Email could have been X.400 times better

https://buttondown.com/blog/x400-vs-smtp-email

by maguay • 3 months ago

239 206 3 months ago

buttondown.com

jgalt2126• 3 months ago

You could have been notified when the message was read a full 15 years before email had something similar tacked on.

Thanks to email security scanners this feature is largely broken.

And so are single click to unsubscribe links. So much so that we have to put our unsubscribe page behind a captcha.

rant over

hilariously• 3 months ago

Not trying to be rude, but If you put your unsubscribe page behind a captcha I am going to mark you as spam and move on.

AdamN• 3 months ago

I don't unsubsubscribe unless I explicitly subscribed in the past. If I did not subscribe in the first place then it's spam (exception for small businesses who may not know better in which case I'll delete or unsubscribe).

trollbridge• 3 months ago

No, it’s largely broken because of spam. I don’t want to be signed up to your useless email marketing list, and I want to use an email client that makes unsubscribing as easy as possible.

jgalt2126• 3 months ago

I don’t want to be signed up to your useless email marketing list,

useless is in the eye of the beholder.

cap11235• 3 months ago

If I cannot just click a button and unsubscribe, guess what, you are malicious spam.

bombcar6• 3 months ago

And if you can't figure out how to make an unsubscribe page that doesn't require a captcha (and is triggered by email scanners) you are incompetent. Claude can figure it out.

xnx• 3 months ago

Thanks to email security scanners this feature is largely broken.

One person's feature is another's anti-feature. I'm glad it's dead.

throw0101d• 3 months ago

You could have been notified when the message was read a full 15 years before email had something similar tacked on.

Which spammers and marketers would have loved.

I have "load remote content" disabled on my e-mail client so that tracking graphics/pixels do not leak such information to the sender.

jgalt2126• 3 months ago

I have "load remote content" disabled on my e-mail client so that tracking graphics/pixels do not leak such information to the sender.

Often times that's meaningless as email scanner software will load and inspect all links and images regardless of the human's email client preferences. It basically comes down to can Constant Contact, or similar, detect if a link was clicked by security software or an actual human. And security software wants to look like an actual human because if security software looks like security software it's very easy for bad actors to serve safe payloads to security software and malware payloads to human actors.

WhyNotHugo• 3 months ago

I think you're referring to things like tracking pixels, whereas the author was likely referring to _actual_ email read receipts, where the sender can request a read receipt, and the receiver's MUA will prompt them to send one.

jgalt2126• 3 months ago

Yes, same feature, different implementations.

PunchyHamster2• 3 months ago

waiting for inevitable "gmail bad, why it spams my emails so much" rant

dpark4• 3 months ago

Are you saying that email scanners were not only fetching the unsubscribe link but also submitting the “unsubscribe” button/form on the page?

I find this hard to believe since everyone else seems to manage this without a Captcha.

yencabulator• 3 months ago

I does sound like they made a HTTP GET request have side effects.

lxgr4• 3 months ago

we have to put our unsubscribe page behind a captcha.

Hope you're not ever sending email to EU residents!

Have you ever heard of `List-Unsubscribe`? It solves your problem without massively annoying people and breaking accessibility and/or the law.

ExoticPearTree• 3 months ago

This is an example of how simplicity won over features.

Not even then, when people with access to computers were probably in the thousands, would anyone liked to type "C=no; ADMD=; PRMD=uninett; O=uninett; S=alvestrand; G=harald" just like in the example of the article.

rjsw• 3 months ago

You were not supposed to type it out, you looked it up using your X.500 directory.

bombcar6• 3 months ago

All we need is an x.500 directory of all addresses in the world, which won't be abused by anyone at anytime!

thaumasiotes• 3 months ago

Is this an example of simplicity winning over features, or an example of features that are advertised but don't exist failing to win over the competition?

Some examples from the article:

You could have messaged an entire organization or department

This is a mailing list.

So it was possible, say, for one implementation of X.400 to offer X.400 features like recalling a message, in theory at least, when such guarantees would fail as soon as messages left their walled garden. But “they couldn't buck the rules of physics,” Borenstein concluded. Once a message reached another server, the X.400 implementations could say that an email was recalled or permanently deleted, but there was no way to prove that it hadn’t been backed up surreptitiously.

This is a feature that (1) is in the spec, and also (2) is impossible to implement. That's not a real feature. It's a bug in the spec.

You don’t email with X.400 today. That is, unless you work in aviation, where AMHS communications for sharing flight plans and more are still based on X.400 standards (which enables, among other things, prioritizing messages and sending them to the tower at an airport instead of a specific individual).

This is... also a mailing list. There's nothing difficult about having an email address for the tower. That email could go to one person, or many people. What's the difference supposed to be? What "feature" are we saying X.400 has that email didn't start with?

jech2• 3 months ago

> You could have messaged an entire organization or department
This is a mailing list.

The way I understand it, the layering is different. In X.400, multicasting was a feature of the protocol. An SMTP mailing list, on the other hand, is an endpoint that terminates a protocol transaction, and then initiates one transaction for each final recipient.

I guess it boils down to where it is preferable to have the extra complexity: the ITU-T protocols invariably prefer to put it inside the network, while the Internet protocols prefer to put it at the endpoints. The SMTP protocol is simple, and therefore the mailing list software needs to be complex.

