email in itself — making it more effective to deal with emails within the context of messaging. But we reckoned that the main problem with email is most apparent when users overly rely on it for collaboration projects.

We definitely are not the first to call for a new protocol to replace email in its current form. Naturally, we are not alone in our quest, and we never will be. I recall watching the video of Google Wave’s developer preview at Google I/O in 2009. We watched 80 minute video for almost 3 hours, because we continuously stopped the video and shouted out of excitement, with my then-colleague András Sly Szalai (@sly010​). Google Wave was a great attempt, what a shame it failed.

Crafting a new protocol

And there, we started crafting a new protocol, not only to be used in communication, but for coordinated collaboration at the same time. This resonated quite well Paul Graham’s blogpost that said, “Email has to be replaced with a new protocol. This new protocol should be a todo list protocol … not a messaging protocol. … It seems unlikely that people in 100 years will still be living in the same email hell we do now. And if email is going to get replaced eventually, why not now?”

This new protocol could become the building block of actionable communication and effective collaboration.

It doesn’t draw a coordination layer next to, or on top of communication, but blends it with collaboration.

And while some say email is likely to stay forever, there are things you cannot do with email. Something so simple and easy like this:

This new protocol has the potential to become the LEGO brick of any effective collaboration tool of the future. We believe it will greatly improve the way people collaborate and cooperate.

This new protocol is the opp.io. What an exciting journey lies ahead.