14 ms·

Re-Thinking Electronic Mail

128 points by smitty1e 7y ago

ggm 7y ago
Queue a nasty self fulfilling list "your email idea won't work because" checkbox. Sender pays would do a lot. Not popular.
- dewey 7y ago
  It would do a lot against democratization of access and one of the good parts of email. > Ubiquitous. Approximately everyone on the Internet has email, or can get it.
  - ddevault 7y ago
    The sender doesn't have to pay a lot to make it effective. Remember that the spammer is sending email to a hundred thousand addresses per day, for free. If you charged even $0.01 per email, that'd stop a lot of spam right in its tracks. However, some companies sending spam^wnewsletters would be willing to pay. I think this crap needs to stop, too, so this would be a partial solution at best.
    - dewey 7y ago
      I don't think it's necessarily about the amount you charge but that for charging it you need access to a bank account / credit card or other banking infrastructure. That's not the case for everyone taking part in the internet.
      - ddevault 7y ago
        Or proof-of-work, so long as it can be done without invoking The Blockchain (proof of work can be done without a blockchain, but you need to invest in armed guards to shoot anyone who mentions it).
- brazzy 7y ago
  Because it's no better an idea than it was 25 years ago when Spam first became a thing and there was another genius throwing this idea around every other day. First, there are some important use cases it would destroy (especially mailing lists). Second, it's impossible to implement gradually. Protocols and infrastructure would have to change drastically, everywhere at once. Not feasible.
  - DennisP 7y ago
    Gradual implementation wouldn't have to be hard. Gmail already sorts your inbox into several buckets. If you have one bucket for "paid/whitelisted" and another for others. You can leave the rest to the user.
    - brazzy 7y ago
      So basically "pay to bypass the spam filter", is that really what we want? And I don't think it would lead to gradual adoption; as long as people still have to pay attention to the other bucket, there is little incentive to start paying at all.
- genpfault 7y ago
  A classic![1] [1]: https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt
  - ggm 7y ago
    That's the one
- hakfoo 7y ago
  I've never seen a good system to differentiate between legitimate transactional email and spam. Both produce high-volume, templatey mail. So how do we make sure that "Vi@gr@ Pilules from C@nada" pays 15 cents per message, without bankrupting the legitimate invoices, tracking updates, mailing lists, and legitimately requested advertising flyers?
crispyporkbites 7y ago
So technically this is DKIM, except pushing the verification down from the domain level to the individual user level. And instead of publishing the public key in the DNS record, you manually give individual senders one/many time keys to send emails to you. Wouldn't it be easier to just set up a whitelist for emails in your inbox, that only allows senders you specify through?
- WayToDoor 7y ago
  And "stamps" are just like your standard email client filters. So basically, a better filtering system and a domain whitelist. And also some emailcoins to send them (PoW).
- Aachen 7y ago
  I'm not sure about your conclusion since that would violate the number one feature of email, but yes, the author's proposals do seem very unwieldy and ignore existing solutions.
gandalfian 7y ago
I worry big companies like the failure of free email. They want you to stick in their giant corporate silo. Gmail to Gmail works. WhatsApp works. The death of the smaller participant by sheer impracticality suits them. Isp's are giving up on even providing SMTP servers. I'm beginning to think I will have to stop using my private domain name and just use a Gmail address. Then they will have won, locked me in and probably start charging me...
- ken 7y ago
  Indeed. The elephant in the room that this post missed is that email was created by researchers, not corporations. Today, a huge swath of computer science progress is created by corporations. We're making great strides in areas which can easily be monetized. Email really isn't one of those. Worse, there are a lot of almost-email areas which are (Slack, Facetime, etc), which makes it nearly impossible for non-commercial entities to produce a viable alternative. You're fighting network effects and deep pockets. There are a lot of areas of computing that we take for granted today which were only created because they didn't need a corporation to find a way to be profitable. When big companies get together and try to produce the OS of the future, we get Multics and Taligent and OS/360. When individuals scavenge old cheap hardware to play around with for their own personal use, we get Unix and Linux and the Apple II.
- Animats 7y ago
  I worry big companies like the failure of free email. Yes. It's a huge win for Google to read everyone's email. Also, companies like the idea of programs needing "security updates", which allows pushing other unwanted things as well. Microsoft was one of the first in that area. If they couldn't have pushed Windows 10 as a semi-forced update, it never would have sold. Now pushing unwanted features is so pervasive that Mozilla does it.
bvrmn 7y ago
All hard details, i.e how to implement UX for end user are not there. PGP and friends was a complete failure for casual user.
- Aeolun 7y ago
  Because those wouldn’t significantly differ from existing email? I hardly think the gmail interface is the problem. All the things in the article can be completely transparent I think?
0DHm2CxO7Lb3 7y ago
I think one of the problems with email is that you have one global email tied to one inbox. Fastmail has the option to create multiple emails tied to one inbox so you could potentially have a unique email per sender, then if you start to receive spam it's easy to know who leaked it and disable the affected address
- vesinisa 7y ago
  This feature is supported by GMail as well FWIW. If your email is john@gmail.com all john+X@gmail.com addresses are aliases for your primary inbox. So you can have john+ebay@gmail.com, john+that_scammy_site@gmail.com and so on to easily track down spam.
  - RedShift1 7y ago
    What prevents spammers from recognizing the + pattern and omit it?
    - voicedYoda 7y ago
      Most of the time they don't care. They've got 4 million email addresses, they'll just spam all of them.
  - eitland 7y ago
    The problem with this is that it is immediately obvious to anyone who knows this how to go from john+that_scammy_site@example.comto john@example.com
  - voicedYoda 7y ago
    I've been using this for years. IIRC it's called "chaining". Unfortunately I've come across many sites that don't recognize, or allow, the + character in their input field. For those sites i can still crates either a group email from my Gmail, or just add another alias.
  - 0DHm2CxO7Lb3 7y ago
    It's not the same though. Fastmail allows a@fastmail.com and b@fastmail.com going to the same inbox. It's also easy to create these aliases. You have revealed your real email using the gmail plus sign feature. It's not that difficult for the people selling the emails or the spammers to remove a plus sign and some characters after years of knowing this.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
dsr_ 7y ago
Perhaps more implementable: IM2000. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Mail_2000 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Mail_2000 TL;DR: Each sender has or subscribes to a reliable mail server. The mail server does not deliver mail to recipients; it sends a tiny notification (restricted set of headers + UUID) to each recipient's reliable mail server. The recipient requests (or doesn't) the whole piece of mail via HTTPS or similar. The basic anti-spam tactic is to reject a whole server because it has sent you spam in the past.
