the e-mail of the future is the e-mail oft the past, was Enough port 26 talk...

Tue Jan 15 08:19:41 UTC 2019

Miles Fidelman <mfidelman at meetinghouse.net> writes:

> Ever since the net went commercial, we've been seeing more and more
> walled gardens - driven by folks with an economic advantage to
> segmenting & capturing audiences.  Whenever someone talks about how
> great some new technology is, I'm always reminded to "follow the
> money."  (And ain't it ironic that Microsoft supports calendaring
> protocols, while Google breaks them.)

And this is happening to email too.

It's not IM or online conferencing that will kill email, but
fragmentation into multiple closed email environments. We accept SPF and
DMARC, abusing DNS to deliberately break SMTP. All in the name of spam
protection, Mailing lists barely work anymore and have to resort to
hacks to be able to forward messages to their recipients.  Traditional
forwarding to another account hasn't worked in years. Smaller providers
are regularily blocked causing service disruption to their users.

It's just a matter of time before the big players, well known for their
disregard of open protocols, just shut off SMTP completely. They'll
probably "invent" something much better as an excuse... And the masses
will love them for that, because it finally removed the spam "problem".

And everyone has a gmail account anyway, so why bother with outside
email?

Bjørn