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.
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.
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.
Generally email that’s tied to your school or job is only active as long as you are a student/employee there, and given how many services don’t let you transfer email accounts at all even if you know you’re about to lose access and start migrating away you might not be able to.
Best practice is to separate out business, personal and academic into separate accounts and separate devices. No personal crap distracting you from your studies, no personal stuff that might endanger your job on your work email, and no sharing your personal email with randos at your job
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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
which makes no sense from user perspective
I’d say it does have some merit from a security perspective though.
I agree it should be something that’s at least more clear for users to enable/disable on setup, but I personally don’t think having it enabled by default is ideal, considering how insecure SMS is.
…but I can literally send infected files thru RCS to my grandma.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
That’s cute. She treats it like writing letters or maybe postcards given the length of the message.
This is why I kind of hate microblogging platforms. This could just be part of a conversation, but shown of context every post is turned into a soundbite and takes on levels of faux-profundity that they can’t possibly support. Yeah, email has been around forever; so what?
What faux-profundity is on display here? Sometimes people just talk. Sometimes this includes observations. Kinda like what you did with your comment. I don’t understand why you’re bringing hate to a tea chat, but I suppose it can be good to get off your chest.
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.
Not so much though.
There was a moment when forums were the only kind of community but now forum use is dwarved by discord and reddit.
Everyone has to provide an email to make an account somewhere, if they don’t do the whole integration with Google/Facebook/etc
You can do it from a terminal. Us Linux kids will never let it die.
And even instant and encrypted when using https://delta.chat/
My most useful emails come from family and groups.io. Rarely some helpdesk response, though if it says reboot something, i stop talking to them.
It seems like a category error to compare email to Discord or Slack. The latter two are distinct companies and not protocols.
You’re right in theory, but in practice the point is that email survives because it’s not a closed, proprietary protocol.
Unfortunately I don’t think the issue is quite so simple. We used to have open chat protocols that were slowly strangled by big tech until only their solutions remained.
I think the biggest problem is simply user apathy, if users cared more we wouldn’t have the whole US green/blue bubble problem
We kind of still have IRC.
Irc is still great. I feel there is more tech channels then social channels nowadays tho.
Only tech people know about irc I suppose.
this is your reminder to set up OpenPGP. encrypt your email.
Yeah and I’ll use it with maybe one other of my tech nerd friends
Delta Chat is basically works on PGP emails.
E-mail barely hanging on between spam, broken HTML and an oligopoly of providers.
Yeah email is one thing I don’t bother to run on my own server, because all the oligopoly providers mark unknown servers as spam by default, so you can’t send emails to anyone anyway…
