It’s reliable, it’s simple, it’s free, and virtually everyone who uses the internet has one. Email won’t be replaced for a LONG time.
To be fair, if it is “free” you are probably paying your mail provider with your data.
I assume he meant free like speech, not free like beer.
There are no gatekeepers to email, anyone can get a domain and their own server.
There are definitely gatekeepers. Even if your hosting provider isn’t blocking port 25 by default, SPF, DKIM and DMARC will see your emails going straight into the recipient’s junk folder/spam filter if not correctly configured. Hosting your own mail server at home is also a fantastic way to piss off your ISP, lose emails to downtime, have your IP blacklisted from many services and open up your environment to exploitation. It can be done but let’s not pretend that it’s easy or that there aren’t barriers to entry.
Mail servers are like filo pastry. Sure, you could go to the inconvenience and effort of making it yourself and I’m sure it’ll be very satisfying to do so. But 99% of professionals use the store bought version, and for good reason, because it’s a lot of effort for an end result that is no better and in all likelihood probably worse.
Mostly agree, but as someone who has been hosting my own email for years I can tell it is, in fact, better.
Quick note for hosting one on a residential IP - that would no longer piss any ISP off. You would simply not deliver anything anywhere due to IP being blacklisted by default.
SPF, DKIM, and DMARC would like to have a gatekeeping word
Blacklists, greylists, whitelists. All just a big fuck you from the big vendors to anyone trying to self host.
There are four tiers of email hosting in my mind.
Tier 1: self hosted by nerds
Tier 2: sketchy fly by night scammers
Tier 3: new hosting companies trying to offer something different than what’s available
Tier 4: the big boys
I don’t want anything to do with tier 2. I want tier 2 wiped off the face of earth. This means tier 1 is just not gonna happen as long as tier 2 is around.
If you don’t know what you’re doing, hosting an email server will not be a good time. It’s very easy to produce an environment that is easily exploited.
A somewhat inexpensive shared hosting plan allows you to host your own email though. I get it done for <$100/yr. and have little to no limitation over self-hosting.
You try that once, but it doesn’t last.
Or your ISP just provides you with one when you sign up.
Not all of them anymore. Verizon doesn’t, for example.
Can never trust ISPs with that data.
They’re marketing companies too. And imagine sending critical health emails to a company who wants to also sell you services, and suddenly, you get ads for it.
critical health emails
If you’re concerned about privacy, then that’s a no-no. Unless your clinic accepts PGP encrypted messages.
And we both know they don’t.
Their point still stands
I mean, not necessarily in that case I’d imagine, since one presumably pays the ISP for internet services, so any “free” things bundled with it could also simply be priced into that contract already.
That ToS definitely gives them the right to sell whatever data you provide to them though, at least in the US.
Sure, but won’t that happen regardless of if you use their email service or not?
Yes. The point I was saying stands is the “paying with data” bit more than the “free (as in beer)” bit. I know youre still paying to use an ISP :p
My mail server is in the cabinet above my desk.
I guess you’re right - my mail provider does have all my data - but my mail provider is Me!
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Not necessarily. My university provides a mail box for every student and their privacy policy is quite transparent and honest. The only limitations are related to the rate you can send emails, to prevent spam.
I also have a work email address, but I use it for work stuff and I lose it if I end my contract. Can you keep your university address after you graduate?
I can keep the basic “user@university.br” one, I can’t keep the optional department-specific ones like “user@bioinformaticslab.university.br” if I quit my position or graduate.
Wouldn’t recommend it.
That’s like using your company email.
Ive met a bunch of people who deeply regret sending everything to their university email to have that inbox shut down after a few years. Heck, had a junior hire recently complain that her university email was the primary for her banking, and once it was shut down, she was struggling with trying to reset her password.
Well this discussion has turned from “there’s no free emai!” to “I don’t recommend using free email from your university because I heard this caused trouble to somebody else once” which is not the point, so I’m not sure how I’m supposed to reply.
There’s kinda no replacement
I think WhatsApp has done it already in places like India
Thousands of years after humanity has destroyed itself with nuclear weapons…
As the sun peeks through the gray clouds and lights up a solar panel…
A long-forgotten server hums to life…
And sends an email…
“Attention Required: Your Order is Delayed”
We’ve been trying to reach you about your car insurance
See my h0t n4ked body here ---->
getallmylinkscom/usr/urieoop0oooojwhwhfb
Sidenote: Remember when having an email address was enough, you didn’t have to have a fucking phone number as well? Stop trying to de-anonymize the internet, you’re making more problems than you’re solving
They’re not trying to solve any problem beyond their own, potential resistance to false authority.