- Aachen 7y ago
  How is that different from spamhaus and similar services that tell you which servers allegedly sent spam in the past? Except that it sounds like every person has to reinvent the wheel by blocking servers themselves instead of using an existing list. Note that I don't use nor am a fan of systems like spamhaus, it just sounds very similar.
  - JdeBP 7y ago
    It is structurally very different, because it attacks the problem by attempting to eliminate the concept of bulk mail. * http://jdebp.uk./Proposals/IM2000/anti-ubm.html http://jdebp.uk./Proposals/IM2000/anti-ubm.html You are using a pull-style electronic communication system right now. * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10405864 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10405864
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
amelius 7y ago
> each email user can have as many email identities as they want, and each identity is represented by a key pair for public key cryptography I'd suggest to use a different term for "identity", because this gets confusing. Perhaps use "appearance" or "presence".
- hanche 7y ago
  I like “persona”.
jka 7y ago
Since the article relates to email and mentions digital stamps, it seems worth mentioning Microsoft's Penny Black[1] anti-spam research project which had/has some similar goals. In general the idea (from both the linked article and the research project) is to make it computationally expensive to send messages, in a way that is cheap for the recipient to verify. That reduces both the desire and the capability for scammers to widely distribute their messages. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penny_Black_(research_project) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penny_Black_(research_project)
upofadown 7y ago
You can do almost all of this within existing standards. The PGP identity token (AKA public key fingerprint) would be used as the primary email identifier. The embedded email address would then just be considered a technical routing detail. If you physically meet someone and want to "know" them in an email sense you just scan the QR code of their identity token (there is a standard for this too). When you decide not to know them anymore you just remove their identity. Knowing someone who knows you is a standardized process and technically is just an attachment of a PGP identity (public key). Knowing someone from their internet presence is also a standardized process. This would be reasonably intuitive just as long as we were willing to give things sane names (e.g. Identity vs public key) and mail clients show clear statuses. We get encryption and identity reputation for free and can use it against spam as desired. Those that do not know PGP are doomed to reinvent it...
- pcr910303 7y ago
  Please don’t use PGP. Quoting ‘The PGP Problem’[0]: > PGP begs users to keep a practically-forever root key tied to their identity. It does this by making keys annoying to generate and exchange, by encouraging “key signing parties”, and by creating a “web of trust” where keys depend on other keys. > Long term keys are almost never what you want. If you keep using a key, it eventually gets exposed. You want the blast radius of a compromise to be as small as possible, and, just as importantly, you don’t want users to hesitate even for a moment at the thought of rolling a new key if there’s any concern at all about the safety of their current key. > The PGP cheering section will immediately reply “that’s why you keep keys on a Yubikey”. To a decent first approximation, nobody in the whole world uses the expensive Yubikeys that do this, and you can’t imagine a future in which that changes (we can barely get U2F rolled out, and those keys are disposable). We can’t accept bad cryptosystems just to make Unix nerds feel better about their toys. [0]: https://latacora.micro.blog/2019/07/16/the-pgp-problem.html https://latacora.micro.blog/2019/07/16/the-pgp-problem.html
  - riedel 7y ago
    The GP only said you should know it not the reinvent it. The rant you are quoting does not add too much to that point IMHO (age, what the author suggest does not solve many problems) So what do you use for signing and encryption today when setting up a heterogeneous system like email or git?
andrey_utkin 7y ago
The gist of one of the most important problem: zero cost of mass unsolicited mail. > Spam is a result of the desirable feature that anyone can email anyone, combined with the fact that sending an email costs approximately nothing, even if you send millions of emails, and aggravated by the fact that spamming has de facto no real financial or legal repercussions. Good that we can discuss this. > 2.2 Overview of solution Has some ideas in the right direciton of imposing the cost on the sender, as well as some ideas which have nothing to do with it. The author jumps straight into implementing things, giving little attention to formulating how we want the cost function to look like. > 2.6 Digital stamps Good for some use cases, but not for others. Imagine your relative wants to write you another email about how they are doing, or that but you haven't read their previous one, or forgot to issue them the new token. So they may as well create a new identity in order to email to you again? > Alternatively, the email server could require the person sending the email to solve a CAPTCHA-like puzzle. Blind and otherwise impaired people would get out of jobs at cusotmer contacts. > Email servers could also sell stamps for real money. As the measure of the last resort, the author turns to the ultimate medium of value exchange. If the sender communicates to you, they expect to derive some (not necessarily immediately monetary) value from it, otherwise why are they motivated for it? If the sender communicates to you so that you benefit, then you should have either paid them in advance, or they should reasonably expect you to pay them back. I think it's time we recognize the economic side in everything we do, and stop shying away from "commercialization" of aspects of our life, i think. Otherwise we won't get out of the nonsense like "free software provides so much value, but nobody wants to pay for it" - valuable things are meant to be valued, that is, exchanged for other valuable things.
- smitty1e 7y ago
  > zero cost of mass unsolicited mail We use "free" as in zero (immediate) cost, and also use the same word to mean liberty. In source code, I would expect that kind of conflation to be a source of subtle and vexing bugs for the application. Can someone smarter than me produce a TED talk that introduces an improvement on this F-word?
  - jauco 7y ago
Endlessly 7y ago
Following would kill 99.999% of spam: - All mailing addresses are linked to a persona and are impossible to guess. - Personas pay per address issued. - Senders pay per message sent with a per volume of data fee too.
- StavrosK 7y ago
  Following would kill 100% of spam: - Shut down all communication entirely.
- stiray 7y ago
  Let me propose another solution, much simpler, the one that internet was made for but looks like no one cares about. Host your own mail server. Each and every site I register to gots its own mail address. Not only that I know when address was sold, site was hacked,.. I also know which site. The only thing that is left is vi /etc/mail/aliases and one '#'. No spam at all. (That is not entirely true, i have few emails I use hidden from users just to collect spam and feed it to bayes. But that is another story.) It is 2020, stop using spyware sites like gmail and start using INTERNET.
  - sbuk 7y ago
