Think about it, you can pick an e-mail domain anywhere and use any e-mail client on any platform, to send an e-mail to someone anywhere else… We just take that for granted, but if e-mail were newly invented today by a company like say Meta, all the billions of people in the world would have to belong to that same single company in order to send and receive mail to anyone else…
E-mail’s greatest success lies in it’s open standards and decentralisation. It will no doubt me replaced at some point in the future, as all technologies will, but let us hope that instant messaging and social networks go back to being open and decentralised (like they too were once).
See https://www.sparkpost.com/blog/a-look-back-at-50-years-of-email/
#technology #email #decentralisation #openstandards #deletemeta
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Yeah for people like us hanging out on lemmy that seems to be obvious but what’s even sadder is that a lot of people nowadays would prefer use some siloed instant messaging app rather than e-mail that is litterally accessible to anyone.
That’s all fine and dandy until you gleefully enter your email on websites or services, only to get a “Sorry! We don’t recognize that domain. Please use a Gmail, Hotmail/Outlook, Yahoo or iCloud address or fuck off!”
And the trend to whitelist only a small number of email services and block everything else is becoming the norm, all in the name of “fighting spam”.
Well, I usually fuck off then and most of the time I’m rewarded by my information not leaking from people who don’t understand technology.
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Wow, that never happened to me In the ten years I’ve been hosting my e-mails but I would avoid those websites like the plague.
The only weird thing I encounter is some site asking to replace my tld (.re) thinking that I’m mistaking
Yes true, and for that reason too around span. There are like three heavy steps to jump through to get your self-hosted mail recognised, but it is a bit of a pain.
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Yes exactly, they recognised that e-mail’s implementation was interoperable. We should not be sitting with this walled garden issue with some of the biggest social network and instant messengers.
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Wow, never heard of this before, really cool project
Yeah email is good, but it by design not very secure/private even with pgp encryption you can still see things like metadata, i.e data and time that the email was sent and who it was sent to by the service provider.
True but it is more about the concept of interoperability and lack of lock in. There are plenty of social media protocols that can support decentralization with encryption. The post is not about suggesting e-mail a replacement for social media or instant messaging.
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You missed encrypted attachments - I get lots of my bank statements and similar with encrypted PDF attachments on e-mail. In my own case certainly a good half plus of business communications come either via e-mail or SMS - both being open standards. The point I was actually making was not about us all going back to e-mail, but rather that many mainstream messenger services and social networks cannot be broadly used, as you have to belong to that specific service to be messaged or message someone else. Where it should be more like e-mail is with having more generic open standards to communicate BETWEEN different messaging and social networks, a bit like ActivityPub works across different social networks in the Fediverse.
Some business I see adopt WhatsApp, but many people don’t use WhatsApp so that breaks as a universal messenger to reach everyone.
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E-mail hosting from home can be very problematic as those domestic IP addresses often get blocked by big providers. Probably best to still host it on a VPS.
