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
I think nobody is commenting only because this is all true, and there is nothing else to say.
Email is a success, but it’s sad how centralized internet has become.
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.
A good way to fight that is using custom domains whenever you give a mail address directly (in person) to a public administration or company.
They will be forced to solve it if it doesn’t work and this will go as a reverse trend.
Sending complaints to the services also work.
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.
Also the day of Delta Chat as consequence.
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.
It seems cool, particularly if already using gpg for signing/encrypting (it uses autocrypt), however, as based on openpg (gpg), it doesn’t support (perfect forward secrecy), but it’s the same for gpg signing/encrypting.
What is really bad about delta chat, is that it doesn’t support (encrypted keys), which to me is really, really, a bad idea. Even openKeyChain (android) manages encrypted keys, as well as any desktop email client supporting gpg, so I really can’t see why delta chat wouldn’t.
And though email is decentralized by nature, it still requires an email service provider. You might self host one, but not everyone can, so in the end, it’s not much different than having another messenger service, such as xmpp. With the advantage those other messengers support voice/video calls, which delta can’t, since it’s based on email in the end, and also most support perfect forward secrecy (some through double ratchet e2ee, like xmpp+omemo, or through other means, like jami).
Though in the end, if no additional service is wanted, voice/video calls are not required, and no perfect forward secrecy is required, then delta might be an option. Thunderbird used to offer chatting as well, I’m wondering if it was based on delta chat, or the other way around, :(
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.
Well I don’t use Email for any business/confidential discussion, I use Matrix/Element chat for that. Email is mostly relegated to notifications on successful login, Terms of Service change, and so forth, that’s really it.
Only idiots use email for confidential communication, it’s not end to end encrypted unless you go out of your way to use PGP, have your recipient give you the key and encrypt the email yourself.
Plus email have a pretty tiny file size upload limit compared to Matrix/Element chat which support up to 100 MB out of the box.
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.
Does anyone know of a really easy way of setting up a reliable server to keep emails on one’s own system?
Perhaps something like paired down Scuttlebutt plus email bridge?
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.