They will never willingly do it. Email marketing works very well compared to the money and effort companies put into it, and so does SMS. They will use every trick they can to get you to signup for one or both while avoiding being labeled an illegal spammer.
It’s why SMS still exists too. It’s from an era where everyone just used open standards instead of trying to create their own thing for money. Big tech conglomerates like we have now didn’t exist. The state of the tech industry and it’s proprietary standards is absolutely fucked.
Google is trying to kill SMS. My new android by default has sms disabled, defaulting to RCS with “try sending sms instead if rcs fails to send” option being off by default, which makes no sense from user perspective
RCS is actually a huge improvement over SMS, as it is fully encrypted. One of the few times I’ve ever approved of something Google did…
If only it was an open standard…
It… is? It’s an open standard that anyone can use and implement. The main provider is Google and there has been a huge push from them to get Apple to adopt, which they mostly have. It’s not ‘owned’ by any company. It’s predominantly serviced by Google, but is in fact an open standard. Google and others have their own format which is how they and their apps interpret and interact with each other, but it is an open standard. There are some backend and requirements for it which stops most from setting it up and implementing off the shelf and just going with Google, but you absolutely could use and make your own format with the standard.
Yep, main reason it’s associated with Google because they bought a company (Jibe Mobile) making one of the main backend service offerings and offered cloud hosting of it, so providers just went with that rather than rolling out their own software.
Also with Apple ignoring it in favour of iMessage, Google was the only one supporting it on handsets. Google client + Google backend = people think it’s Google’s iMessage competitor.
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…but I can literally send infected files thru RCS to my grandma.
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SMS was never intended to be available to end users. It was built as a side channel to help field techs with diagnostics. When consumer handsets started to add features, it was co-opted to provide what we know it as today.
It’s from an era where everyone just used open standards instead of trying to create their own thing for money.
SMS is literally from a time when every mobile phone manufacturer had their on charger plug. And some tried pushing proprietary headphone jacks.
Vendors LOVE vendor lock-in.
Yeah that’s because vendor lockin for hardware had already started. It’s kind of a miracle we got everyone to agree to USB. Look at cars, same thing. Everyone agreed to the same gas pump, but it’s been decades and we can’t agree on a standard for electric car chargers. That’s what happens when industries mature under capitalism
Rather than build for humanity they build for the demon capital.
It’s because it isn’t a silo?
Discord, Slack and a bajillion similar apps do not meld with other apps. Email just happened to hit critical mass before “let’s try to get a monopoly” became the slogan of all tech, and collectively Big Tech is too stupid/hostile to replace it with some cooperative protocol.
iMessage is another pure example of this.
There are tons of open messaging protocols that have been replaced by closed ones. For instance, Discord shouldn’t be a thing since IRC exists, but Discord exists and is very successful.
For some reason, likely tied to how it is used, email survived as an open protocol.
For instance, Discord shouldn’t be a thing since IRC exists, but Discord exists and is very successful.
IRC lacks a massive amount of features that discord users typically want. Screensharing, VCs with group and camera support, built-in history (don’t need to use a bouncer like on IRC), built-in online GIF searcher and sender with one click, huge community of bots that use discord’s API to do anything from games to moderation.
It isn’t even close.
ICQ and AIM managed to draw a huge crowd in the early (ish) days of home Internet.
It’s not about features…it’s about ease of use.
Also, IRC wasn’t as decentralized as email to begin with, there were several isolated networks that would not communicate with each other (dalnet, EFnet, undernet, etc)
It’s not about features…it’s about ease of use.
Its absolutely about both features and ease of use. If your program doesn’t do what people want from it, then good luck.
Its also irrelevant to talk about considering I have used IRC and highly doubt that people are going to consider it easier to use than discord.
Yeah I’m giving the ease-of-use points to Discord.
I’d agree that both are big, sure…but ICQ and AIM didn’t have attachments or GIFs or screensharing, They barely had text formatting. Yet they were still bigger than the semi-decentralized (but at least standards-based) IRC. The features weren’t the big lure, it was the ease of use.
Discord (to me) has better UX than any IRC I’ve ever experienced.
Email, on the other hand, is total baloney if it’s not interoperable. It’s why SMS/MMS is like a zombie that just won’t die, and telecoms are more cooperative than most of Big Tech.