    Its a wonderful idea, but I fear there are too many blocks in place at the moment to achieve this, technical literacy being the main one. The reason that people go to GMail, Outlook.com (formerly Hotmail) and other services is For the convenience - mainly the simplicity. It’s easy. Running a mail server is hard (tm), well in relative terms. There is a lot that needs fixing, especially on the ISP front. Until we can all agree to use IPv6, or another solution that isn’t constrained in the same manner as IPv4, it’s a non starter. I hate to be one of those that doesn’t proffer an alternative solution...
  - magicalhippo 7y ago
    Wouldn't require hosting your own server as far as I see. Gmail or Fastmail could do something similar. Provider could have UI to generate unique alias, the alias address being account.uid.hash@provider.com. The uid is unique per alias, and the hash is h(account|uid|salt). The salt is of course stored by the provider. This way the provider can easily verify the alias is not forged, and it is easily blocked if leaked. Mails going straight to the account (not an alias) could then be strictly whitelisted. Or did I miss something?
wildsatchmo 7y ago
A friend has built a client with inbox economics in mind at https://baemail.me https://baemail.me It doesn't use email but paymail which is a protocol for email-like payment addresses. - messages include some Bitcoin SV - inbox sorted by value - conditional notifications based on value threshold - encrypted messaging
gandalfian 7y ago
It can't be that hard for an email client, on setup, to invisibly authenticate that you can recieve email from the address you are using to send from. Then it could organise all the key stuff for you automatically. Though admittedly getting the world to do it may be impossible. Nobody wants to invest in a dying technology. Sigh.
someguydave 7y ago
The way to fix email is to simply affix the message to a payment. Free is for chumps.
- tomcooks 7y ago
  Worked so well for newsgroups right? /s
  - someguydave 7y ago
    Paying to post on a newsgroup is much different than paying an individual to read your message
einpoklum 7y ago
Author makes the implicit assumption that the problem he experiences are the experience of everyone. They aren't. Specifically: Spam: I used to get a lot more spam, today I get some, but with client side-filtering, it's something like a message every one or two days. And my address is very visible online, and I get dozens of legit messages per day; a good number even excluding mailing lists. centralisation: This _is_ a problem for me - my provider is being swallowed by MS Outlook365. But that's not driven by spam detection IMHO. (PS - spam did not go down significantly when this happened.) Actually, whatever standard you use - it's extremely likely that if it's free and anybody can ran an "email-plus" server, then Google and Yandex and GMX etc. will run those, and web services to access them, giving you centralization again. Scam: I feel I have this under control personally, but I recognize that some people might fall prey to that. Standards for digitally signed email ... not great: I dunno, seems to work fine for me. I mean, sure, mail clients could use better integration of encryption and signing, but other than that no serious complaints about email as such. a future where hosting email yourself makes you suspicious. Now _that_ is a problem. In fact, it's a problem _right now_. difficult to hide who is sending email to whom. So, me and the author may believe this is a general problem, but many/most people don't care about this. Unfortunately. HTML email is not well standardised, and is a security and privacy risk. It's a menace! For me, this is a serious problem. People write crap HTML and send it to me. HTML emails can embed ... from the Internet: Easily disabled entirely with reasonable mail clients. The problem is in the client, not the protocol. After all, with any messaging protocol, you could send markdown or HTML as though it was plain text, and a client could choose to interpret it as it sees fit. Attachments fill disks: I'm annoyed by this to no end, many people are perfectly fine with it since for them it's just webmail, so not their disk. Also, it's unlikely you can have your protocol prevent transferring files. At worst it would go back to the days of binaries-over-IRC. The technologies and standards for email are getting ridiculously complicated. This is at most a problem for programmers. Also, it's a problem from the 1980s and early 1990s... MIME is quite complicated, and in fact, I challenge anyone here to point to any mail client properly support complex MIME structures, with hierarchies including multipart, alternative and so on. But most users are none the wiser. The email tech stack is getting so hard to understand that it’s difficult to even use: If you're a power-user/administrator - maybe. If your' an end-user of webmail or a mail client - not really IMHO. never mind implement correctly. Never mind that the complexity results in more effort to operate and keep the servers secure.
tomcooks 7y ago
Not a silver bullet, but a default filter for addresses you haven't whitelisted would solve the problem in my opinion. Works fine with Instagram, where you get a notification that someone wants to write you a message.
nunodonato 7y ago
Even though its still "email as usual", I've since had a much better experience since switching to Fastmail. I'm not waiting to see Hey.com, the new project from the basecamp folks which sounds very promising to bring email to a new level. Both of these are paid solutions, but I guess thats fine because free brought us here....
- nunodonato 7y ago
  I'm now* waiting
jussij 7y ago
I don't understand why we don't have a system whereby all e-mail clients automatically attach a $0.001 stamp to each and every email they send (obviously a sign in feature). Then the e-mail readers receiving e-mails could easily filter all e-mails based on the absence/presence of that stamp. At that cost 1000 emails would cost about $1.00 which would be a years worth of e-mails for a typical user. For a million a day e-mail spammer that cost would quickly run them out of business.
- tyingq 7y ago
  There are, of course, legitimate reasons to send lots of email. You run these people out of business too.
  - rgejman 7y ago
    Emails from a stamped individual could be "whitelisted" so as to no longer require a stamp to show up in your inbox. For instance, the first time you get an email from Amazon Prime (which they pay $0.001 cent to send), a box shows up saying "add this email to a whitelist so they don't have to spend money emailing you?"
  - syrrim 7y ago
    As long as you earn more than a tenth of a cent for every email you send, you'll be fine. I don't think it's unfair to classify anything else as spam.
    - boomlinde 7y ago
      It's not spam if it earns you money? That seems like an arbitrary distinction.
naasking 7y ago
The problem with email is summed up in Zooko's triangle: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zooko%27s_triangle https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zooko%27s_triangle Zooko's triangle can be satisfied by a petname system: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petname https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petname This provides the security, decentralisation and human readable names needed for something like email. You just need the right system for managing the crypto for the secure global names, and a good user-focused process for secure introduction, key revocation/upgrade, etc.
upofadown 7y ago
The idea of doing email in terms of identities is a good one. That is because doing any communication in terms of identities is a good one. That simplifies, email, IM, video/voice and, yes, even video conferences. What we need is a standard identity token that works with everything. Everything could still do their own identity stuff natively but could be automatically verified using the standard identity token. I have recently spent some time looking at how PGP does this sort of thing in the form of key fingerprints and how the public key stuff works. There is a lot of wisdom in there that could be used as an example for a universal identity scheme...
