It is so hard to get an email address without providing an email or SMS verification. Like 9/10 on the internet difficulty scale.
Any site that lets you receive email for example by generating a random inbox seems to be blocked by the more full-featured ones that let you send email. I’ve spent the last week trying to get an email address doing lots of searches and trying to signup for any email address at all without success.
This makes sense if you understand that bots cause problems universally but at the same time the personal information strategy isn’t working. Spammers have no problem getting email accounts and every other kind of account. It’s the honest person who won’t go to the dark side and pay for stolen accounts that is in the worst shape.
Maybe you want to setup your own mail server? Ther you need a domain name and registars want even more information. Many of them give you privacy on your domain records, but this is no defense from the surveillance state.
If as said in the sidebar mass surveillance is about mass control, and not justice, then email is an extremely important technology to start supporting for privacy and freedom.
Spam and abuse are problems to be sure but there must be other ways to solve them than by providing information that links back to the real world.
Now what can we do about it?
Its even better than email in that regard, you have to accept a message request before they can spam you. And it looks really no different from email, with a list of conversations being equivalent to your inbox.
An SMTP server can be set up to only accept email from addresses in your contact list, if that method of spam rejection is desired.
All the matrix clients I’ve tried look nothing like a typical old school (thunderbird/eudora/mutt/outlook) email inbox. It’s all IRC-style chat.
I consider email excellent for exchanging and filing letters/correspondence. Conversations do happen over email but a conversational/chat layout like gmail/matrixelement can be more suited for that communication mode.
Neither email nor chat chat layouts seem useful for (especially multi-party) discussions, where a threaded conversational layout such as used in zulip/lemmy/ discourse are more suited.