PunchyHamster2• 3 months ago

C=no; ADMD=; PRMD=uninett; O=uninett; S=alvestrand; G=harald

that would be very annoying way to write e-mail and no less prone to typosquatting (if anything, more)

Both standards lacked hindsight we have today but x.400 would just be added complexity (as years of tacked-on extensions would build upon it) that makes non-error-prone parsing harder

msla2• 3 months ago

Plus, having to change email addresses when you physically move, in addition to when you change providers, would be immensely annoying.

giantrobot• 3 months ago

Ah but the solution was an X.500 directory where you just look up the recipient! So you never type the e-mail address, you just look up "Joe Smith" to send them an e-mail. Like looking them up in the phone book. Ignore the fact that the directory may return multiple Joe Smiths at the same large organization, not return Joe Smyth you wanted to message, or that there's not even a hint of anonymity with such directories. Oh yeah the internal organization of a company could be easily enumerated from the outside.

mystraline• 3 months ago

But theres a reason why "White Pages" of peoples' phone number books are gone.

Its the same reason why fingerd isnt run.

And why the LDAP for an org isnt exposed.

You do not give information of all your users to the public/enemy. Its the cybersecurity "principle of least privilege" and need to know.

gadders• 3 months ago

My first business card when I was working for a tech company had an X.400 address on it. Nobody was memorising that. Or writing it down quickly.

elzbardico• 3 months ago

Working, free implementations are better than perfect specification barelly supported only incompletely by closed, expensive implementations.

pjc503• 3 months ago

> SMTP "“didn’t win because it was ‘better,’” he argued, but “just because it was easier to implement."

Yes - and this is actually really important! It's true of most of the important early internet technologies. It's the entire reason "internet" standards won over "telco" (in this case ITU) standards - the latter could only be deployed by big coordinated efforts, while internet standards let individual decentralized admins hook their sites together.

Did any of the ITU standards win? In the end, internet swallowed telephones and everything is now VOIP. I think the last of the X standards left is X509?

ghaff• 3 months ago

And you could add any number of the big standards group-based standards that a great deal of blood, sweat, and tears were poured into. Not universally the case, but more true than false.

MisterTea2• 3 months ago

It's the entire reason "internet" standards won over "telco" (in this case ITU) standards - the latter could only be deployed by big coordinated efforts,

Anyone remember the promise of ATM networking in the 90's? It was telecom grade networking which used circuit switched networking that would handle voice, video and data down one pipe. Instead of carelessly flinging packets into the ether like an savage, you had a deterministic network of pipes. You called a computer as if it were a telephone (or maybe that was Datakit?) and ATM handed the user a byte stream like TCP. Imagine never needing an IP stack or setting traffic priority because the network already handles the QoS. Was it simple to deploy? No. Was it cheap? Nooohooohooohooo. Was Ethernet any of those? YES AND YES. ATM was superior but lost to the simpler and cheaper Ethernet which was pretty crappy in its early days (thinnet, thicknet, terminators, vampire taps, AUI, etc.) but good enough.

The funny part is this has the unintended consequences of needing to reinvent the wheel once you get to the point where you need telecom sized/like infrastructure. Ethernet had to adapt to deterministic real-time needs so various hacks and standards have been developed to paper over these deficiencies which is what TSN is - reinventing ATM's determinism. In addition we also now have OTN, yet another protocol to further paper over the various other protocols to mux everything down a big fat pipe to the other end which allows Ethernet (and IP/ATM/etc) to ride deterministically between data-centers.

pjc503• 3 months ago

Ethernet had to adapt to deterministic real-time needs

Without being able to get too into the telco detail, I think the lesson was that hard realtime is both much harder to achieve and not actually needed. People will happily chat over nondeterministic Zoom and Discord.

It's both psychological and slightly paradoxical. Once you let go of saying "the system MUST GUARANTEE this property", you get a much cheaper, better, more versatile and higher bandwidth system that ends up meeting the property anyway.

p_l3• 3 months ago

Pretty sure TSN is unrelated to ATM determinism, and comes from a completely separate area (replacing custom field buses where timing and contention is more important than bandwidth). Some of ATM complexity came from wanting to deliver the same quality of experience as plesiosynchronous networks provided for voice (that's how it got the weird cell size).

Once those requirements dropped down (partially because people just started to accept weird echo) the replacement became MPLS and whatever you can send IP over where Ethernet sometimes shows as package around the IP frame but has little relation to Ethernet otherwise.

EvanAnderson3• 3 months ago

ATM was superior in the context of a bill-by-the-byte telco-style network where oversubscribed links could be carefully planned. The "impedance mismatch" IP's of unreliable datagram delivery with ATM's guaranteed cell delivery created situations where ATM switches could effectively need unlimited buffer RAM to make their delivery guarantees even if the cells were containing IP datagrams that could just be discarded with no ill consequences.

There's likely an element of the "layering TCP on TCP" problem going on, too.

The classic popular treatment of the subject is: https://www.wired.com/1996/10/atm-3/

fmajid• 3 months ago

I started my career at France Telecom's R&D lab in Caen, Normandy. They had their own home-grown X.400 email client, and even though they could have set up a SMTP server for free, they deliberately chose to MX to a paid SMTP to X.400 gateway out of OSI ideology.

It was complete garbage.

Another lab of theirs proudly made a Winsock that would use ATM SVCs instead of TCP and proudly made a brochure extolling their achievement "Web protocol without having to use TCP". Because clearly it was TCP hindering adoption of the Web /s

The Bellhead vs. Nethead was a real thing back then. To paraphrase an old saying about IBM, Telcos think if they piss on something, it improves the flavor.

