Email Hates the Living
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN points to it whenever someone underestimates how hard email parsing, validation or building a mail client really is.
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.
Recommended by 3 HN commenters across 3 different months, 2015 to 2022.
What Hacker News said
Strong rec lkbm · 2022-04 · on “Stop Validating Email Addresses with Regex (2012)”
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]
Recommends clscott · 2015-12 · on “Email made me miserable, so I decided to build my own email app from scratch”
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]
Recommends calvinmorrison · 2022-08 · on “Email doesn't suck – it's email clients that need improving”
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.