21 ms·

A realization of why email is critical infrastructure for the Internet

316 points by deafcalculus 5y ago

leros 5y ago
Email is your proof of identity. It's absolutely critical. Anyone with your email can not only impersonate you, but gain access to many of your online accounts.
- encryptluks2 5y ago
  This is also why you should use aliases for each site you register for.
unixbane 5y ago
Email is a pile of garbage created with the same mentality of web and UN*X. This stupid shit in 2000 and 2020 still sends my IP address to the receiver for no reason so I have to use the web interface which removes it but then I can't control headers so I probably can't use PGP because some idiot wants to use that S/MIME shit (which was unsurprisingly broken due to the E-Fail bug). Coming up with a bunch of ad-hoc key-value pairs with keys you hope people will adhere to is not engineering. It's web shotting. When you do this it makes a sound of web being shot like *THWIP*. Coming up with yet another way of encoding key-value pairs (or any type of serialization) is not engineering; you have not addressed the concrete problem in any way what so ever other than explaining what the syntax will be. Like wtf is wrong with you people? How hard is it to call encrypt_message(your_message) and verify_message(their_message) without introducing RCE vulns? There is nothing hard about delimiting different entries in a list (for argv or whatever). This is pre-school stuff. The reason people omit it is becaues UN*X makes the path of least resistance to be insecure shit like system(), but even then it's still easy to work around it time after time if you are above the age of 12. Federation is also a hare-brained concept. Why in the hell do I want my address to be qualified with some stupid string? Is this so I can make a group and LARP about firing missiles from mydomain.com to yourdomain.com? How is it possible that XMPP was created with the same idiotic concept once we already knew email was garbage? Federation is absolutely and thorougly pointless. The literal only reason it makes any sense is because if it was fully centralized, the service would just be dead once comapny #1 dies. DAY OF THE SEAL SOON
citizenpaul 5y ago
Email is the last stand against millisecond invasiveness of tech in every living second of our lives. The reason that large companies struggle or fail to implement systems like slack and teams is not because they are superior to email. Its because these huge corporation treat employees as faceless cogs in a machine. Email fails email delays email sucks everyone knows this and accepts it so it becomes the only way to take a break from the corporate pressure cooker. I suspect in the future small companies that treat their employees as human and can use better tools effectively will eventually take over sufficient market shares to force large companies (they already are really) reevaluate the dispensibility of its workforce. The death of email is a social not tech problem.
h0nd 5y ago
Because as opposed to the mentioned alternatives, email is an openly defined protocol.
causi 5y ago
Email is our only reliable communication method between different organizations. I'm still of the opinion there should be public-option internet services. Everyone deserves an e-mail address that cannot be taken away from them without a court order.
- ejb999 5y ago
  Is there somehow a lack of affordable - and in many cases free - email options that we need a government solution to this?
  - vital_beach 5y ago
    arbitrary account shutdown is a known issue with free email. losing your gmail account without explanation and with no recourse can be an awful situation for anyone, especially for vulnerable populations. This leaves the options of forcing private orgs to maintain email addresses or have a gov email for every citizen, both of which have significant drawbacks.
  - vladvasiliu 5y ago
    I think the issue is that since email is more and more required to interact with the Government services, they should also provide a usable alternative. Why have your citizens rely on random foreign services from which they may be cut off because a bot somewhere is having a bad day? In France at least, many people (mostly the elderly) are having a hard time using computers and such. Some Government agencies have dedicated personnel to help them with filling in the forms and such on dedicated computers. It could probably be easier for them if they also provided email instead of relying on a third party provider. Grandma lost her password? No biggie. If she has her ID, we can reset it for her. Good luck getting any kind of support from Google / Yahoo in such a case. Of course, I will explicitly say that I would be very much against such a service being compulsory for the people. I just think it should exist.
    - sofixa 5y ago
      The post office ( La Poste) offer free emails, so there already is a non-foreign not-exactly-for-profit free email service out there. Plus all the ISPs also offer emails ( by default, you get an email with your plan, and on some ISPs you can't refuse it), but honestly that's just a terrible idea.
high_5 5y ago
> There are a huge variety of intra-organizational communication systems, to the point where pretty much every large enterprise provider seems to have one (Slack, Microsoft Teams, Discord, etc etc). That's why I find Delta Chat piggybacking on Push-IMAP such an interesting concept: https://delta.chat https://delta.chat
- Demcox 5y ago
  I like the idea alot. Too bad the app thorws errors left and right with Gmail and Live making it unuseable to me...
  - jve 5y ago
    I set it up with gmail (It offered Oauth login which I did) and tried to chat with my exchange. First ping-pong had 0 errors on Android.