One of the jobs I had applied out of college was to lead Schengen's central police database (think stolen car reports, arrest warrants etc) which would federate national databases. For some unfathomable reason, they chose X.400 as messaging bus for that replication, and endured massive delays and cost overruns for that reason. I guess I dodged a bullet by not going there.

kstrauser5• 3 months ago

I was there for ATM, and I'm so freaking glad it lost. It's a prime example of "a camel is a horse designed by committee". A 53 byte cell with a 48 byte payload? Of course! What an excellent idea! We definitely want a 10% overhead on a ludicrously small packet, just so it has tolerable voice latencies if you scale it down to run on a 64Kb DS0, never mind that literally everything in the industry was scaling up to fatter pipes.

ATM was nifty if you had a requirement of establishing voice-style, i.e. billable, connections. No thanks. It was an interesting technology but hopelessly hobbled by the desire to emulate a voice call that fit into a standard invoice line.

cyberax• 3 months ago

And for a while, telco engineers tried to retrofit Internet to their purposes.

I worked on a network that used RSVP ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_Reservation_Protocol ) to emulate the old circuit-switched topology. It was kinda amazing to see how it could carve guaranteed-bandwidth paths through the network fabric.

Of course, it also never really worked with dynamic routing and brought in tons of complexity with stuck states. In our network, it eventually was just removed entirely in favor of 1gbit links with VLANs for priority/normal traffic.

rayiner3• 3 months ago

Instead of carelessly flinging packets into the ether like an savage, you had a deterministic network of pipes

I love this. Ethernet is such shit. What do you mean the only way to handle a high speed to lower speed link transition is to just drop a bunch of packets? Or sending PAUSE frames which works so poorly everyone disables flow control.

themafia2• 3 months ago

Anyone remember the incredible disrepute of the phone company in the 80s?

We just wanted our own stuff. We did not want to coordinate with a proprietary vendor to network or be charged by the byte to do so.

nofriend• 3 months ago

Was it actually superior though? The usual treatment is that packet switching works better at the scale of the internet. With voice, hogging a whole line works, but for the internet it makes more sense to slow everybody down when congestion occurs rather than preventing some people from connecting at all. I get why the telecoms would have you waste your bandwidth reserving a connection you don't need, and I get why they would try and sell that as a superior solution because of some nonsense about reliability, but I don't see it as providing much benefit to the user.

pimlottc3• 3 months ago

My college went all-in on ATM-over-fiber and wired all the dorm rooms with it. It was a PITA. Of course no computers came with ATM support and the cards cost $400+ each so the school had hundreds of cards that they would “lease” them out to students each year. There would be a huge “install depot” at the start of the year where students brought in their (desktop) computers and volunteers would open them up, install the cards, install drivers and configure them for our network.

For Linux heads, it was doubly annoying, as ATM was not directly supported in the kernel. You had to download a separate patch to compile the necessary modules, then install and run three separate system daemons, all with the correct arguments for our network, just to get a working network device. And of course you had to download all the necessary packages with another computer, since you couldn’t get online yet. This was the early 2000s, so WiFi was not really common yet.

Even once you got online, one of the admins would randomly crash every so often and you’d have to restart to get back online. It was such a pain.

xorcist2• 3 months ago

ATM was superior but lost to the simpler and cheaper Ethernet which was pretty crappy in its early days (thinnet, thicknet, terminators, vampire taps, AUI, etc.)

Aren't you confusing LAN and WAN here? ATM didn't lose to thinnet. Nobody (approximately) ran ATM as their LAN.

ATM had its successor in DTM. Yes, long range ethernet won out in the end, but that was much later when it was clear all anyone wanted was IP transport and the cheaper ethernet transcievers got good enough. People ran IP over what they could get: X.25, ATM, anything else vaguely T1/E1-like.

pabs3• 3 months ago

The critical part of that quote "Like a car with no brakes or seatbelts."

bragr• 3 months ago

That's a partisan framing. Another framing could be that SMTP is the golf cart SMBs were asking for, not the car they were being sold.

pjc503• 3 months ago

It doesn't seem to have worked out like that? You might as well say "like a car without a man walking in front of it with a red flag" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_flag_traffic_laws

p_l3• 3 months ago

A lot of the IETF standards winning was vendors avoiding work even when paid for.

Another was NIH in considerable important places.

Yet another was that ITU standards promoted use of compilers generating serialization code from schema, and that required having that compiler. One common issue I found out from trying to rescue some old Unix OSI code was that the most popular option in use at many universities was apparently total crap.

In comparison, you could plop a grad student with telnet to experiment with SMTP. Nobody cared that it was shitty, because it was not supposed to be used long. And then nobody wanted to invest in better.

SV_BubbleTime• 3 months ago

As x509 goes. I doubt many could explain it off hand with BER, DER and others being subset to ASN.1 and other obscura.

I’ve never been a fan

agwa• 3 months ago

I'll note that while X.509 certificates are deployed widely on the Internet, they are not deployed in the manner the ITU intended. There is no global X.500 directory and Distinguished Names are just opaque identifiers that are used to help find issuers during chain building. That hardly counts as a win for the ITU in my book.

justsomehnguy• 3 months ago

And in some usages CN is just doesn't even looked up upon.

jcranmer2• 3 months ago

WebPKI is derived from X.509, but I don't think X.509 lives on anymore. X.500 was stripped down to form LDAP, which is still in very heavy use today. There's still some X.400 systems in existence. I think some of the early cellphone generations may have used the ITU standards in the physical layer?

