LOL That reminds me of an old classic: http://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt http://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt There are a lot of obvious problems with

LOL That reminds me of an old classic: http://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt http://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt There are a lot of obvious problems with email. * It's hard to run your own mail server, as described in the original post * Your address is tied to your provider * The standards involved in delivering mail (SMTP, POP, IMAP, etc) are complex, layered with hacks (SPF, STARTTLS, etc), hard to implement correctly, hard to secure. * The standards that govern the actual body of email (multipart MIME, a 90s-vintage subset of "HTML" and "CSS") are even worse But despite all those flaws, email is built on ubiquitous open standards running on a federated infrastructure. It's the best thing we have. Proprietary standards and centralized designs like AIM, ICQ, MSN, FB Messenger, Slack, and Twitter DMs come and go. Email is forever, and is more useful than all of those combined. The flipside is that it's very hard to "fix".