Surprising Uses of Email
The RSS to email thing is surprisingly good because it effectively replaces all needs for specific software: you can mark posts as read, you can read HTML-formatted content and everything is synced already. I&#x27;m currently looking to put the same thing in place for a read-it-later usecase: we havevthe tools for fetching content and formatting it, and for pushing it in an IMAP account. That&#x27;s all I need.<p>One usecase I was thinking about: when subscribing to a mailing list, by design you don&#x27;t have access to the archives, you will only receive new emails. Archives are to be browsed in another tool, with another protocol. What if we turned the thing on its head and get closer to NNTP: when a user is interested in a mailing list, they IMAP-subscribe to a specific folder (&#x2F;lists&#x2F;announce@myproject.org) and the server will IMAP-subscribe to upstream. Auth is managed automatically, no need to send an email and verify it. Archives are naturally handled. A smart server would provide dynamic listing of content without having to download evertyhing, so that browsing old posts can be efficient.<p>Some other unorthodox uses of email:<p>- deltachat (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;delta.chat&#x2F;en&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;delta.chat&#x2F;en&#x2F;</a>) replaces whatsapp: it&#x27;s an instant messenger with e2ee based on autocrypt (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;autocrypt.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;autocrypt.org&#x2F;</a>)<p>- RMS used email to fetch webpages he wishes to consult (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lwn.net&#x2F;Articles&#x2F;262570&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lwn.net&#x2F;Articles&#x2F;262570&#x2F;</a>). Not sure it is still true today.