Well, in Estonia, they have a different approach.<p>1. If you are a citizen or a resident, you get an ID card to use for every public service. It's just a smart card with a government PKI.<p>2. The public services provide an email account that can only be used within the e-government services. The card is used for accessing those services.<p>3. The email service accepts either identity number or registry number of the recipient. So the recipient can be a legal entity.<p>4. You can and almost always do provide a forwarding address, so that you don't need to check.<p>5. You can't use it for other purposes. No RFC defined email address is shared with you. And it's just an internal system for official issues.<p>I've heard some countries issue mailboxes for citizens but I am not aware of the general use of these. Also, email services were designed to be decentralized but evolved into centralized systems, a current and unsolved problem. I am not sure about the privacy and security of government provided email services.
I really hope that we end up moving back towards supporting open protocols.<p>I was heartened (and a little surprised) that Jack Dorsey recently mentioned that the draconian control of the Twitter API was the worst thing Twitter had done [1].<p>The corporatisation of the Internet, has undone a lot of the great work that had traditionally underpinned the network.<p>It feels like the slow, laborious and fundamentally equitable nature of standards ratification in the open has been seen to be at odds with the OKRs of tech businesses.<p>Businesses that sell and work with natural resources are starting to wake up to the idea that a degree of cooperation and inter-market regulation with peer companies can positively impact individual performance. Sustaining business is even more fundamental than making profit.<p>In the same sense; open protocols can help to develop rich and sustainable markets that benefit the consumer; as well as those businesses that operate in within it.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.revyuh.com/news/software/developers/twitters-founder-admits-that-shutting-down-the-api-was-worst-thing-we-did-it-affected-users-and-developers/" rel="nofollow">https://www.revyuh.com/news/software/developers/twitters-fou...</a>
<i>Email is our only reliable communication method between different organizations.</i><p>I'm still of the opinion there should be public-option internet services. Everyone deserves an e-mail address that cannot be taken away from them without a court order.
I always have this feeling that email is flawed and due for a complete overhaul or replacement - and then I think about it a little harder and I realize that it's actually really good at it's intended purpose.<p>Other than fiddling around the edges with security improvements, spam filtering, and a few other nice-to-haves, there's not really much that need improvement.<p>Some features of email that are nice:<p>- It's completely open standard<p>- I can host it myself if I want, or not.<p>- It is completely decentralized and roughly point-to-point, subject to email routers.<p>- Other than getting an email address, no other 'linkage' or prepwork with that person is required.<p>- My address is not tied to any other service, like a phone number. (in contrast to e.g. WhatsApp)<p>- It supports unsolicited communication from unsolicited sources (e.g. marketing)<p>- It's easy to ignore communication I don't care about. (e.g. marketing)<p>- Non-people are supported, like group emails/aliases (support@...)<p>- I can trivially attach files, subject to some practical constraints<p>- Email can be handled by the recipient in a wide variety of ways using different client mechanisms.<p>- I can front-end my email in a variety of ways, such as with a contact form.<p>Those are just the few I can think of off the top of my head. I'm sure there are others.
> There are a huge variety of intra-organizational communication systems, to the point where pretty much every large enterprise provider seems to have one (Slack, Microsoft Teams, Discord, etc etc).<p>That's why I find Delta Chat piggybacking on Push-IMAP such an interesting concept: <a href="https://delta.chat" rel="nofollow">https://delta.chat</a>
I don’t think email is as decentralized and federated as it used to be.<p>In theory, email is a service that is simple enough for anyone to run themselves. Most Linux distros come with sendmail, so theoretically it should be as easy as reading the manual and exposing some ports. Spam is performed server side both at the origin and at the destination to mitigate bad actors, and because email is simple, there should be no shortage of clients to choose from.<p>In reality, 1/4 of all email users globally are on Gmail. Apple Mail is the most popular mail client followed by Outlook, then Gmail. SMTP and IMAP are theoretically simple, but the bellwether providers use APIs on top of these protocols that have added some functionality at the expense of restricting the proliferation of email clients. Many large companies that used to run their own email (through Exchange, Zimbra, etc) are moving to hosted Office 365 or Google Workspace. One major AWS-scale outage in Gmail or Azure will incite (and has caused) serious panic and disruption (which is great for SREs like me since we’ll continue to get paid serious money to keep all this stuff running while maintaining a healthy work-life balance, but I digress).<p>Furthermore, one doesn’t simply “stand up” their own email server unless they don’t care about landing in people’s spam folders.<p>Additionally, many companies outside of the US _do_ use WhatsApp (Facebook) for official communication. I’d posit that this trend is only accelerating.<p>I agree that email is fundamental technology, but I can see a future where it disappears in favor of something like federated Slack (or, worse, instant messaging centralized and controlled by the FAANG cabal with insurmountable cost-of-entry). Given the suppression of “free speech” on Twitter et al during peak COVID/peak insurrection (for valid reasons), this is slightly worrying.
The biggest blunder for me is that there were usable decentralized communication options before that were popular, but because of trying to monetize user's data FAANG started to tighten their grip on any decentralized solution, and I think they succeeded. They are already trying do to email the same thing they did to XMPP and RSS.
E-Mail is one of the last remaining federated systems on the Internet, but I doubt it will survive long as the large players slowly sabotage it. I think already more than 90 % of all e-mails are delivered by three or four large companies, which is a trend that will continue.