Of course, the biggest--and weirdest--success of the ITU standards is that the OSI model is still frequently the way networking stacks are described in educational materials, despite the fact that it bears no relation to how any of the networking stack was developed or is used. If you really dig into how the OSI model is supposed to work, one of the layers described only matters for teletypes--which were are a dying, if not dead, technology when the model was developed in the first place.

chuckadams3• 3 months ago

There's an entire book devoted to ripping up the OSI model: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1iL0fYmMmariFoSvLd9U5nPVH...

pseudohadamard7• 3 months ago

  X.500 was stripped down to form LDAP

No, LDAP was a student project from UMich that somehow gained mindshare because (a) it wasn't ISO, and (b) it cleverly had an 'L' in front of it. It's now more complex and heavyweight than the original DAP, but people think it isn't because of that original clever bit of marketing.

pzb• 3 months ago

X.509 absolutely lives on -- https://www.itu.int/rec/t-rec-x.509 last update was October 2024. However WebPKI uses PKIX which is fairly stubbornly stuck on RFC5280.

On the ITU side, they have made improvements including allowing a plain fully qualified domain name as the subject of a certificate, as an alternative to sequence of set of attributes.

tosti• 3 months ago

If you mean the presentation layer, hard disagree. Not thinking about presentation creates problems. For example, Go treating ASCII headers as UTF-8 caused trouble. Only slightly not worrying about an HTTP/2 vs HTTP/1.1 mismatch caused trouble for reverse proxies.

Now I'm young enough not to have seen teletypes in an actual production use setting, but I've never heard anyone suggesting the presentation layer was for teletypes. That's just Google-level FUD.

msla2• 3 months ago

Yes, the TCP/IP protocol stack beat the OSI protocol stack comprehensively, even down to four layers beating out seven unless you're so wedded to the Magic Number of Seven that you see Session as distinct from Application in the modern world, like how Newton was so wedded to seeing Seven Shades of Light in a spectrum he was sure to note indigo as distinct from violet in the rainbow.

(Presentation and Session are currently taught in terms of CSS and cookies in HTML and HTTP, respectively. When the web stack became Officially Part of the Officiously Official Network Stack is quite beyond me, and rather implies that you must confound the Web and the Internet in order to get the Correct Layering.)

https://computer.rip/2021-03-27-the-actual-osi-model.html - The Actual OSI Model

I have said before that I believe that teaching modern students the OSI model as an approach to networking is a fundamental mistake that makes the concepts less clear rather than more. The major reason for this is simple: the OSI model was prescriptive of a specific network stack designed alongside it, and that network stack is not the one we use today. In fact, the TCP/IP stack we use today was intentionally designed differently from the OSI model for practical reasons.
The OSI model is not some "ideal" model of networking, it is not a "gold standard" or even a "useful reference." It's the architecture of a specific network stack that failed to gain significant real-world adoption.

rstuart4133• 3 months ago

Doh! Of course it was easier to implement. IETF wants a working open source implementation before standardising.

Have you ever tried to implement an ITU standard from just reading the specs? It's hard. Firstly you have to spend a lot of money just to buy the specs. Then you find the spec is written by somebody who has a proprietary product, and is tiptoeing along a line that reveals enough information to keep the standards body happy (ie, has enough info to make it worthwhile to purchase the specification), and not revealing the secret sauce in their implementation.

I've done it, and it's an absolute nightmare. The IETF RFCs are a breath of fresh air in comparison. Not only can you read the source, there are example implementations!

And if you think that didn't lead to a better outcome, you're kidding yourself. The ITU process naturally leads to a small number of large engineering orgs publishing just enough information so they can interoperate, while keeping enough hidden so the investment discourages the rise of smaller competitors. The result is, even now I can (and do) run my own email server. If the overly complicated bureaucratic ITU standards had won the day, I'm sure email would have been run by a small number of CompuServe like rent seeking parasites for decades.

ogurechny2• 3 months ago

Given that general public uses social network services for electronic messaging today, and those don't even pretend they want to be interoperable, we've got parasites of a totally different class on top of the Internet infrastructure.

jech2• 3 months ago

IETF wants a working open source implementation before standardising.

I don't think that's IETF policy. Individual IETF working groups decide whether to request publication of an RFC, and the availability of open source implementations is a strong argument in favour of publication, but not a hard requirement.

If the IETF standards are sometimes useful, it's more a matter of culture than of policy.

zzo38computer• 3 months ago

I have been told that ITU specifications are deliberately confusing so that they can sell consulting services.

However, I think DER is good (and is better than BER, PER, etc in my opinion). (I did make up a variant with a few additional types, though.)

OID is also a good idea, although I had thought they should add another arc for being based on various kind of other identifiers (telephone numbers, domain names, etc) together with a date for which that identifier is valid (to avoid issues with reassigned identifiers) as well as possibility of automatic delegation for some types (so that e.g. if you register an account on another system then you can get a free OID from it too; there is a bit of difficulty in some cases but it might be possible). (I have written a file about how to do this, although I did not publish it yet.)

bigbuppo2• 3 months ago

ITU recommendations are free.

pseudohadamard7• 3 months ago

It's not so much that SMTP won, it's that X.400 lost because it suuuuucked. Anyone who's ever had to work with that piece of s*t, as opposed to rhapsodising over what it could theoretically do, can tell you stories about this. It made Microsoft Mail and Lotus Notes look good in comparison. Notes actually did X.400, so imagine Notes but even suckier.

rayiner3• 3 months ago

Worse is Better: https://web.archive.org/web/20040619155500/http://www.jwz.or...

teddyh• 3 months ago

Better link, by the author: <https://dreamsongs.com/RiseOfWorseIsBetter.html>

bigfatkitten3• 3 months ago

In the end, internet swallowed telephones and everything is now VOIP.