    - darau1 5y ago
      I've also used it successfully with gmail, and others.
  - rakoo 5y ago
    The only issue I've had in my limited use is that a Deltachat email triggers a notification on the desktop before it is moved to a Deltachat-specific folder. The solution is to configure Sieve filters to do this upon reception, but just saying that we've lost all 99% of potential users
- jve 5y ago
  Oh, wow, finally something I started to "dream" about 2 years ago. Thanks for pointing out. Here's my ASK HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22854641 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22854641
wombatmobile 5y ago
> Email is our only reliable communication method between different organizations. Actually, that’s snail mail.
- SargeDebian 5y ago
  I think you’ll find it hard to send me a physical mail through my employer. Especially with the office in lockdown it may not be read for weeks.
- lrem 5y ago
  Snail mail to my work address has about nine months average latency these days.
zekica 5y ago
The biggest blunder for me is that there were usable decentralized communication options before that were popular, but because of trying to monetize user's data FAANG started to tighten their grip on any decentralized solution, and I think they succeeded. They are already trying do to email the same thing they did to XMPP and RSS.
- pjmlp 5y ago
  Before Internet we had centralized networking, BBS, Compserve, and similar online services accessed point to point via modem services. What is old is new again.
  - peoplefromibiza 5y ago
    That's only because running TCP/IP over a 1200 bits per seconds connection was close to impossible, but Fidonet had > 40 thousands nodes connect by 1990, so decentralization was already a thing back then. When modems became fast enough to handle a TCP/IP connection it was ~1994 and by then Internet was already (relatively) cheap and available.
- cpach 5y ago
  I’m not convinced that XMPP is actually such a great protocol. (I used it for many years.)
  - lrem 5y ago
    It's objectively awful... But when you step back a tiny bit, that doesn't matter. What matters is the inter-organizational community it achieved. If these organizations wanted to continue, they could come up with a negotiation technique like in http - both ends can use whatever fancy thing they both support, but fall back unto riding dinosaurs if that's the only thing that works.
  - hansel_der 5y ago
    email likewise lives on "not so great" protocols. "perfect is the enemy of good"
nsonha 5y ago
if this was twitter I would've commented with that meme of Newman from Seinfeld
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
lwhi 5y ago
I really hope that we end up moving back towards supporting open protocols. I was heartened (and a little surprised) that Jack Dorsey recently mentioned that the draconian control of the Twitter API was the worst thing Twitter had done [1]. The corporatisation of the Internet, has undone a lot of the great work that had traditionally underpinned the network. It feels like the slow, laborious and fundamentally equitable nature of standards ratification in the open has been seen to be at odds with the OKRs of tech businesses. Businesses that sell and work with natural resources are starting to wake up to the idea that a degree of cooperation and inter-market regulation with peer companies can positively impact individual performance. Sustaining business is even more fundamental than making profit. In the same sense; open protocols can help to develop rich and sustainable markets that benefit the consumer; as well as those businesses that operate in within it. [1] https://www.revyuh.com/news/software/developers/twitters-founder-admits-that-shutting-down-the-api-was-worst-thing-we-did-it-affected-users-and-developers/ https://www.revyuh.com/news/software/developers/twitters-fou...
- gjvc 5y ago
  It feels like the slow, laborious and fundamentally equitable nature of standards ratification in the open has been seen to be at odds with the OKRs of tech businesses. At the risk of sounding like I'm trivialising this comment (with which I completely agree), this difference in behaviours has as its root the difference between a long- vs short-term mindset.
  - rocqua 5y ago
    I think the issue might be the huge amount of VC cash invested, and the need for such a player to have explosive growth to a huge valuation. Open standards of federated systems could lead to slow sustainable growth with a spot for the original designers and pushers of the protocol. But open standards won't let you fully dominate the market, they don't allow you to leverage all the VC cash, and so they don't pay back on massive investment. Because quite a lot of the benefits are shared. Moreover, slow growth can't compete with VC cash investment. The VC backed competition will have a better UX, more features, aggressive marketing, and in general be more developed. All because they can develop their product a lot faster because they have more money behind them.
feldrim 5y ago
Well, in Estonia, they have a different approach. 1. If you are a citizen or a resident, you get an ID card to use for every public service. It's just a smart card with a government PKI. 2. The public services provide an email account that can only be used within the e-government services. The card is used for accessing those services. 3. The email service accepts either identity number or registry number of the recipient. So the recipient can be a legal entity. 4. You can and almost always do provide a forwarding address, so that you don't need to check. 5. You can't use it for other purposes. No RFC defined email address is shared with you. And it's just an internal system for official issues. I've heard some countries issue mailboxes for citizens but I am not aware of the general use of these. Also, email services were designed to be decentralized but evolved into centralized systems, a current and unsolved problem. I am not sure about the privacy and security of government provided email services.
