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I used to use UUCP to get my email when I was on a dialup, non permanent connection. I was able to host my own mail server. There were a lot of technologies ba

I used to use UUCP to get my email when I was on a dialup, non permanent connection. I was able to host my own mail server. There were a lot of technologies back then helping the internet stay somewhat decentralized. Now I, like most, just use Gmail. What has become of our beloved free(digital)land?

cmrdporcupine 6y ago
Yep, I remember spooling usenet and email to my Atari ST over a 1200 baud modem over UUCP in 1990, 1991. Bang path and all. And you're right, the centralization is crazy, and opposite of what techno utopians predicted/promised at the time.
- vidarh 6y ago
  My first access to the web around '93 was via CERNs e-mail to web gateway coupled with UUCP exchange from my Amiga to my local BBS which exchanged with its upstream 4-6 times a day.
  - cmrdporcupine 6y ago
    Yeah I used to dial into the local university's gopher "campus information server" -- which was just a dial-up to telnet to a gopher client -- hit the ^] telnet escape character, close the connection, and re-open to another host where I had a shell and go from there. If I recall right it was probably gnu.ai.mit.edu that gave out free shell accounts, or something else in that domain connected somehow to Stallman. There was no ISP in my area back then, not even dial-up. Again, around 1991.
- toyg 6y ago
  Sadly, the upsides are just too good. I love decentralization, but I have to recognise that I've not lost a message since I moved to gmail in 2005; before then, losing entire mailbox files was not uncommon, as well as missing messages from unreliable mailservers, spam management, and so on. I'm sure I could have done better etc etc, but the bottom line is that with gmail-like services you don't have to. I enjoy doing sysadmin but not 24/7.
  - cmrdporcupine 6y ago
    Oh hell yes, I basically don't delete email ever and as a result I have an archive of every email (pointless or not) since 2005. (Though I just checked and my first email on gmail is porn spam). Meanwhile everything I had from every account prior to that, dating back to 1991 or so, is lost forever. Apart from some very embarassing forever-archived usenet posts.
KirinDave 6y ago
Well, part of this is on us. Let's think on the reasons Gmail is so popular: 1. It's very easy to get to. 2. It has incredibly fast search that has 0 setup. We have never really even tried to address problem 1 as an open source community. Networks, name lookup, and VPNs remain incredibly complex topics that beginners cannot hope to wrestle with. The best we have is .mdns which either works magically or perversely refuses to work. Similarly for free text search, the software world simply hasn't delivered a lego-like solution for email search. You CAN rig up any number of open source projects but it is neither easy nor instant. And even other professional products like Apple Mail struggle with a mere gigabyte of email. Despite the fact that it's 2021 and every successful email provider aggressively solves these problems, the open source world still debates about the utility of ubiquitous search or pretends that local networking isn't a pressing problem.
- sumtechguy 6y ago
  Another issue that needs to be solved is 'bad actor'. Basically someone gaming the system and overloading it with spam. There is no real nice neat way to fix that. Instead it is a mishmash of blacklists/whitelists/blocklists and sorta intelligent alg filtering. Getting that all filled and working is not trivial either. Oh its 'doable' but kind of a pain for even someone with decent experience at it.
  - ywei3410 6y ago
    To add to that; with re-assigned IP's, widespread port 25 blocking /most/ ISP connections won't allow you to run an email server on a residential connection. Spam/botnets have a lot to answer for.
- creeble 6y ago
  Agree 100% on both of these, and #2 is seldom listed as a big issue. Had IMAP addressed search in a better way, I think it would have made a huge difference. Of course, it's not simple to set up a mail server that stays clean of spam RBLs, or that is Gmail-acceptable out the gate. But that's just the bar that got set as people went to Gmail because of the lack of other good alternatives. Question is, is Gmail hegemony fixable now?
theamk 6y ago
Spammers and abuse. I used to run personal email server some years ago. The spam was harder and harder to manage - first local SpamAssasin was fine, the I had to tweak rules, then I tried distributed filtering (DCC)... and then I gave up and started paying for Fastmail. This ended up working much better than I could ever do. Usenet was similar -- I remember looking at the newgroups which were at more than half spam (and some were 95%+ spam) and then just leaving for forums. (plus there were a major UX annoyance: unlike with email, there is no simple way to sync read status across multiple devices) Our free(digital) land has been killed by a handful of bad actors. I no longer believe in "free for all" systems. The best we can do is many independent systems, each with its own rules and policies.
- Mediterraneo10 6y ago
  I run my own mail server with only Spamassassin for filtering, and I get little spam to my inbox in spite of my e-mail address being posted in plaintext across the internet. It has sufficed to 1) simply activate distributed filtering within Spamassassin, and 2) set a slightly more stringent standard than the default for regarding a message as ham, since any legitimately sent message will easily meet that higher standard. I also fed my entire e-mail archive to sa-learn, and what spam I occasionally get I also feed to sa-learn. In ten years of running this mail server, I have only had one persistent spammer I couldn’t manage to get filtered with these settings, but then I just created a custom rule.
  - Avamander 6y ago
    And _that's_ the work that is needed to have a spam-free-ish setup. Why can't FOSS ship these defaults and do these trainings semi automatically? Something totally could based on specific folder contents, but nothing does, it's always this "reinvent the wheel"-type of stuff.
    - Mediterraneo10 6y ago
      Spamassassin is storage-agnostic, at heart it is just a script that takes messages piped through stdin. It doesn’t know where your preexisting e-mail archive is stored on disk. Storage is done by either your IMAP server or your e-mail client, and obviously it is up to you to tell Spamassassin where those messages are for Bayesian training.
icedchai 6y ago
Me too! I ran AmigaUUCP on my Amiga, dialed up at 9600 baud to my upstream. This was around 1992 or so. I had Internet email and a Usenet feed of maybe 15 groups or so. Fun times.