Using ITU voice codecs!

buttocks• 3 months ago

And still, ITU modem standards and T.30 … yes, fax still lives!

lukeasch21• 3 months ago

X.25 and other ITU specs won out massively in aviation, and they are just recently starting to go through the slow painful process of moving to IP. We'll probably see it hanging around for at least another 15 years in that sector.

userbinator• 3 months ago

H.261-264 video codecs, depending on your definition of "win".

AnimalMuppet2• 3 months ago

At the time, when there were so many different platforms still in existence, "easier to implement" was in fact a major component of "better".

unscaled• 3 months ago

LDAP might have won over DAP, but it's still heavily based on the X.500-family of standards. Unlike SMTP (which is a completely different standard), LDAP is strongly based on DAP and other X.500 family standards.

Besides LDAP and X.509, you've got old standards that were very successful for a while. I'm perhaps a little bit too young for this, but I vaguely remember X.25 practically dominated large-scale networking, and for a while inter-network TCP/IP was often run over X.25. X.25 eventually disappeared because it was replaced by newer technology, but it didn't lose to any contemporary standard.

And if you're looking for new technology, CTAP (X.1278) is a part of the WebAuthn standard, which does seem to be winning.

I'm pretty sure there are other X-standards common in the telco industry, but even if we just look at the software industry, some ITU-T standards won out. This is not to say they weren't complex or that we didn't have simpler alternatives, but sometimes the complex standards does win out. The "worse is better" story is not always true.

The OP article is definitely wrong about this:

“Of all the things OSI has produced, one could point to X.400 as being the most successful,

There are many OSI standards that are more successful than X.400, by the seer virtue of X.400 being an objective failure. But even putting that aside, there are X-family standards that are truly successful and ubiquitous.X.500 and X.509 are strong contenders, but the real winner is ASN.1 (the X.680/690 family, originally X.208/X.209).

ASN.1 is everywhere: It's obviously present in other ITU-T based standards like LDAP, X.509, CTAP and X.400, but it's been widely adopted outside of ITU-T in the cryptography world. PKCS standards (used for RSA, DSA, ECDSA, DH and ECDH key storage and signatures), Kerberos, S/MIME, TLS. It's also common in some common non-cryptographic protocols like SNMP and EMV (chip and pin and contactless payment for credit cards). Even if your using JOSE or COSE or SSH (which are not based on ASN.1), ASN.1-based PKCS standards are often still used for storing the keys. And this is completely ignoring all the telco standards. ASN.1 is everywhere.

ajb• 3 months ago

The rivalry continues in the fibre era, with ITU's GPON and successors competing with IEEE EPON etc. ITU does seem to have lost out comprehensively at layer 3. They do some stuff like OAM which is only interesting at Telco scale, although in the mobile era bodies like ETSI are more relevant.

The other difference from that era, and even the early internet era, is how much is no longer standardised at all, but decided by global monopolies. Back then it was a given that Everything would at least need to interoperate at the national level. But we may be returning to that .

mixdup5• 3 months ago

In the US at least the fiber standards are shaking out to telco vs. cable. Fiber providers who used to be telephone companies (AT&T, Verizon, and the smaller former Bells) are hitching to ITU standards in products developed and sold by vendors who have always sold to the Bells (Nokia via Alcatel via Lucent). Many of the startup fiber providers fall into this category, too (Google Fiber, Sonic, etc--oftentimes because they started as DSL companies riding on physical last mile networks of the telephone companies)

ISPs and providers (fiber or not) that started out as cable companies (Comcast, Charter) are hitching to SCTE/CableLabs standards and equipment from their traditional vendors (Commscope, wherever Cisco's Scientific Atlanta business lines ended up)

In the US there is little need for interoperability since networks don't have to be unbundled or support any kind of competition, outside of cable networks have to allow a customer to bring their own CPE (and only for copper networks, when they move to fiber all bets are off)

The only benefit interoperability brings is pricing--if a vendor can sell their platform to many ISPs, they get an economy of scale. This doesn't mean standards win, even in the cable world in DOCSIS 4.0 there are two flavors, with Comcast being just about the only company that has picked one flavor, with the rest of the industry picking the other

bostik• 3 months ago

Did any of the ITU standards win?

Maybe X.500 - also known as LDAP, and widely deployed across enterprises in the form of Active Directory.

mixdup5• 3 months ago

Kind of the exception that proves the point. Yeah LDAP is open, and there's a dull roar of an underbelly of stuff glued together, or glued to AD via LDAP, but AD is proprietary and if it had been completely proprietary instead of built on LDAP it probably would've been just as successful. Just kind of an accident that it "won" as an ITU standard, it could've been a Bill Gates fever dream instead and still made it

gzread3• 3 months ago

Everyone likes Wireguard over OpenVPN for many reasons, and one of those reasons is that OpenVPN requires a certificate pair while Wireguard uses a 40-character private and public key you can generate by running "wg genkey" with no parameters and copy/pasting.

sheepscreek• 3 months ago

Especially in that age when compute was precious, and scaling horizontally looked nothing like how it does today. This is a time before the Intel 386 which ran at either 16Mhz or 33Mhz :)

So it must have been preferable to reduce the workload per email for the server and client.

throwaway_ocr• 3 months ago

X.400 is still in use today for things like sending invoices and orders through EDI.

Yes, it is a pain to manage. Yes, it is all still mostly running on 20+-year-old hardware and software.

It is slightly ironic that the main way we communicate X.400 addresses between parties is through modern email.

roryirvine• 3 months ago

Is that actually true today? When I was doing EDI stuff ~20 years ago, it was mostly done using FTP, with some forward-thinking orgs moving to SFTP or (HTTPS-based) AS2.