jsilence 7y ago
Also: shared folders in IMAP.
jlgaddis 7y ago
> 2.2 Overview of solution > Every email user has one or more identities, represented by cryptographic keys. > All email is digitally signed using the cryptographic keys. > No email is delivered unless it carries a digital stamp issued by the recipient, or someone authorised to issue one on behalf of the recipient. Ahhh, yes... yet another Final Ultimate Solution to the Spam Problem (FUSSP) [0]: > The FUSSP depends on spammers or mail recipients changing their behavior without any immediate gain. > The FUSSP requires that anyone wanting to send mail obtain a certificate that will be checked by all SMTP servers. > The FUSSP involves certificates, but there is no barrier to spammers buying many independent certificates. > The FUSSP assumes that your attention is so important that strangers will pay money to send you mail. --- [0]: https://www.rhyolite.com/anti-spam/you-might-be.html https://www.rhyolite.com/anti-spam/you-might-be.html
pjc50 7y ago
See the canonical checklist: https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt (This is very old copypasta, maybe 20 or so years. As is the failed idea of email stamps.)
ethn 7y ago
As far as I know, this is a solved problem. http://www.wisdom.weizmann.ac.il/~naor/PAPERS/pvp_abs.html http://www.wisdom.weizmann.ac.il/~naor/PAPERS/pvp_abs.html An implementation of this is Hashcash which was used on UseNet very successfully: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash
kazinator 7y ago
Obligatory: https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt > Every email user has one or more identities, represented by cryptographic keys. Administered by whom? > No email is delivered unless it carries a digital stamp issued by the recipient The central premise of e-mail is that you can contact anyone if you know their e-mail address, without any pre-arranged permission. If a recipient has to issue something to me before I can contact them by e-mail, that is too broken to be usable. An intelligently designed micropayment system doesn't require anything from the recipient. Simply knowing someone's endpoint address, you an create a payment without their knowledge or consent, and attach it to the message. > In this approach, each email user can have as many email identities as they want [ ... ] This means misrepresenting the sender becomes much harder, reducing the possibility for scam. I.e. people can create arbitrary cryptographic identities, as many as they want (spammers can create millions of of these identities), yet somehow misrepresentation is not possible. Right. If you get a cryptographic message from Joe Blow offering you fake R0lex watches, you know that must be the real Joe Blow, because, like, it is cryptographic! Someone running a key generator would never lie about who they are.
- tomjen3 7y ago
  I remember how often it was posted on /. back in the day, and how it effectively shut down any discussion about fixing the real issues with email in any kind of open source fashion. The problem was eventually solved, but it was solved by Google and Yahoo and Microsoft in monopolizing email, because they were focused on the user and us nerds were focused on shutting down (im)-perfect open source solutions instead of working to improve them. The document is not obligatory, it is one of the most destructive ever published on the subject; it represents the worst of nerd-dom and should not be used.
  - kazinator 7y ago
    There is no debate-silencing coercion involved in posting a link to a humor piece. The debate stops spontaneously, because the participants are too stumped to respond to the ways that the form managed to anticipate serious flaws in their ideas. If you can't defend your ideas in the face of some piece of net humor written years earlier, what good are those ideas? That piece is in fact the encoding of a requirements specification; it shuts down the debate because it intrudes into it with some real world requirements that e-mail has to satisfy, and continue to satisfy while it transitions to something new. (Some of it is plain wacky, too, but not all). A lot of programmers are very good at pretending requirements don't exist; they think that design means inventing your own requirements and making everyone else follow them. But a world-wide electronic mail communication system isn't an editor, video game or toy compiler.
jedberg 7y ago
The obvious solution to spam/scams are micropayments. When you send an email, you attach a micropayment (say 1 cent's worth). When the recipient opens the email, you get your 1 cent back. This would make mass spam unfeasible while still allowing companies with legit bulk email needs keep sending email, since they would get most of their money back. It would even create an industry for people to be the payment middleman where they front you the cash for your bulk emailing and then assume the risk and keep the difference as profit.
- lazypenguin 7y ago
  Except payment is already required for traditional mail, yet I still receive an endless stream of spam and scams.
  - platelminto 7y ago
    Yes but nowhere near 1 cent per email, a sum that is still very little for legitimate users (especially considering the high likelihood of getting it back), but much higher than what current spammers pay.
  - jedberg 7y ago
    Do you? I get unsolicited postal mail, but it's at least well targeted and often relevant to me. Sure I toss the credit card offers, but if I were in the market for a credit card, the ones that I'm getting offered are probably the ones I'd consider.
- Yizahi 7y ago
  Bad guys will buy cheap stolen credit cards (and there will be intermediaries for more legit ones). One credit card bought for 2$ - one hundred thousands emails sent. On the other hand payment processors will drown in transactions which cost more than amount sent. And before someone says "blockchain" - highly unlikely that it could work, but lets say maybe, for some specific token system. But eventually it will be plagued with exact same issue - easily and cheaply stolen funds will empower millions of emails and system will struggle under millions of useless transactions, problem won't be solved.
zzo38computer 7y ago
Some of the problems can be solved as: - Spam: What I do is use different email addresses for each correspondent and service. I can then edit my /etc/aliases file to get rid of addresses which are receiving spam. And as mentioned, some other services also support aliases too, so if you have aliases, then you can do the same kind of things too, perhaps. - HTML email: Just avoid HTML email; plain text is much better. I use email software that doesn't even support HTML email (it will display the plain text part if it is a multipart message, but if not, then the HTML code will be displayed without attempting to render it). - No real privacy, even if you self-host: Well, there is encryption if needed, if you know the recipient's key. However, of course some things will need to be unencrypted in order to transfer the message, such as the recipient's mailbox (although with SMTP over TLS, you can encrypt the username too, even though the target server will still be known). - Attachments fill disks: You could use compression. You can also delete messages you no longer need. You can also program the server to reject messages longer than a certain length. - There is no good support for group discussions: Use NNTP instead. NNTP is a superior alternative to mailing lists and web forums.