- cycomanic 5y ago
  I always discover how Estonia is really amazing for lots of technology things. AFAIK they are by quite a margin the most advanced country in Europe when in comes to egovernment services. Moreover my (admittedly outside) impression is that they often go for technologically sound solutions not the ones which some large lobby organisation pushed for. This is particularly remarkable considering how small the country is, and in stark contrast to the mess that is egovernment services in Germany the richest country in Europe.
  - simongray 5y ago
    If we are to believe the EU, they are #1 in digital public services and have a respectable place in overall digitalisation of society: https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_21_5481 https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_21_...
  - fredley 5y ago
    Probably because they're so small they're overlooked by the salespeople and lobbyists from the big corps. I imagine that helps a lot. In the UK there are plenty of smart people in Government who can and would build things in a sensible way (and sometimes they do!), but there are also legions of smooth talking salespeople who usually bend the ministers' ears more easily.
_8j50 5y ago
Please HN, let email die. it is unsecurable (universal) in transit or storage (mta's) and because of its reliability and universal adoption a ton of security depends on it like a very rotten and rusted link in a chain even a small child can break. It is an almost 4 decade old tech where any security you find for it is purely opportunistic. I am very concerned how people here are stating how good, simple and reliable it is. They are not wrong but so is IPv4 and the C language. Sentiment has no place in a building a secure and proper future technology.
- cycomanic 5y ago
  Yes email is old and has lots of issues, it is still by a large margin the best we have. Name one protocol/program/service that comes anywhere close in its usefulness.
  - _8j50 5y ago
    Sort of my point. It is shit but it is neccesary, any replacement is predicated on popular acceptance of the problem.
- dqv 5y ago
  I don’t get it. I was waiting for you to say “in favor of…” but you never got to that part. Let email die in favor of what? What is the viable alternative? Not a single messaging app I’ve used comes close to email. And I can’t use one messaging app, I have to have 6! I would be way more willing to move on from email if a solid viable alternative came along. XMPP, for example, is still too ephemeral and barely anyone uses it.
  - aero-glide2 5y ago
    I was suprised to learn WhatsApp uses XMPP. Would be nice if all popular chat applications are interoperable.
    - BlueTemplar 5y ago
      "Is based on" rather than "uses" - AFAIK they deliberately broke compatibility ? (Ditto with Facebook Messenger and at least one of the Google chats ?)
Arathorn 5y ago
> As j. b. crawford notes, the prospect for another federated, Internet wide communication system seem very remote at this point in time, so email is it. I really don’t think this is true, and is defeatist at best. SIP and XMPP both had a good shot at creating a federated Internet-wide communication system, and we are doing our best to build one with Matrix or die trying.
- zaik 5y ago
  What's wrong with XMPP except Google decided to shut their instance down?
  - MattJ100 5y ago
    Nothing. XMPP has an active community, mature servers for every kind of deployment, and many clients under active development for a range of platforms. My personal focus within the community these days is with improving the ecosystem UX through initiatives like https://docs.modernxmpp.org/ https://docs.modernxmpp.org/ You can follow XMPP development via the community newsletter (email or RSS): https://xmpp.org/newsletter/ https://xmpp.org/newsletter/
- upofadown 5y ago
  A short message instant messaging system can not replace a long message offline capable system like email. They are fundamentally different things. The achievable security is significantly higher for an offline capable medium for example: * https://articles.59.ca/doku.php?id=em:emailvsim https://articles.59.ca/doku.php?id=em:emailvsim It is clear to me at least that we are stuck with at least 2 problems here. I have wondered if you could at least generalize the two modes in a way that would allow you to have one client and let the user decide.
  - rakoo 5y ago
    Both Matrix and XMPP can be used as instant messengers and asynchronous long-form messengers. They both have asynchronous encryption, and have had it for years now.
cube00 5y ago
Microsoft is chipping away at this by getting governments on to Outlook 365 on the basis that if all departments use it it'll be secure between them and can gain Top Secret certification.
arpa 5y ago
Protocols over something, i forget.
ThePhysicist 5y ago
E-Mail is one of the last remaining federated systems on the Internet, but I doubt it will survive long as the large players slowly sabotage it. I think already more than 90 % of all e-mails are delivered by three or four large companies, which is a trend that will continue.
- bullen 5y ago
  They have been trying to sabotage it for two decades, they can't because it is distributed. Just like HTTP/1.1 can't be deprecated because too much infrastructure depends on it. These protocols are simple and as complexity fails we all need to go back to them!