cmrdporcupine 6y ago

Yep, I remember spooling usenet and email to my Atari ST over a 1200 baud modem over UUCP in 1990, 1991. Bang path and all. And you're right, the centralization is crazy, and opposite of what techno utopians predicted/promised at the time.

vidarh 6y ago
My first access to the web around '93 was via CERNs e-mail to web gateway coupled with UUCP exchange from my Amiga to my local BBS which exchanged with its upstream 4-6 times a day.
- cmrdporcupine 6y ago
  Yeah I used to dial into the local university's gopher "campus information server" -- which was just a dial-up to telnet to a gopher client -- hit the ^] telnet escape character, close the connection, and re-open to another host where I had a shell and go from there. If I recall right it was probably gnu.ai.mit.edu that gave out free shell accounts, or something else in that domain connected somehow to Stallman. There was no ISP in my area back then, not even dial-up. Again, around 1991.
toyg 6y ago
Sadly, the upsides are just too good. I love decentralization, but I have to recognise that I've not lost a message since I moved to gmail in 2005; before then, losing entire mailbox files was not uncommon, as well as missing messages from unreliable mailservers, spam management, and so on. I'm sure I could have done better etc etc, but the bottom line is that with gmail-like services you don't have to. I enjoy doing sysadmin but not 24/7.
- cmrdporcupine 6y ago
  Oh hell yes, I basically don't delete email ever and as a result I have an archive of every email (pointless or not) since 2005. (Though I just checked and my first email on gmail is porn spam). Meanwhile everything I had from every account prior to that, dating back to 1991 or so, is lost forever. Apart from some very embarassing forever-archived usenet posts.

KirinDave 6y ago

Well, part of this is on us. Let's think on the reasons Gmail is so popular: 1. It's very easy to get to. 2. It has incredibly fast search that has 0 setup. We have never really even tried to address problem 1 as an open source community. Networks, name lookup, and VPNs remain incredibly complex topics that beginners cannot hope to wrestle with. The best we have is .mdns which either works magically or perversely refuses to work. Similarly for free text search, the software world simply hasn't delivered a lego-like solution for email search. You CAN rig up any number of open source projects but it is neither easy nor instant. And even other professional products like Apple Mail struggle with a mere gigabyte of email. Despite the fact that it's 2021 and every successful email provider aggressively solves these problems, the open source world still debates about the utility of ubiquitous search or pretends that local networking isn't a pressing problem.

sumtechguy 6y ago
Another issue that needs to be solved is 'bad actor'. Basically someone gaming the system and overloading it with spam. There is no real nice neat way to fix that. Instead it is a mishmash of blacklists/whitelists/blocklists and sorta intelligent alg filtering. Getting that all filled and working is not trivial either. Oh its 'doable' but kind of a pain for even someone with decent experience at it.
- ywei3410 6y ago
  To add to that; with re-assigned IP's, widespread port 25 blocking /most/ ISP connections won't allow you to run an email server on a residential connection. Spam/botnets have a lot to answer for.
creeble 6y ago
Agree 100% on both of these, and #2 is seldom listed as a big issue. Had IMAP addressed search in a better way, I think it would have made a huge difference. Of course, it's not simple to set up a mail server that stays clean of spam RBLs, or that is Gmail-acceptable out the gate. But that's just the bar that got set as people went to Gmail because of the lack of other good alternatives. Question is, is Gmail hegemony fixable now?

theamk 6y ago

Spammers and abuse. I used to run personal email server some years ago. The spam was harder and harder to manage - first local SpamAssasin was fine, the I had to tweak rules, then I tried distributed filtering (DCC)... and then I gave up and started paying for Fastmail. This ended up working much better than I could ever do. Usenet was similar -- I remember looking at the newgroups which were at more than half spam (and some were 95%+ spam) and then just leaving for forums. (plus there were a major UX annoyance: unlike with email, there is no simple way to sync read status across multiple devices) Our free(digital) land has been killed by a handful of bad actors. I no longer believe in "free for all" systems. The best we can do is many independent systems, each with its own rules and policies.

Mediterraneo10 6y ago
I run my own mail server with only Spamassassin for filtering, and I get little spam to my inbox in spite of my e-mail address being posted in plaintext across the internet. It has sufficed to 1) simply activate distributed filtering within Spamassassin, and 2) set a slightly more stringent standard than the default for regarding a message as ham, since any legitimately sent message will easily meet that higher standard. I also fed my entire e-mail archive to sa-learn, and what spam I occasionally get I also feed to sa-learn. In ten years of running this mail server, I have only had one persistent spammer I couldn’t manage to get filtered with these settings, but then I just created a custom rule.
- Avamander 6y ago
  And _that's_ the work that is needed to have a spam-free-ish setup. Why can't FOSS ship these defaults and do these trainings semi automatically? Something totally could based on specific folder contents, but nothing does, it's always this "reinvent the wheel"-type of stuff.
  - Mediterraneo10 6y ago
    Spamassassin is storage-agnostic, at heart it is just a script that takes messages piped through stdin. It doesn’t know where your preexisting e-mail archive is stored on disk. Storage is done by either your IMAP server or your e-mail client, and obviously it is up to you to tell Spamassassin where those messages are for Bayesian training.

icedchai 6y ago

Me too! I ran AmigaUUCP on my Amiga, dialed up at 9600 baud to my upstream. This was around 1992 or so. I had Internet email and a Usenet feed of maybe 15 groups or so. Fun times.