I see that Wikipedia claims that "X.400 is quite widely implemented[citation needed], especially for EDI services", and that might once have been the case - but I doubt it was particularly widespread even at the time that article was first written. It's worth noting that that [citation needed] tag dates from October 2008!

philipstorry• 3 months ago

SMTP won because it was simpler, but it's probably good to look at why it was simpler.

SMTP handled routing by piggybacking on DNS. When an email arrives the SMTP server looks at the domain part of the address, does a query, and then attempts transfer it to the results of that query.

Very simple. And, it turns out, immensely scalable.

You don't need to maintain any routing information unless you're overriding DNS for some reason - perhaps an internal secure mail transfer method between companies that are close partners, or are in a merger process.

By contrast X.400 requires your mail infrastructure to have defined routes for other organisations. No route? No transfer.

I remember setting up X.400 connectors for both Lotus Notes/Domino and for Microsoft Exchange in the mid to late 90s, but I didn't do it very often - because SMTP took over incredibly quickly.

An X.400 infrastructure would gain new routes slowly and methodically. That was a barrier to expanding the use of email.

Often X.400 was just a temporary patch during a mail migration - you'd create an artificial split in the X.400 infrastructure between the two mail systems, with the old product on one side and the new target platform on the other. That would allow you to route mails within the same organisation whilst you were in the migration period. You got rid of that the very moment your last mailbox was moved, as it was often a fragile thing...

The only thing worse than X.400 for email was the "workgroup" level of mail servers like MS Mail/cc:Mail. If I recall correctly they could sometimes be set up so your email address was effectively a list of hops on the route. This was because there was no centralised infrastructure to speak of - every mail server was just its own little island. It might have connections to other mail servers, but there was no overarching directory or configuration infrastructure shared by all servers.

If that was the case then your email address would be "johnsmith @ hop1 @ hop2 @ hop3" on one mail server, but for someone on the mail server at hop1 your email address would be "johnsmith @ hop2 @ hop3", and so on. It was an absolute nightmare for big companies, and one of the many reasons that those products were killed off in favour of their bigger siblings.

rogerbinns• 3 months ago

... why it was simpler.

In the early 90s I implemented a gateway between Novell email and X.400. What amused me the most was X.400 specified an exclusive enumerated list of reasons why email couldn't be delivered, including "recipient is dead". At the X.400 protocol level this was a binary number. SMTP uses a 3 digit number for general category, followed by a free form line of text. Many other Internet standards including HTTP use the same pattern.

It was already obvious at the time that the X.400 field was insufficient, yet also impractical for mail administrators to ensure was complete and correct.

That was the underlying problem with the X.400 and similar where they covered everything in advance as part of the spec, while Internet standards were more pragmatic.

chuckadams3• 3 months ago

so your email address was effectively a list of hops on the route

Who can forget addresses like "utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!allegra!mit-eddie!rms@mit-prep"

tengwar23• 3 months ago

I am still trying to forget setting up sendmail.cf in that era.

somat2• 3 months ago

Ehhh.. This is a bit revisionist for a couple reasons.

1. smtp predates dns. or really even most of the internet. It was originally designed to work over uucp.

2. early smtp used bang paths (remember those) where the route or partial route is baked into the path.

themafia2• 3 months ago

Of course, for reliability, you could even bake multiple paths into the envelope address.

xorcist2• 3 months ago

A bit, perhaps, but not much.

At the time of bang paths, smtpd was just one of several email protocols in use. And X.400 was absolutely a competitor at the time.

A decade or two later, when it was clear that smtp had become the least common denominator between all email systems, then smtp absolutely used DNS and even had its own record type, MX.

So I don't think it is wrong to say a large part of why it won out on all other protocols was that you didn't have to mess with email routing once MX records was universally accepted.

computersuck• 3 months ago

More like X.400 times convoluted

a-dub• 3 months ago

i once did a contract for a company that built a product around connectors for legacy lan e-mail products and an x.400 mta. it was a gigantic steaming pile of shit and made me appreciate the simple internet protocols so much more than i already did.

jerjerjer• 3 months ago

If the history of email had gone somewhat differently, the last email you sent could have been rescinded or superseded by a newer version when you accidentally wrote the wrong thing. It could have auto-destructed if not read by midnight.

Immutability is one of the best things about email.

silon42• 3 months ago

Certainly it should be immutable if read.

Gigachad• 3 months ago

As a platform for sending invoices and official communications it’s fine. As a way for people to talk with each other it sucks. These days I’m of the opinion that most messaging should just be auto deleted after a month. If there’s something particularly important you want to keep, note it down. Otherwise just let it be forgotten.

dbbk2• 3 months ago

Boy do I have news for you https://amp.dev/about/email

EvanAnderson3• 3 months ago

The X.400 world would have had different spam economics because metered usage by your telco (who would be acting as a "Value Added Network" provider and delivering your X.400 mail) would likely have been the norm. As other comments have pointed out, this is still A Thing today with X.400 VANs being used for EDI.

dreamcompiler• 3 months ago

Gall's Law:

"A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked."

https://lawsofsoftwareengineering.com/laws/galls-law/

In my naive youth I always thought top-down design was the sensible way to build systems. But after witnessing so many of them fail miserably, I now agree with Gall.

beng-nl• 3 months ago

Well said. And similarly, it always seems to be the simple, bottom up, “let’s just build something simple and minimal that works” projects that get iterated on that do can do well, and start to strain when the technical debt and complexity accumulate.

cwillu• 3 months ago

“If the history of email had gone somewhat differently, the last email you sent could have been rescinded or superseded by a newer version when you accidentally wrote the wrong thing. It could have been scheduled to arrive an hour from now. It could have auto-destructed if not read by midnight.”

