Talks to Watch

Email Hates the Living

3K views · May 6, 2012 · 48:57 · 3 HN recommenders · 3 mentions · discussed 2015–2022

A lightning-style conference talk by Ricardo Signes about the horrors of email: its protocols, formats and decades of accumulated quirks. It is delivered with a humorous horror theme to show why handling email correctly is harder than it looks.

Why Hacker News points people here: HN points to it whenever someone underestimates how hard email parsing, validation or building a mail client really is.

“If you want to read about the insanity behind some of the protocols watch that talk.”HN comment, 2022

What Hacker News said 3

Strongly recommendslkbmApr 2022

“am sad it's not available in higher quality”

Beloved talk on email's quirks.

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I've always loved the "Email Hates The Living" talk[0] and am sad it's not available in higher quality. This is a great alternative. [0] this video

in “Stop Validating Email Addresses with Regex (2012)” · view on HN
RecommendsclscottDec 2015

“I was reminded of this presentation by Rik Signes at YAPC::NA (2008)”

Talk showing why building email is harder than it looks.

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This is an interesting read, when I saw a few of the comments here ask "how hard can it be?" I was reminded of this presentation by Rik Signes at YAPC::NA (2008) Email Hates the Living this video

in “Email made me miserable, so I decided to build my own email app from scratch” · view on HN
RecommendscalvinmorrisonAug 2022

“If you want to read about the insanity behind some of the protocols watch that talk.”

Tour of the insane quirks of email protocols.

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Here's a talk from one of the heads of Fastmail: "Email Hates the Living" this video Email itself is a very weird quirk filled system. If you want to read about the insanity behind some of the protocols watch that talk. That's why things like JMAP are being developed.

in “Email doesn't suck – it's email clients that need improving” · view on HN