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3 HN recommenders · recommended in 3 months, 2015–2022
48:57 · 3.1K views · May 6, 2012
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.
HN points to it whenever someone underestimates how hard email parsing, validation or building a mail client really is.
3 comments from Hacker News
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
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.
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