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Email Hates the Living

m · talk · Watch on YouTube

Networking & internet infrastructureSoftware (other)

What it is

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 recommends it

HN points to it whenever someone underestimates how hard email parsing, validation or building a mail client really is.

  • 3 people recommended it
  • 3 different months
  • 1 strong recommendations
  • first 2015, last 2022

What HN commenters said

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

    Beloved talk on email's quirks.

    lkbm, 2022-04 · Strong recommendation · in “Stop Validating Email Addresses with Regex (2012)”

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

    Talk showing why building email is harder than it looks.

    clscott, 2015-12 · Recommendation · in “Email made me miserable, so I decided to build my own email app from scratch”

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

    Tour of the insane quirks of email protocols.

    calvinmorrison, 2022-08 · Recommendation · in “Email doesn't suck – it's email clients that need improving”

Excerpts from Hacker News comments, linked to the originals. Summaries and labels were written by a language model from those comments.

Topics: email, smtp, imap, mime, perl, rant

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