That would have required a lot of changes to computing history beyond simply email, and I doubt many of them would have been improvements.

fulafel• 3 months ago

For anyone wondering about the rest of the X standards, they're at: https://www.itu.int/itu-t/recommendations/index.aspx?ser=X

For example from 2023: X.1095: Entity authentication service for pet animals using telebiometrics

ogurechny2• 3 months ago

An article from Microsoft Systems Journal in 1993 ends with a bunch of different electronic mail addresses:

https://jacobfilipp.com/MSJ/1993-vol8/qawindows.pdf

By 1995, the “Internet” e-mail address was the only remaining one.

SllX2• 3 months ago

1993 "socials".

tengwar23• 3 months ago

Just looking back, we were using the hybrid ".uucp" pseudo domain in 1995, e.g. see the contact details for the third author on this papes: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/2291331_Beyond_Hack... (not me, a colleague). For those who don't recognise this, .uucp was an unofficial "TLD" used for UUCP-based email systems accessible via an Internet relay by a dial-up modem. The relay would rewrite jlc@bmtech.uucp to bmtech!jlc, a short UUCP bang-path email address.

ButlerianJihad• 3 months ago

In 1995, I had an AIM screen name, an ICQ UIN, a Jabber thing, which we began consolidating in Pidgin, and my girlfriend was experimenting with Cu-SeeMe and some kind of “microblog” twit thing.

You could also reach us by knowing our character names on certain MUDs, which implemented a spectrum of “real time IM” to “leave a message with the bot” to “virtual room full of mailboxes which are also rooms and contain objects that are notes”.

I didn’t really use IRC, but everyone else did.

Tor32• 3 months ago

I used to have a book laying around - it had, or tried to have, all the email addresses in my country. Like a phonebook for email addresses. That approach didn't last long.

foresto• 3 months ago

The ugly addressing? It “provides solutions to certain problems and is ugly for good reason,” Betanov explains. “Make it less ugly, and it immediately loses functionality. Thus, the solution is not to make addressing nicer, but to hide it from the user,” something both internet email and X.400-powered software could easily do with headers, not so much with addresses.

Reminds me of IPv6. ;)

pnw• 3 months ago

My first job at college was wrangling campus email, both X.400 and SMTP. As the article points out, SMTP won out because it was simple and developed in the open, not buried in standards committees, and SMTP code was widely available. It was the Cathedral and the Bazaar hypothesis playing out in real time.

Just seeing that X.400 notation is giving me bad memories!

sinnickal• 3 months ago

Having PP flashbacks right now.. You weren't there man... you don't know!

addaon3• 3 months ago

I still think the missing opportunity with e-mail was for the USPS (back in the US-dominant internet days) to take a leading role and implement "e-stamps." Provide a subscription service that managed a per-user account, cost a 1¢ stamp to send a message, and guaranteed delivery of messages received with a 1¢ stamp on them -- with the received stamp value being put in the user's account, so a user who received more mail than they sent would never spend a penny. (Messages received from other services could be rejected, delivered, or binned for later inspection at the user's discretion.) This would have the obvious downside of centralizing a major early-Internet feature (although federation is certainly possible as well), but it would have the upside of penalizing companies sending millions of e-mails, but not users using it for person-to-person communication, or companies using it for per-(valuable)-customer communication. We could have had a world without spam… and if USPS took 10% off the top (0.9¢ of each incoming message given to the user account), or similar, I could imagine it having a big impact on their budgetary issues.

halJordan• 3 months ago

The physical usps works because, the usps controls every inbox and every outbox; everyone has to have an inbox/outbox with the single carrier, and no one can actually reject or refuse mail. All the downsides of iMessage but the government reading your email bc it's not an encrypted protocol. Spam exists in the real world, this wouldn't have worked either

addaon3• 3 months ago

Spam exists in the real world, this wouldn't have worked either.

A two-or-more order-of-magnitude reduction in a problem seems like a good start and a worthwhile step, not something to disregard because it's not 100%…

pembrook• 3 months ago

Not sure it was a big missed opportunity to create a communication protocol that...financially penalizes communication?

Sounds like a really fast way to kill a network instead of grow it into a 4B daily active user staple like email is today. You'd basically ensure that email would ONLY be spam, because marketers would be the only ones willing spend money to reach people.

Every time I see someone suggest micropayments on HN I have to wonder if people here have any understanding of how actual humans are. Turning every action on your network into a purchase decision is a good way to ensure nobody ever does anything on your network and thus it never becomes a network.

Humans will always gravitate toward the lowest friction way to achieve their goals. So immediately some private company would introduce a free communication channel as a loss leader instead, theirs would grow faster, and then they'd monetize via ads once their network reached critical mass (see also, whatsapp). Killing the more egalitarian decentralized protocol in the process.

kevin_thibedeau• 3 months ago

This is what Xanadu and OSI were going to deliver: real world pay services recast on electronic networks. That could never compete against unmetered communication delivered by the likes of FidoNet, Compuserve, and the open internet protocols.

addaon3• 3 months ago

Not all communication has positive value. 99.9% of the e-mail I receive not only has no value in itself, but the overhead of managing it, ignoring it, and categorizing it is highly negative -- and decreases the value of the valuable e-mail I receive, because I can't be arsed to check it promptly or consistently because of the overhead of the dreck. But as others point out, even charging money would only reduce spam by an order of magnitude or two, not entirely -- and since I send 1 - 10 actual e-mails a week, I only need to receive a dozen a week to never pay a penny.