128 points by smitty1e 7y ago

ggm 7y ago

Queue a nasty self fulfilling list "your email idea won't work because" checkbox. Sender pays would do a lot. Not popular.

dewey 7y ago
It would do a lot against democratization of access and one of the good parts of email. > Ubiquitous. Approximately everyone on the Internet has email, or can get it.
- ddevault 7y ago
  The sender doesn't have to pay a lot to make it effective. Remember that the spammer is sending email to a hundred thousand addresses per day, for free. If you charged even $0.01 per email, that'd stop a lot of spam right in its tracks. However, some companies sending spam^wnewsletters would be willing to pay. I think this crap needs to stop, too, so this would be a partial solution at best.
  - dewey 7y ago
    I don't think it's necessarily about the amount you charge but that for charging it you need access to a bank account / credit card or other banking infrastructure. That's not the case for everyone taking part in the internet.
    - ddevault 7y ago
      Or proof-of-work, so long as it can be done without invoking The Blockchain (proof of work can be done without a blockchain, but you need to invest in armed guards to shoot anyone who mentions it).
brazzy 7y ago
Because it's no better an idea than it was 25 years ago when Spam first became a thing and there was another genius throwing this idea around every other day. First, there are some important use cases it would destroy (especially mailing lists). Second, it's impossible to implement gradually. Protocols and infrastructure would have to change drastically, everywhere at once. Not feasible.
- DennisP 7y ago
  Gradual implementation wouldn't have to be hard. Gmail already sorts your inbox into several buckets. If you have one bucket for "paid/whitelisted" and another for others. You can leave the rest to the user.
  - brazzy 7y ago
    So basically "pay to bypass the spam filter", is that really what we want? And I don't think it would lead to gradual adoption; as long as people still have to pay attention to the other bucket, there is little incentive to start paying at all.
genpfault 7y ago
A classic![1] [1]: https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt
- ggm 7y ago
  That's the one
hakfoo 7y ago
I've never seen a good system to differentiate between legitimate transactional email and spam. Both produce high-volume, templatey mail. So how do we make sure that "Vi@gr@ Pilules from C@nada" pays 15 cents per message, without bankrupting the legitimate invoices, tracking updates, mailing lists, and legitimately requested advertising flyers?

crispyporkbites 7y ago

So technically this is DKIM, except pushing the verification down from the domain level to the individual user level. And instead of publishing the public key in the DNS record, you manually give individual senders one/many time keys to send emails to you. Wouldn't it be easier to just set up a whitelist for emails in your inbox, that only allows senders you specify through?

WayToDoor 7y ago
And "stamps" are just like your standard email client filters. So basically, a better filtering system and a domain whitelist. And also some emailcoins to send them (PoW).
Aachen 7y ago
I'm not sure about your conclusion since that would violate the number one feature of email, but yes, the author's proposals do seem very unwieldy and ignore existing solutions.

gandalfian 7y ago

I worry big companies like the failure of free email. They want you to stick in their giant corporate silo. Gmail to Gmail works. WhatsApp works. The death of the smaller participant by sheer impracticality suits them. Isp's are giving up on even providing SMTP servers. I'm beginning to think I will have to stop using my private domain name and just use a Gmail address. Then they will have won, locked me in and probably start charging me...

ken 7y ago
Indeed. The elephant in the room that this post missed is that email was created by researchers, not corporations. Today, a huge swath of computer science progress is created by corporations. We're making great strides in areas which can easily be monetized. Email really isn't one of those. Worse, there are a lot of almost-email areas which are (Slack, Facetime, etc), which makes it nearly impossible for non-commercial entities to produce a viable alternative. You're fighting network effects and deep pockets. There are a lot of areas of computing that we take for granted today which were only created because they didn't need a corporation to find a way to be profitable. When big companies get together and try to produce the OS of the future, we get Multics and Taligent and OS/360. When individuals scavenge old cheap hardware to play around with for their own personal use, we get Unix and Linux and the Apple II.
Animats 7y ago
I worry big companies like the failure of free email. Yes. It's a huge win for Google to read everyone's email. Also, companies like the idea of programs needing "security updates", which allows pushing other unwanted things as well. Microsoft was one of the first in that area. If they couldn't have pushed Windows 10 as a semi-forced update, it never would have sold. Now pushing unwanted features is so pervasive that Mozilla does it.

bvrmn 7y ago

All hard details, i.e how to implement UX for end user are not there. PGP and friends was a complete failure for casual user.

Aeolun 7y ago
Because those wouldn’t significantly differ from existing email? I hardly think the gmail interface is the problem. All the things in the article can be completely transparent I think?

0DHm2CxO7Lb3 7y ago

I think one of the problems with email is that you have one global email tied to one inbox. Fastmail has the option to create multiple emails tied to one inbox so you could potentially have a unique email per sender, then if you start to receive spam it's easy to know who leaked it and disable the affected address

vesinisa 7y ago
This feature is supported by GMail as well FWIW. If your email is john@gmail.com all john+X@gmail.com addresses are aliases for your primary inbox. So you can have john+ebay@gmail.com, john+that_scammy_site@gmail.com and so on to easily track down spam.
- RedShift1 7y ago
  What prevents spammers from recognizing the + pattern and omit it?
  - voicedYoda 7y ago
    Most of the time they don't care. They've got 4 million email addresses, they'll just spam all of them.
- eitland 7y ago
  The problem with this is that it is immediately obvious to anyone who knows this how to go from john+that_scammy_site@example.comto john@example.com
- voicedYoda 7y ago
  I've been using this for years. IIRC it's called "chaining". Unfortunately I've come across many sites that don't recognize, or allow, the + character in their input field. For those sites i can still crates either a group email from my Gmail, or just add another alias.
- 0DHm2CxO7Lb3 7y ago
  It's not the same though. Fastmail allows a@fastmail.com and b@fastmail.com going to the same inbox. It's also easy to create these aliases. You have revealed your real email using the gmail plus sign feature. It's not that difficult for the people selling the emails or the spammers to remove a plus sign and some characters after years of knowing this.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

dsr_ 7y ago

Perhaps more implementable: IM2000. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Mail_2000 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Mail_2000 TL;DR: Each sender has or subscribes to a reliable mail server. The mail server does not deliver mail to recipients; it sends a tiny notification (restricted set of headers + UUID) to each recipient's reliable mail server. The recipient requests (or doesn't) the whole piece of mail via HTTPS or similar. The basic anti-spam tactic is to reject a whole server because it has sent you spam in the past.

