lkbmon Hacker News • Recommends
On “Stop Validating Email Addresses with Regex (2012)”
I've always loved the "Email Hates The Living" talk0 and am sad it's not available in higher quality. This is a great alternative. 0 link to this video
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- Recommended by 3 people: 3 on Hacker News.
- A classic. People kept recommending it from 2015 to 2022.
- Presented by Ricardo Signes
Intermediate. Assumes working knowledge.
3K views14 years ago3 recommendations
Systems programmingTools and practiceNetworking and protocols
Ricardo Signes delivers a humorous, horror-themed talk detailing the complex, quirky, and historical realities of email protocols and formats.
By Ricardo SIGNES (rjbs) from ABE.pm, Philadelphia.pm Date: Monday June 16, 2008 Duration: 45 minutes Target audience: Lightning Tags: brains email hate horror lovecraft mail rant warning wtf you.are.all.going.to.die zombie Email: you see it every day. It's on your desktop. It's in your servers. Through the magic of modern technology, it flows invisibly through the air and into your PDA! Your cellular phone conducts silent and arcane conversations with distant servers, speaking the ancient language of SMTP and the unknowable dialects of IMAP. Surely all this technology means progress of mankind... or does it? Now you can learn the truth: buried deep within the eldrich documents describing the slow accretion of features in the Elder Protocols lie subtle recursions and devilish ambiguities -- grammars that are not grammars, strings quietly stripped of their higher bits -- designed to slowly bend the mind of all who implement them. Now you can hear of the horrors perpetrated by those who became thrall to these documents -- and by those, too, who fought to oppose them for the sake of their own dwindling sanity. Now it can be told: Email Hates the Living! WARNING: This talk is low in career-sustaining educational content.Why it's here
3 people recommend thisWhat people say. Highly recommended as a hilarious yet accurate explanation of why handling email protocols and validation is incredibly difficult.
clscotton Hacker News • Recommends
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 link to this video
calvinmorrisonon Hacker News • Recommends
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" link to 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.