I highlight IRC because being an open protocol doesn’t mean it gets adopted.
Yeah, it’s the widespread adoption/necessity that made email what it is. Discord was able to largely replace IRC because not a lot of people were using IRC. Everybody has an email account though-- you need one to order a pizza ffs
It’s an ongoing debate in one of the projects I work with if we should move to a more forge oriented development process. For all it’s faults email does provide a good record of discussion as well as evidence of review.
I’ve not heard of this before, and a search finds a lot about Minecraft?
Forge is a newish term for systems like github, gitlab, forgejo, gitea, etc that provide source control, project management, issues, and discussion features for projects.
And more to the point, Forge is a free, open-source server that allows players to install and run Minecraft mods. It was designed with the intent to simplify compatibility between community-created game mods for Minecraft: Java Edition.
It sounds like maybe OP and their crew were maintaining Minecraft compatibility via e-mail prior to the release of Forge.
Wait does that mean comment thread OP isn’t using any of those things?
It’s not uncommon for older projects to use plain git, patch files, and email groups. Linux kernel development still gets done that way every day.
Ah right. I thought you meant that there was no project management or revision system. That does make more sense
The project management capabilities of GitLab are pretty nice, for what my opinion is worth.
Then Sourcehut is built around email, so that might be a good middle ground.
We use GitLab for hosting and CI as well as the issue tracker. Just the patch workflow goes over email although we have considered just maintainers submitting pull requests once the review and tags have been collected on list.
A lot of the more senior maintainers find the process of patch review in the webui suboptimal compared to email.
Mail has the big advantage of being totally cross platform. And it works, basically everywhere.
All the application protocols were supposed to be cross-platform! It’s something the corporatisation of the net undermined to an extent
Have to put every damn thing over port 80 (well, 443 now). HTTP(S) was never meant to do this shit.
JavaScript was originally designed to have cute little interact able things and to talk to a server.
Not whatever nonsense web devs come up with this week haha
I hope the Fediverse will prove similarly resilient.
I guess that’s why someone decided to build a chat app on the email protocol and infrastructure.
I love that this exists but never have used it.
Several people have tried to do this.
Delta was first one I have heard of, but when you think about it, it would be surprising if it was the first one when email over network has existed over 50 years. What other ones are there?
I usually dismiss them as quickly as I discover them because I know how the underlying technology behind email works and I don’t agree that it should be presented in the form of chats.
So each time I see it, it only resides in my mind for a few minutes at most.
Reality is everyone has an email, and everyone will keep having an email. My 10 year old has an email so they could sign up to epic and steam. You basically need it to use the internet at all. So of course it will survive.
Outside of business though, when was the last time you sent an email to someone you know?
My mother uses email for nearly everything. I’m 31 now, but in high school she’d email me from the basement that dinner is ready.
Just last month I received this… we chat on WhatsApp and phone calls regularly as well.
I forwarded tickets to my wife. But for “normal” communication I emailed the city about a citation they gave me for my yard.
My ex emailed me from a new account when he thought I’d blocked him everywhere else. I hadn’t, but I did after that!
Work Accountant Lawyer Contractor Community org
Yeah basically just for transactions, management
Matrix, IRC, XMPP
Also Email is useful and you probably shouldn’t waste your time consuming info from people who think otherwise.
xmpp is underrated
IRC and forums as well to a lesser extent.
Much much lesser. IRC has basically died to successors. Everybody still uses email sometimes.
Forums are still banging around however. Lots of places still use them, and thank god for that.
Everyone has to provide an email to make an account somewhere, if they don’t do the whole integration with Google/Facebook/etc
IRC is still a pretty strong backbone for Twitch chat. At least it was a couple of years ago.
IMAP is useful. POP can crawl back to the bowels of hell from whence it came.
JMAP is apparently the shiny new thing trying to replace IMAP.
Neat! I just did a quick read about it. JSON over HTTP would offer a lot of new features, most notably not requiring a persistent connection in the transport layer like IMAP in TCP. I’ll keep my eye on it. Thanks for the heads up!
Also Usenet. Still around after decades. As long as people are hosting news servers, it will stay. The original decentralized protocol.
I haven’t figured out how to host my own news server.
Is there a resource about how to do this?
I work in B2B IT support, and email is designed to be very async, and for the most part it still is. What I can say with certainty is that business folks expect email to be instant like synchronous platforms are… It’s not, it never will be… It’s gotten about as close as it can be, but it is not, and will never be, instant delivery, no matter how much they want it to be.
