I don't know how I feel about email

https://xeiaso.net/blog/idk-about-email

by blackhole • 3 years ago

99 54 3 years ago

xeiaso.net

Kye3• 3 years ago

You'll never find William Shatner on it.

f_devd• 3 years ago

EDIT: didn't realize this was satire when I wrote this

Setting it up from scratch is extremely annoying but there are foss solutions which manages everything mentioned and more, you only need to install & add the specified DNS records. Modoboa does a great job at this: https://modoboa.org/en/

Also apparently there's no real way to migrate between email servers either

This seems false (unless I'm misunderstanding), you can just setup a second mailserver, change DNS records and run IMAPsync to get everything transfered (backend-indepently), the only thing that would need additional consideration is passwords.

rssoconnor• 3 years ago

It's been a while, but as I recall your ISP will provide you with an email address. So if you have internet, you have an email address. Sure, if you change your ISP then you have to update your email address everywhere. But the same is true for phone numbers if you change phone companies.

As for email clients, just use whatever Netscape comes with.

generalpf• 3 years ago

Not sure where you live but in Canada and the USA the phone companies legally have to allow you to port your existing number over from one company to another.

Kwpolska• 3 years ago

Was that true in the 90s, when Netscape and ISP email addresses were in use?

ipcress_file• 3 years ago

You can port your number between providers here in Canada too. I even ported my old landline over to VOIP.

8organicbits3• 3 years ago

What do you mean that the spamfilter software takes 12 gigabytes of ram, 4 CPU cores, and 35 GB of local space in order to work?

What software needs that? Mail in a box seems much lower for the whole stack: https://mailinabox.email/guide.html#machine

cool_dude85• 3 years ago

The whole thing is talking about the fediverse. Presumably if you wanted to set up a server of your own on there and run a spam filter it would need to be so large.

8organicbits3• 3 years ago

The satire may land better if the hyperbole was more exaggerated. The specs are crazy for personal use, but probably reasonable for heavy/enterprise tools. I left wondering if they were considering the latter; misguided people make mistakes like that.

CJefferson• 3 years ago

I imagine if you tried “releasing” IMAP and SMTP email (with whatever cleanups and encryption you wanted to choose) now as a new open standard, in a world where email never existed, there is no chance it would take off.

upofadown• 3 years ago

My theory is that email took off because of how well it used already existing concepts from paper mail. People picked up the concepts behind paper mail as children. New concepts are hard and I think we tend to overlook that fact.

CharlesW• 3 years ago

Hey early responders: Christine's post is not actually about email, and she presumably believes email is just fine.

It's written to be a satire of critiques about federated social media services like Mastodon and Lemmy.

tomlx• 3 years ago

was about to say that ...

Tags: satire email

jeroenhd5• 3 years ago

I think it's a fair warning.

Half the comments on long blog posts usually end up discussing the headline, or even just part of it. Combine that with the difficulty people on online forums have to recognise blatant satire and you'll end up with pages of discussion about SMTP before you know it.

I see at least four top level comments failing to see the satire or talking about email. The downvotes are pushing them down, but it shows the sarcasm warning was necessary…

Kye3• 3 years ago

It's very on the snout if you're familiar with all the usual criticisms of Mastodon.

veave• 3 years ago

I suppose I understand what the author's position is, but they wrote a long post explaining that, since we have a flawed system, we are allowed to create new systems that are as flawed as that one... and that doesn't sound too good

kixiQu• 3 years ago

The warning is necessary, so I'm not disagreeing with you per se... But I think it's a positive quality of the piece that it doesn't actually resolve to a thesis about the comparison (as might "email is fine, and therefore..."), but just points out the tension. It's up to the reader to use the comparison to take a moment to consider what they think the costs and benefits involved are. Plenty of folks (well, judging from comments sections) think that email fails at many of the things it claims to do, and would assent to an "Everyone sucks here" judgment about both email and the Fediverse.

LukeShu• 3 years ago

FYI, they prefer to be called "Xe" now, not "Christine".

8organicbits3• 3 years ago

I thought this was actually about Mastodon given that people already have experience with email, and it was trying to draw parallels with the success of email. But it just ends by giving up..?

phoe-krk2• 3 years ago

Just like many people give up before figuring Mastodon out. Satire successful.

appplication2• 3 years ago

I seems to be missing the mark and satirizing the users for not understanding or liking a poor user experience, when it would make more sense to satirize the platform itself for failing to appropriately consider that when given a choice, users aren’t going to choose the difficult and annoying thing, but rather the simple and understandable one.

Criticisms of mastodon/lemmy/fediverse are 100% warranted. People try it and give up because it’s a confusing mess compared to any alternative. So either the product is so complex it can’t be simplified, or the developers of the project are so ignorant to user feedback that they aren’t willing to prioritize simplifying it. Both of these do not bode well for long term success or wide adoption.

