Comment by apitman
1 day ago
It's pretty amazing email hasn't been replaced, or at least joined, by an open protocol where you can't message someone without first being approved by them, either directly like Facebook messenger or through some sort of referral system.
The problem is how to start a conversation.
We had a similar problem in the university. At the beginning of the semester, the students have to register for a Moodle server with additional material. So when they create an account, we have to send a few thousands of confirmation emails in a short period out of the blue, that makes Gmail/Yahoo/Outlook/Whatever unhappy.
The solution was to ask the students to send an email to the server half an hour before registering. It's not ideal, but it adds us to a secret list of known contacts of the student, so (most) emails are delivered.
> we have to send a few thousands of confirmation emails
What are you confirming, and why do you have to send it as E-mail? If it's sign-ups, just "confirm" using the same system that the user used to sign-up. Presumably HTTP.
on most services you sign up by using an email address (or a phone number) as an identifier. these need to be verified to make sure it's actually yours and not someone else's, or a typo.
5 replies →
Why are you making the students use their personal e-mail rather than the school e-mail?
it's probably the other way around. students use their private email, and they somehow can't make them use a school email.
2 replies →
which system does that? neither telegram, nor whatsapp do it, and it annoys the hell out of me. at least whatsapp tells me that the sender doesn't get a notification until i respond or add the contact. wechat actually requires a connection request before allowing you to message someone, with all the complaints about privacy, wechat has the better UX to avoid getting spammed, linkedin requires a connection too, if you don't have a pro account. i don't know about any others.
Well you can already do this with email, can't you? You just use [company-name]@[yourdomain].com. Or you+[company]@gmail.com. Then you either block all unknown, or more practically just block companies as soon as they start spamming you.
And how should this approval look like? You think about a email that asks if you want to receive mail from buy-my-dickpicks-online-at-dp.com@dp.com?