Email Hates the Living

m · 3.1K views · 2012-05-06 · 48:57

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Overview

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.

On Hacker News

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

Recommended by 3 HN people across 3 months · HN mentions 2015–2022

Topics

Networking & internet infrastructure Software (other)

What people said

lkbm · 2022-04 · Strong recommendation
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] [VIDEO]
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calvinmorrison · 2022-08 · Recommendation
Here's a talk from one of the heads of Fastmail: "Email Hates the Living" [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.
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clscott · 2015-12 · Recommendation
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 [VIDEO]
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Sources

Video by m, played through YouTube.

HN Library · Source license

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