There is also this sense I get when interacting with some fediverse enthusiasts that perhaps the complexity is good because it keeps the communities small, or if you can’t figure it out you shouldn’t use it. All I have to say about that perspective is that it’s pretty damn pretentious, as well as at odds with the messaging that these are meant to be replacement services for widely adopted social networks.

dwheeler• 3 years ago

I registered a domain name, then configured an email system to use it. Now I'm not locked in to the same degree.

grrdotcloud2• 3 years ago

Twenty some years later I am still on the same domain.

I initially ran my own email server. Spam filtering was easy.

Then things got more complicated.

Now I only use email for corporations to send me bills.

To the person just entering the world and getting exposed to computers and the internet I can almost understand the perspective.

There are a lot of silly things that exist because of necessity and systems being built over time.

Why isn't our mail just routed to a three-word address?

Like every tax system in government and system architecture, if we knew now how it would be implemented in used, we would do things differently.

There is a loss when oral history is removed from a culture. The stories of why are gone.

There is a warning, do not move the ancient landmarks. Do not tear down an old fence. After learning this I now ask, why is it this way?

jeroenhd5• 3 years ago

What got so complicated? Things like reverse PTR and SPF are trivial. DKIM is a bother to set up but you do it once during an annoyed afternoon and never need to look at it again. DMARC is as easy to set up as DKIM.

why isn't our mail just routed to a three-word address?

If only there was something that could take words like "grdotcloud gmail com" that we could use to deliver mail!

hsjqllzlfkf• 3 years ago

Image generated by Counterfeit -- a girl with yellow eyes, pink hair, fox ears, a white hoodie, and a short skirt walking through a park;

xena• 3 years ago

This is the model I used: https://civitai.com/models/4468?modelVersionId=57618. I also used a few extra LoRA filters (remove bad features, foxgirl ears, etc) to make the image a bit better. The model is literally named Counterfeit.

lolinder• 3 years ago

The key difference between SMTP and ActivityPub is that SMTP arrived on the scene in an era when getting started on the internet (sorry, ARPANET) at all was a major technical feat. The median internet user in the two decades following the introduction of SMTP was plenty competent enough to handle the complexities of email, and once email became the standard way to communicate everyone had to figure it out. At first it was all that we had, and by the time centralized platforms started making things easier the network effects were so strong that they had to support SMTP.

Some people are putting Mastodon forward as a replacement for a centralized platform, but now the network effects are working in the same direction as the complexity friction—both are pushing you towards centralized platforms and away from Mastodon and company. For most people there's no incentive to overcome the barriers because they would be the first in their social circles to attempt it, and the centralized platforms so far have had little motivation to support ActivityPub because their users don't expect to interact with that ecosystem. If Threads really does implement ActivityPub I could see that changing, but that remains to be seen.

This doesn't mean that Mastodon doesn't have a place right now—if you're looking for a community that is specifically filtered to exclude those who aren't above average in technical competency, it'll do nicely. But it cannot serve the median internet user today.

justsomehnguy• 3 years ago

I think it's 'AnalogBrocean' when it clicked for me.

CrampusDestrus3• 3 years ago

Comparing Mastodon (or ActivityPub-related endeavors) to email is silly.

Mastodon is an open platform where people can post things publicly.

Email is private communication between individuals.

Petty disputes exist on Mastodon because admins can see what's being posted and talked about in other instances and so can choose to ban them just for personal spite.

How about your instance admin peeping into everyone's DMs and seeing which servers hold the most people talking against the Democratic party and then blocking all those instances?

Would you like that?

Well, that's what would need to happen with email to achieve a same 1:1 comparison

jeroenhd5• 3 years ago

Are you saying email administrators are somehow above this all? They absolutely make weird personal choices when it comes to blocking servers and users. Microsoft will purge your account if it detects what appears to be a names child.

Take, for example, email delivery: if you're simply running a Tor relay (not an exit node) on the same IP address. You'll end up on a weird lists of blacklists not because there's any chance of abuse, but simply because they don't like Tor (or because they're too incompetent to distinguish between the two or too lazy to look up what those IP address lists mean).

The biggest difference between Mastodon and email is that you're less likely to interact with the petty administrators because people send fewer emails than they send toots. I promise you that free, community run email servers will be just as petty, shady, or unreliable as any hobbyist Mastodon instance.

CrampusDestrus3• 3 years ago

Email admins are not above this, but they have waaaayy less information available in order to ban stuff

jeroenhd5• 3 years ago

The email comparison often confuses people in my experience. They simply seem forget that email is federated when it comes to discussions like this.

I usually see these arguments from people who never had any interest in even trying Mastodon (or a related service).

In practice, there are only three large providers (Apple, Google, Microsoft, not necessarily in that order) that control whether or not your email gets delivered, so the comparison doesn't work entirely if you look at the modern web.

