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THE VIDEO SHELF · email protocols

Email Hates the Living

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.

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Why HN readers recommended it

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

This is a summary from the source dataset, not an endorsement by Hacker News or the video creator.

Video & recommendation details

Creator / channel
m
Topic
email protocols
Format
talk
Level
intermediate
HN recommenders in dataset
3
HN mentions in dataset
3
Recommendation years in dataset
2015–2022

These counts and years describe the included Hacker News records; they are not YouTube views or the video’s publication date.

From the original HN conversations

Excerpts from the recorded comments. Follow each source for the full comment and surrounding discussion.

  • 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]

    lkbm on Hacker News · 2022-04
    In Stop Validating Email Addresses with Regex (2012)

  • 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]

    clscott on Hacker News · 2015-12
    In Email made me miserable, so I decided to build my own email app from scratch

  • 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 …

    calvinmorrison on Hacker News · 2022-08
    In Email doesn't suck – it's email clients that need improving

Summaries, classifications and recommendation records are from the HackerTube source dataset. Read about this library and its limitations.

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