Aachen 7y ago
How is that different from spamhaus and similar services that tell you which servers allegedly sent spam in the past? Except that it sounds like every person has to reinvent the wheel by blocking servers themselves instead of using an existing list. Note that I don't use nor am a fan of systems like spamhaus, it just sounds very similar.
- JdeBP 7y ago
  It is structurally very different, because it attacks the problem by attempting to eliminate the concept of bulk mail. * http://jdebp.uk./Proposals/IM2000/anti-ubm.html http://jdebp.uk./Proposals/IM2000/anti-ubm.html You are using a pull-style electronic communication system right now. * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10405864 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10405864

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

amelius 7y ago

> each email user can have as many email identities as they want, and each identity is represented by a key pair for public key cryptography I'd suggest to use a different term for "identity", because this gets confusing. Perhaps use "appearance" or "presence".

hanche 7y ago
I like “persona”.

jka 7y ago

Since the article relates to email and mentions digital stamps, it seems worth mentioning Microsoft's Penny Black[1] anti-spam research project which had/has some similar goals. In general the idea (from both the linked article and the research project) is to make it computationally expensive to send messages, in a way that is cheap for the recipient to verify. That reduces both the desire and the capability for scammers to widely distribute their messages. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penny_Black_(research_project) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penny_Black_(research_project)

upofadown 7y ago

You can do almost all of this within existing standards. The PGP identity token (AKA public key fingerprint) would be used as the primary email identifier. The embedded email address would then just be considered a technical routing detail. If you physically meet someone and want to "know" them in an email sense you just scan the QR code of their identity token (there is a standard for this too). When you decide not to know them anymore you just remove their identity. Knowing someone who knows you is a standardized process and technically is just an attachment of a PGP identity (public key). Knowing someone from their internet presence is also a standardized process. This would be reasonably intuitive just as long as we were willing to give things sane names (e.g. Identity vs public key) and mail clients show clear statuses. We get encryption and identity reputation for free and can use it against spam as desired. Those that do not know PGP are doomed to reinvent it...

pcr910303 7y ago
Please don’t use PGP. Quoting ‘The PGP Problem’[0]: > PGP begs users to keep a practically-forever root key tied to their identity. It does this by making keys annoying to generate and exchange, by encouraging “key signing parties”, and by creating a “web of trust” where keys depend on other keys. > Long term keys are almost never what you want. If you keep using a key, it eventually gets exposed. You want the blast radius of a compromise to be as small as possible, and, just as importantly, you don’t want users to hesitate even for a moment at the thought of rolling a new key if there’s any concern at all about the safety of their current key. > The PGP cheering section will immediately reply “that’s why you keep keys on a Yubikey”. To a decent first approximation, nobody in the whole world uses the expensive Yubikeys that do this, and you can’t imagine a future in which that changes (we can barely get U2F rolled out, and those keys are disposable). We can’t accept bad cryptosystems just to make Unix nerds feel better about their toys. [0]: https://latacora.micro.blog/2019/07/16/the-pgp-problem.html https://latacora.micro.blog/2019/07/16/the-pgp-problem.html
- riedel 7y ago
  The GP only said you should know it not the reinvent it. The rant you are quoting does not add too much to that point IMHO (age, what the author suggest does not solve many problems) So what do you use for signing and encryption today when setting up a heterogeneous system like email or git?

andrey_utkin 7y ago

The gist of one of the most important problem: zero cost of mass unsolicited mail. > Spam is a result of the desirable feature that anyone can email anyone, combined with the fact that sending an email costs approximately nothing, even if you send millions of emails, and aggravated by the fact that spamming has de facto no real financial or legal repercussions. Good that we can discuss this. > 2.2 Overview of solution Has some ideas in the right direciton of imposing the cost on the sender, as well as some ideas which have nothing to do with it. The author jumps straight into implementing things, giving little attention to formulating how we want the cost function to look like. > 2.6 Digital stamps Good for some use cases, but not for others. Imagine your relative wants to write you another email about how they are doing, or that but you haven't read their previous one, or forgot to issue them the new token. So they may as well create a new identity in order to email to you again? > Alternatively, the email server could require the person sending the email to solve a CAPTCHA-like puzzle. Blind and otherwise impaired people would get out of jobs at cusotmer contacts. > Email servers could also sell stamps for real money. As the measure of the last resort, the author turns to the ultimate medium of value exchange. If the sender communicates to you, they expect to derive some (not necessarily immediately monetary) value from it, otherwise why are they motivated for it? If the sender communicates to you so that you benefit, then you should have either paid them in advance, or they should reasonably expect you to pay them back. I think it's time we recognize the economic side in everything we do, and stop shying away from "commercialization" of aspects of our life, i think. Otherwise we won't get out of the nonsense like "free software provides so much value, but nobody wants to pay for it" - valuable things are meant to be valued, that is, exchanged for other valuable things.

smitty1e 7y ago
> zero cost of mass unsolicited mail We use "free" as in zero (immediate) cost, and also use the same word to mean liberty. In source code, I would expect that kind of conflation to be a source of subtle and vexing bugs for the application. Can someone smarter than me produce a TED talk that introduces an improvement on this F-word?
- jauco 7y ago

Endlessly 7y ago

Following would kill 99.999% of spam: - All mailing addresses are linked to a persona and are impossible to guess. - Personas pay per address issued. - Senders pay per message sent with a per volume of data fee too.