My primary goal is not to send e-mail for free -- my primary goal is to have reliable, low-overhead communication with humans. Having this sponsored by spammers is a fine start, but even if I paid a dollar a year or so, that would be much lower overhead than even a day's worth of looking through spam is today (at the rate I value my time -- but even if you value your time orders of magnitudes less, the payoff is there).

handoflixue• 3 months ago

Agreed. In particular, I'd say that most social media relies on highly prolific posters: the people who produce the most content are also naturally the most valuable for making people want to be in-network.

If you charge to read, it's hard to build an audience. If you charge to SEND, there's not going to be anything for the audience in the first place.

Ferdinandpferd• 3 months ago

I found the artificial cost ideas interesting at the time but I think the Ad landscape shows that it doesn't really work. All but the least sinister scammers would happily pay pretty well and have to be prevented from buying ads unless financial regulations could prevent any kind of laundering proceeds back into more ads.

TZubiri2• 3 months ago

It's worth noting the difference between a fixed cost for sending a message, and a fixed inventory of messaging, and an auction bid system where bids are maximized by competition unless bidders form a cartel.

Funnily enough, if collusion is prohibited, the goal of such a law would be more competition, but the result is more mergers and monopolies, up until the point where antitrust kicks in and ad-hoc limits the monopoly, so each industry ends up with 1 bidder, or 2-3 tops

twobitshifter• 3 months ago

My physical mailbox full of junk mail says that spam would still exist.

WalterBright• 3 months ago

3 or 4 items, sure. But my email account gets several hundred per day.

TZubiri2• 3 months ago

Have you heard about hashcash? They propose a novel similar mechanism for postage for email with some interesting theoretical consequences.

kelnos• 3 months ago

We could have had a world without spam

I doubt it. USPS charges everyone to send snail mail, and I get plenty of spam in my mailbox. I end up with way more spam in my snail mailbox than in my email inbox, since the latter has filtering.

o10449366• 3 months ago

Yes, I throw away maybe 98% of the physical mail I receive. But I have to sort through it for the 2% that's maybe important and for some reason MUST be received by physical mail.

There's obviously a lot of physical waste in this day and age and it's arguably small by comparison, but the paper waste from mail spam still disgusts me.

waynecochran• 3 months ago

Yes. I don't know if this is exactly the recipe, but something akin to this could have .. no should have .. existed. Probably 1¢ is too much. Also, full public key encryption and digital signatures should be easily integrated by now as well. I know the whole trust problem ... yadda yadda ... I don't even read my email hardly at all anymore -- I want everyone that needs to get a hold of me don't rely on email.

maguay• 3 months ago

And yet, when the USPS did deliver email (via paper, no less, with their E-COM system), over half of the message volume was sent by one mass-mailer: https://buttondown.com/blog/the-e-com-story

Afraid the spammers will always be with us.

tengwar23• 3 months ago

We could have had a world without spam

You might have had an American walled garden, but I don't see this being accepted internationally.

dbbk2• 3 months ago

what on earth are you on about

thund• 3 months ago

wow, how to romanticize X.400 ...

- poor Internet fit, assuming managed, trusted networks - some promises depended on all participating systems behaving honestly

- once a message reaches another server, you cannot guarantee it isn't copied, backed up, or logged

- X.400 read receipts: more reliable but also more privacy invasive

- X.400 metadata: carries a lot of routing, classification, and organizational info leading to potential privacy leaks

- SMTP is ugly but observable, you don't need a standard specialist to debug issues

grandinj• 3 months ago

Yeah, as someone who had to implement a protocol stack to talk to a X.400 server, it was not fun at all. Weird encodings, monster spec, all sorts of weird server-specific stuff that you had to do exactly right if you wanted the server to accept your email.

Compared to that, when I implemented RFC821/822 (i.e. SMTP) mail, the hardest part was the weird line-encodings, but other than that, the spec was ___so___ nicely readable and pragmatic.

bigfatkitten3• 3 months ago

For the use cases where it found adoption, such as in air traffic management, formal military messaging, diplomatic cables etc, these are all mostly desirable properties.

ChrisMarshallNY• 3 months ago

Argh. That red book. I may still have my copy around, somewhere.

X.400 was an “all things, to all men” solution; kinda like TIFF, for images.

I worked on an X.400 product, that never got out of the crib.

You could do things like specify the route that the email took, which was important, because there was support for microtransactions, all along the way. You could do things like pay extra for “premium delivery,” and “registered”-like messages.

It was really crazy. It did work, though.

The issue with specs like that, however, is they only ever get partially implemented. If you have an infrastructure, composed of many partial steps, it can be a mess.

amelius• 3 months ago

Yes, messaging apps like WhatsApp have some very desirable features that are missing in e-mail.

I wish someone would write some RFCs and e-mail could get an update.

splootie• 3 months ago

Did anyone remember that X.400 providers typically charged a fee per message?

upofadown• 3 months ago

Encryption would have been baked in from the start, rather than waiting for PGP, S/MIME, and TLS to add them later.

This comment intrigued me so I did a tiny bit of research. It appears that X.400 uses S/MIME for encryption (see RFC-3854). Alternatively something called STANAG 4406 which provides some sort of centralized control of who sees what for military applications.

Neither seems to be "baked in from the start".

simonebrunozzi• 3 months ago

Reminds me of Token Ring vs Ethernet. Token Ring was arguably superior, but Ethernet was cheaper to license, and over time more investment went into Ethernet and eventually Ethernet won.

1o1o1o1o1• 3 months ago

Baking in encryption would have been a terrible idea since encryption gets broken over the years and then you would have to update the entire protocol. Read receipts are an invasion of privacy.

Email could have been X.400 times better

Related Stories