There also aren't that many Mastodon spam filters out there, but then again I haven't seen the same amounts of spam on there. I'm sure it'll get worse once Threads starts interacting with other servers and more people join the network, though.

Mastodon does solve the authenticity problem that SPF, DKIM, and DMARC have yet to solve in email. When you receive a message from steve@example.com, you don't need to dig through the headers to make sure it wasn't a Gmail signed envelope from some entirely different domain that happened to use the same server infrastructure like you need to with email.

jcranmer• 3 years ago

There's one big misconception here which really tears down the entire analogy from the beginning: you don't really choose your email server, and you were never intended to.

When email was developed, your email address would have been comprised of the computer you used (email is quite old) and your account name on said computer. As computers proliferated, the "computer" instead becomes "institution providing you with internet access", which would be your employer or your university (if a student), or your ISP if you manage to get home internet access. The email address is thus fundamentally tied to your source of internet [1], which also made it a useful unique identifier for the Web. But the desire for stability of this across ISP changes, as well as the need for multiple email accounts for a single household (kids don't want to use their parents' email address), propels the need for webhosted email accounts, email identities not specifically tied to your source of internet. And these email providers should be seen as exceptions to the general rule that email comes from your internet provider (although they probably provide the majority of email addresses now).

So the decentralization of email doesn't really create a "what server do I choose?" question, because the server is already chosen for you. And to the extent that the question does come up (when choosing a personal, permanent email provider), the evidence from the field is that the vast, vast, vast majority of people settle down for very few providers for this question (Gmail is close to a majority of personal email accounts, if not already there). From a user's perspective, email is not decentralized, and the confusion that Mastodon's decentralization brings isn't really an issue in email.

[1] And if you look up the version of email that was actually properly designed from the ground up as email (X.400), rather than accreting over time as SMTP et al did, it's even more apparent that email addresses are intended to come from your source of internet.

FooBarWidget2• 3 years ago

I can't remember anybody using their ISP email since ~2000. Email tied to your source of Internet is the exception, not the rule.

lapcat• 3 years ago

I can't remember anybody using their ISP email since ~2000.

This is very common among older people, for example.

vel0city• 3 years ago

Oh and even better, apparently Gmail is starting to lock down access to your emails with only a username and password in the interest of "security", so you have to go through convoluted hoops in order to check your email in something that isn't the gmail web UI. It is literally impossible for me to check my work mail in something like Aerc.

Application specific passwords. If you have 2FA enabled on your Google account, you can create an app password for your account to use a client like Aerc or whatever.

https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/185833?hl=en

Note, an organization may configure policies to disable this access.

andreareina• 3 years ago

You also need to have 2fa set up. And they don't have totp as an option unless you also set up either a security key or any number of options (sms, mobile push, others?) that involve getting entangled with google again.

Google really prefers you'd use sms 2fa over totp.

goranmoomin• 3 years ago

I get that this is a satire post on the usual criticisms of Mastodon, but honestly the points on Email is valid, and the reasons are a big point on why non-business Email usage is declining…

Especially the points 'there's no real way to migrate between email servers either, so whatever I choose is going to be my permanent home' and 'I can't run my own server' parts are very valid criticisms of the Email system…

mst• 3 years ago

I do like the way BlueSky lets you use your own domain much like hosted email providers do - presumably your account should be migrateable to other AT protocol systems as a result (eventually, hopefully, caveat, caveat).

gpvos• 3 years ago

This article was posted on M07 16 2023.

It's probably meant ironically (I see more reasonable date formats elsewhere on the site), but Americans will truly do anything to avoid using international standards.

seabass-labrax• 3 years ago

Every mailing list has their own unspoken rules on how you're supposed to use your client, reply to emails, and more. If you break these rules, you're threatened with banning.

It's an interesting and mostly correct article overall, but I must come to the defence of email here.

I would say this is a rather unfair characterisation of Internet mailing lists. I've been a member of dozens, if not hundreds, of mailing lists; I have never seen a member threatened with a ban, let alone being ejected. This may have been the predominant culture twenty years ago (and the archives witness that), but times have changed.

xtiansimon• 3 years ago

Haha. Email was a strange beast to understand back in the day. Of course, you needed to have access to the internet, your ISP, so you would default to their server. Whichever platform you were on had leading software, so you use the default. Not really that hard to figure out—it was all just new.

Since then, I’ve obtained my own domain name to have a ‘permanent’ (while I pay for the domain) email address.

Now I just forward these emails to my gmail account. I don’t have any hang-ups about google using my emails to train my AI overlord. Maybe the AI will recognize me like a country cousin?

xnx• 3 years ago

This accidentally(?) makes the case for an extension of email (a la Google Buzz) as a social network.

I don't know how I feel about email

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