StavrosK 7y ago
Following would kill 100% of spam: - Shut down all communication entirely.
stiray 7y ago
Let me propose another solution, much simpler, the one that internet was made for but looks like no one cares about. Host your own mail server. Each and every site I register to gots its own mail address. Not only that I know when address was sold, site was hacked,.. I also know which site. The only thing that is left is vi /etc/mail/aliases and one '#'. No spam at all. (That is not entirely true, i have few emails I use hidden from users just to collect spam and feed it to bayes. But that is another story.) It is 2020, stop using spyware sites like gmail and start using INTERNET.
- sbuk 7y ago
  Its a wonderful idea, but I fear there are too many blocks in place at the moment to achieve this, technical literacy being the main one. The reason that people go to GMail, Outlook.com (formerly Hotmail) and other services is For the convenience - mainly the simplicity. It’s easy. Running a mail server is hard (tm), well in relative terms. There is a lot that needs fixing, especially on the ISP front. Until we can all agree to use IPv6, or another solution that isn’t constrained in the same manner as IPv4, it’s a non starter. I hate to be one of those that doesn’t proffer an alternative solution...
- magicalhippo 7y ago
  Wouldn't require hosting your own server as far as I see. Gmail or Fastmail could do something similar. Provider could have UI to generate unique alias, the alias address being account.uid.hash@provider.com. The uid is unique per alias, and the hash is h(account|uid|salt). The salt is of course stored by the provider. This way the provider can easily verify the alias is not forged, and it is easily blocked if leaked. Mails going straight to the account (not an alias) could then be strictly whitelisted. Or did I miss something?

wildsatchmo 7y ago

A friend has built a client with inbox economics in mind at https://baemail.me https://baemail.me It doesn't use email but paymail which is a protocol for email-like payment addresses. - messages include some Bitcoin SV - inbox sorted by value - conditional notifications based on value threshold - encrypted messaging

gandalfian 7y ago

It can't be that hard for an email client, on setup, to invisibly authenticate that you can recieve email from the address you are using to send from. Then it could organise all the key stuff for you automatically. Though admittedly getting the world to do it may be impossible. Nobody wants to invest in a dying technology. Sigh.

someguydave 7y ago

The way to fix email is to simply affix the message to a payment. Free is for chumps.

tomcooks 7y ago
Worked so well for newsgroups right? /s
- someguydave 7y ago
  Paying to post on a newsgroup is much different than paying an individual to read your message

einpoklum 7y ago

Author makes the implicit assumption that the problem he experiences are the experience of everyone. They aren't. Specifically: Spam: I used to get a lot more spam, today I get some, but with client side-filtering, it's something like a message every one or two days. And my address is very visible online, and I get dozens of legit messages per day; a good number even excluding mailing lists. centralisation: This _is_ a problem for me - my provider is being swallowed by MS Outlook365. But that's not driven by spam detection IMHO. (PS - spam did not go down significantly when this happened.) Actually, whatever standard you use - it's extremely likely that if it's free and anybody can ran an "email-plus" server, then Google and Yandex and GMX etc. will run those, and web services to access them, giving you centralization again. Scam: I feel I have this under control personally, but I recognize that some people might fall prey to that. Standards for digitally signed email ... not great: I dunno, seems to work fine for me. I mean, sure, mail clients could use better integration of encryption and signing, but other than that no serious complaints about email as such. a future where hosting email yourself makes you suspicious. Now _that_ is a problem. In fact, it's a problem _right now_. difficult to hide who is sending email to whom. So, me and the author may believe this is a general problem, but many/most people don't care about this. Unfortunately. HTML email is not well standardised, and is a security and privacy risk. It's a menace! For me, this is a serious problem. People write crap HTML and send it to me. HTML emails can embed ... from the Internet: Easily disabled entirely with reasonable mail clients. The problem is in the client, not the protocol. After all, with any messaging protocol, you could send markdown or HTML as though it was plain text, and a client could choose to interpret it as it sees fit. Attachments fill disks: I'm annoyed by this to no end, many people are perfectly fine with it since for them it's just webmail, so not their disk. Also, it's unlikely you can have your protocol prevent transferring files. At worst it would go back to the days of binaries-over-IRC. The technologies and standards for email are getting ridiculously complicated. This is at most a problem for programmers. Also, it's a problem from the 1980s and early 1990s... MIME is quite complicated, and in fact, I challenge anyone here to point to any mail client properly support complex MIME structures, with hierarchies including multipart, alternative and so on. But most users are none the wiser. The email tech stack is getting so hard to understand that it’s difficult to even use: If you're a power-user/administrator - maybe. If your' an end-user of webmail or a mail client - not really IMHO. never mind implement correctly. Never mind that the complexity results in more effort to operate and keep the servers secure.

tomcooks 7y ago

Not a silver bullet, but a default filter for addresses you haven't whitelisted would solve the problem in my opinion. Works fine with Instagram, where you get a notification that someone wants to write you a message.

nunodonato 7y ago

Even though its still "email as usual", I've since had a much better experience since switching to Fastmail. I'm not waiting to see Hey.com, the new project from the basecamp folks which sounds very promising to bring email to a new level. Both of these are paid solutions, but I guess thats fine because free brought us here....

nunodonato 7y ago
I'm now* waiting

jussij 7y ago

I don't understand why we don't have a system whereby all e-mail clients automatically attach a $0.001 stamp to each and every email they send (obviously a sign in feature). Then the e-mail readers receiving e-mails could easily filter all e-mails based on the absence/presence of that stamp. At that cost 1000 emails would cost about $1.00 which would be a years worth of e-mails for a typical user. For a million a day e-mail spammer that cost would quickly run them out of business.

tyingq 7y ago
There are, of course, legitimate reasons to send lots of email. You run these people out of business too.
- rgejman 7y ago
  Emails from a stamped individual could be "whitelisted" so as to no longer require a stamp to show up in your inbox. For instance, the first time you get an email from Amazon Prime (which they pay $0.001 cent to send), a box shows up saying "add this email to a whitelist so they don't have to spend money emailing you?"
- syrrim 7y ago
  As long as you earn more than a tenth of a cent for every email you send, you'll be fine. I don't think it's unfair to classify anything else as spam.
  - boomlinde 7y ago
    It's not spam if it earns you money? That seems like an arbitrary distinction.

naasking 7y ago

The problem with email is summed up in Zooko's triangle: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zooko%27s_triangle https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zooko%27s_triangle Zooko's triangle can be satisfied by a petname system: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petname https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petname This provides the security, decentralisation and human readable names needed for something like email. You just need the right system for managing the crypto for the secure global names, and a good user-focused process for secure introduction, key revocation/upgrade, etc.