> As j. b. crawford notes, the prospect for another federated, Internet wide communication system seem very remote at this point in time, so email is it.<p>I really don’t think this is true, and is defeatist at best. SIP and XMPP both had a good shot at creating a federated Internet-wide communication system, and we are doing our best to build one with Matrix or die trying.
Microsoft is chipping away at this by getting governments on to Outlook 365 on the basis that if all departments use it it'll be secure between them and can gain Top Secret certification.
The ability to send messages is perhaps the less interesting role of email. I think maybe the real value comes from providing globally unique, federated identities. It's not perfect, but it's pretty dang good.<p>If for no other reason, this is why no closed system will never supplant email. Even the biggest walled gardens like GOOG and FB bow to the power of email identities in the end, as the preferred (maybe even only) way to recover an account.
Email is a pile of garbage created with the same mentality of web and UN*X. This stupid shit in 2000 and 2020 still sends my IP address to the receiver for no reason so I have to use the web interface which removes it but then I can't control headers so I probably can't use PGP because some idiot wants to use that S/MIME shit (which was unsurprisingly broken due to the E-Fail bug). Coming up with a bunch of ad-hoc key-value pairs with keys you hope people will adhere to is not engineering. It's web shotting. When you do this it makes a sound of web being shot like *THWIP*.<p>Coming up with yet another way of encoding key-value pairs (or any type of serialization) is not engineering; you have not addressed the concrete problem in any way what so ever other than explaining what the syntax will be.<p>Like wtf is wrong with you people? How hard is it to call encrypt_message(your_message) and verify_message(their_message) without introducing RCE vulns? There is nothing hard about delimiting different entries in a list (for argv or whatever). This is pre-school stuff. The reason people omit it is becaues UN*X makes the path of least resistance to be insecure shit like system(), but even then it's still easy to work around it time after time if you are above the age of 12.<p>Federation is also a hare-brained concept. Why in the hell do I want my address to be qualified with some stupid string? Is this so I can make a group and LARP about firing missiles from mydomain.com to yourdomain.com? How is it possible that XMPP was created with the same idiotic concept once we already knew email was garbage? Federation is absolutely and thorougly pointless. The literal only reason it makes any sense is because if it was fully centralized, the service would just be dead once comapny #1 dies.<p>DAY OF THE SEAL SOON
I'd suggest everyone setup a custom domain with SimpleLogin and start using aliases for every site. Also, use isync and goimapnotify to backup your email automatically. Then if Google or some other company shuts you out of your hosted email you can easily get back up on a new provider and not need to change your email address which almost every site you register on now requires.
Email is the last stand against millisecond invasiveness of tech in every living second of our lives.<p>The reason that large companies struggle or fail to implement systems like slack and teams is not because they are superior to email. Its because these huge corporation treat employees as faceless cogs in a machine. Email fails email delays email sucks everyone knows this and accepts it so it becomes the only way to take a break from the corporate pressure cooker.<p>I suspect in the future small companies that treat their employees as human and can use better tools effectively will eventually take over sufficient market shares to force large companies (they already are really) reevaluate the dispensibility of its workforce.<p>The death of email is a social not tech problem.
Another insane feature of WhatsApp (besides using phone number for an internet service) is that it only runs on Android and iOS (the web client is only some kind of "remote access" to the app, which requires the app to constantly run).<p>I actually run Android-x86 VM on a server because of WhatsApp, which I need for work. And it has some problems, for example to allow the browser to access the app, you need to scan a QR code - but I did not find a webcam emulator (think: v4l2-loopback on normal Linux) for Android or a way to emulate a webcam in VirtualBox or Qemu, so I need to copy the VM image to a computer with physical webcam, scan the code by pointing the webcam to the screen, and then copy it back to the server. WTF.<p>Or am I missing something? How do people without smartphones use WhatsApp (for communicating on a computer)?
Email is your proof of identity. It's absolutely critical.<p>Anyone with your email can not only impersonate you, but gain access to many of your online accounts.
Good points made in the article. Siloed services like Slack, etc. do have an advantage that you don’t get SPAM. I prefer E-mail and SMS person to person communication but there is the SPAM…<p>Most people in my family and closest friends prefer SMS, even texting large image and video files (not really what the protocol was designed for, right?). Anyway, I tend to use what my people use.
Let’s hope that email remains a “simple” protocol (envelopes are plaintext with some encoding, transmission is simple enough to do over Telnet) instead of something more complicated whose standards are drafted and maintained by the FAANG cabal.
<i>> Email is our only reliable communication method between different organizations.</i><p>For certain definitions of “reliable”!<p>(though reliably <i>available</i> at least which can't be said for anything else, no matter how reliable in other senses)
I'm going to build my instant messaging on top of SMTP adding a list of allowed "from" addresses.<p>SMTP will prevail and at some point all the messaging will be done over it just like HTTP/1.1...
I think I have used email once I can't even remember what it was for. But I think the story is more true for SMS. If SMS was taken down, nobody could use their money or social media.
If nothing else, the freenode/libera hard fork showed that IRC is not only a federated protocol, it’s one that is relatively easy to pick up and move!
Please HN, let email die. it is unsecurable (universal) in transit or storage (mta's) and because of its reliability and universal adoption a ton of security depends on it like a very rotten and rusted link in a chain even a small child can break. It is an almost 4 decade old tech where any security you find for it is purely opportunistic.<p>I am very concerned how people here are stating how good, simple and reliable it is. They are not wrong but so is IPv4 and the C language. Sentiment has no place in a building a secure and proper future technology.