upofadown 7y ago

The idea of doing email in terms of identities is a good one. That is because doing any communication in terms of identities is a good one. That simplifies, email, IM, video/voice and, yes, even video conferences. What we need is a standard identity token that works with everything. Everything could still do their own identity stuff natively but could be automatically verified using the standard identity token. I have recently spent some time looking at how PGP does this sort of thing in the form of key fingerprints and how the public key stuff works. There is a lot of wisdom in there that could be used as an example for a universal identity scheme...

jsilence 7y ago

Also: shared folders in IMAP.

jlgaddis 7y ago

> 2.2 Overview of solution > Every email user has one or more identities, represented by cryptographic keys. > All email is digitally signed using the cryptographic keys. > No email is delivered unless it carries a digital stamp issued by the recipient, or someone authorised to issue one on behalf of the recipient. Ahhh, yes... yet another Final Ultimate Solution to the Spam Problem (FUSSP) [0]: > The FUSSP depends on spammers or mail recipients changing their behavior without any immediate gain. > The FUSSP requires that anyone wanting to send mail obtain a certificate that will be checked by all SMTP servers. > The FUSSP involves certificates, but there is no barrier to spammers buying many independent certificates. > The FUSSP assumes that your attention is so important that strangers will pay money to send you mail. --- [0]: https://www.rhyolite.com/anti-spam/you-might-be.html https://www.rhyolite.com/anti-spam/you-might-be.html

pjc50 7y ago

See the canonical checklist: https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt (This is very old copypasta, maybe 20 or so years. As is the failed idea of email stamps.)

ethn 7y ago

As far as I know, this is a solved problem. http://www.wisdom.weizmann.ac.il/~naor/PAPERS/pvp_abs.html http://www.wisdom.weizmann.ac.il/~naor/PAPERS/pvp_abs.html An implementation of this is Hashcash which was used on UseNet very successfully: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash

kazinator 7y ago

Obligatory: https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt > Every email user has one or more identities, represented by cryptographic keys. Administered by whom? > No email is delivered unless it carries a digital stamp issued by the recipient The central premise of e-mail is that you can contact anyone if you know their e-mail address, without any pre-arranged permission. If a recipient has to issue something to me before I can contact them by e-mail, that is too broken to be usable. An intelligently designed micropayment system doesn't require anything from the recipient. Simply knowing someone's endpoint address, you an create a payment without their knowledge or consent, and attach it to the message. > In this approach, each email user can have as many email identities as they want [ ... ] This means misrepresenting the sender becomes much harder, reducing the possibility for scam. I.e. people can create arbitrary cryptographic identities, as many as they want (spammers can create millions of of these identities), yet somehow misrepresentation is not possible. Right. If you get a cryptographic message from Joe Blow offering you fake R0lex watches, you know that must be the real Joe Blow, because, like, it is cryptographic! Someone running a key generator would never lie about who they are.

tomjen3 7y ago
I remember how often it was posted on /. back in the day, and how it effectively shut down any discussion about fixing the real issues with email in any kind of open source fashion. The problem was eventually solved, but it was solved by Google and Yahoo and Microsoft in monopolizing email, because they were focused on the user and us nerds were focused on shutting down (im)-perfect open source solutions instead of working to improve them. The document is not obligatory, it is one of the most destructive ever published on the subject; it represents the worst of nerd-dom and should not be used.
- kazinator 7y ago
  There is no debate-silencing coercion involved in posting a link to a humor piece. The debate stops spontaneously, because the participants are too stumped to respond to the ways that the form managed to anticipate serious flaws in their ideas. If you can't defend your ideas in the face of some piece of net humor written years earlier, what good are those ideas? That piece is in fact the encoding of a requirements specification; it shuts down the debate because it intrudes into it with some real world requirements that e-mail has to satisfy, and continue to satisfy while it transitions to something new. (Some of it is plain wacky, too, but not all). A lot of programmers are very good at pretending requirements don't exist; they think that design means inventing your own requirements and making everyone else follow them. But a world-wide electronic mail communication system isn't an editor, video game or toy compiler.

jedberg 7y ago

The obvious solution to spam/scams are micropayments. When you send an email, you attach a micropayment (say 1 cent's worth). When the recipient opens the email, you get your 1 cent back. This would make mass spam unfeasible while still allowing companies with legit bulk email needs keep sending email, since they would get most of their money back. It would even create an industry for people to be the payment middleman where they front you the cash for your bulk emailing and then assume the risk and keep the difference as profit.

lazypenguin 7y ago
Except payment is already required for traditional mail, yet I still receive an endless stream of spam and scams.
- platelminto 7y ago
  Yes but nowhere near 1 cent per email, a sum that is still very little for legitimate users (especially considering the high likelihood of getting it back), but much higher than what current spammers pay.
- jedberg 7y ago
  Do you? I get unsolicited postal mail, but it's at least well targeted and often relevant to me. Sure I toss the credit card offers, but if I were in the market for a credit card, the ones that I'm getting offered are probably the ones I'd consider.
Yizahi 7y ago
Bad guys will buy cheap stolen credit cards (and there will be intermediaries for more legit ones). One credit card bought for 2$ - one hundred thousands emails sent. On the other hand payment processors will drown in transactions which cost more than amount sent. And before someone says "blockchain" - highly unlikely that it could work, but lets say maybe, for some specific token system. But eventually it will be plagued with exact same issue - easily and cheaply stolen funds will empower millions of emails and system will struggle under millions of useless transactions, problem won't be solved.

zzo38computer 7y ago

Some of the problems can be solved as: - Spam: What I do is use different email addresses for each correspondent and service. I can then edit my /etc/aliases file to get rid of addresses which are receiving spam. And as mentioned, some other services also support aliases too, so if you have aliases, then you can do the same kind of things too, perhaps. - HTML email: Just avoid HTML email; plain text is much better. I use email software that doesn't even support HTML email (it will display the plain text part if it is a multipart message, but if not, then the HTML code will be displayed without attempting to render it). - No real privacy, even if you self-host: Well, there is encryption if needed, if you know the recipient's key. However, of course some things will need to be unencrypted in order to transfer the message, such as the recipient's mailbox (although with SMTP over TLS, you can encrypt the username too, even though the target server will still be known). - Attachments fill disks: You could use compression. You can also delete messages you no longer need. You can also program the server to reject messages longer than a certain length. - There is no good support for group discussions: Use NNTP instead. NNTP is a superior alternative to mailing lists and web forums.