  - ThePhysicist 5y ago
    But HTTP is client/server whereas e-mail is server/server (or client/server/server/client). Small independent server operators are at the mercy of the large companies as those can just stop processing their e-mails (which they already often do). That's different for HTTP (though gatekeeping happens there too via discoverability and other mechanisms).
    - bullen 5y ago
      Both HTTP and SMTP are client/server because you cannot read SMTP without a "client"... The crucial part of these protocols are simple text that use DNS for distributing the connecting. HTTP can be used for server to server too... and I recommend it. So to repeat you need to implement HTTP, SMTP and DNS in you server software so that you can self host all 3 on your own hardware. This means asking your fiber ISP to open all ports (25, 53, 80) and give you a static IP! DNS is centralized for now... but eventually it wont be.
      - ThePhysicist 5y ago
        I'm not saying you can't do it, I'm saying it won't help you because nobody will want to "play" with you. Open protocols mean nothing if the playing field is not level and the big guys can just bully around smaller players in whichever way they wont. That's not a problem that can be solved by technology (IMHO).
bullen 5y ago
I'm going to build my instant messaging on top of SMTP adding a list of allowed "from" addresses. SMTP will prevail and at some point all the messaging will be done over it just like HTTP/1.1...
hprotagonist 5y ago
If nothing else, the freenode/libera hard fork showed that IRC is not only a federated protocol, it’s one that is relatively easy to pick up and move!
mark_l_watson 5y ago
Good points made in the article. Siloed services like Slack, etc. do have an advantage that you don’t get SPAM. I prefer E-mail and SMS person to person communication but there is the SPAM… Most people in my family and closest friends prefer SMS, even texting large image and video files (not really what the protocol was designed for, right?). Anyway, I tend to use what my people use.
nunez 5y ago
Let’s hope that email remains a “simple” protocol (envelopes are plaintext with some encoding, transmission is simple enough to do over Telnet) instead of something more complicated whose standards are drafted and maintained by the FAANG cabal.
dspillett 5y ago
> Email is our only reliable communication method between different organizations. For certain definitions of “reliable”! (though reliably available at least which can't be said for anything else, no matter how reliable in other senses)
nunez 5y ago
I don’t think email is as decentralized and federated as it used to be. In theory, email is a service that is simple enough for anyone to run themselves. Most Linux distros come with sendmail, so theoretically it should be as easy as reading the manual and exposing some ports. Spam is performed server side both at the origin and at the destination to mitigate bad actors, and because email is simple, there should be no shortage of clients to choose from. In reality, 1/4 of all email users globally are on Gmail. Apple Mail is the most popular mail client followed by Outlook, then Gmail. SMTP and IMAP are theoretically simple, but the bellwether providers use APIs on top of these protocols that have added some functionality at the expense of restricting the proliferation of email clients. Many large companies that used to run their own email (through Exchange, Zimbra, etc) are moving to hosted Office 365 or Google Workspace. One major AWS-scale outage in Gmail or Azure will incite (and has caused) serious panic and disruption (which is great for SREs like me since we’ll continue to get paid serious money to keep all this stuff running while maintaining a healthy work-life balance, but I digress). Furthermore, one doesn’t simply “stand up” their own email server unless they don’t care about landing in people’s spam folders. Additionally, many companies outside of the US _do_ use WhatsApp (Facebook) for official communication. I’d posit that this trend is only accelerating. I agree that email is fundamental technology, but I can see a future where it disappears in favor of something like federated Slack (or, worse, instant messaging centralized and controlled by the FAANG cabal with insurmountable cost-of-entry). Given the suppression of “free speech” on Twitter et al during peak COVID/peak insurrection (for valid reasons), this is slightly worrying.
- zaphar 5y ago
  Email's federation is an escape hatch. It's presence means that I can go to any provider I want to if I'm dissatisfied with my current provider. I can even run my own as a last resort. (Or first resort if that's your preferred mode of operation). Until that escape hatch disappears, which is unlikely, I will always have choice of providers. I don't have whatsapp, or discord for that matter. I have slack for work but I don't use it externally. I will probably never have those systems for my personal communication which means that if a company wants to communicate to me they are going to have to use email, full stop. I think there is a large barrier to email ever going away. Removing it from the market would require coordination that most companies and providers will probably never want to engage in. It's a lowest common denominator that all of them will want to support to avoid their users getting silo'd into a system that is not theirs.
encryptluks2 5y ago
I'd suggest everyone setup a custom domain with SimpleLogin and start using aliases for every site. Also, use isync and goimapnotify to backup your email automatically. Then if Google or some other company shuts you out of your hosted email you can easily get back up on a new provider and not need to change your email address which almost every site you register on now requires.
mdavis6890 5y ago
I always have this feeling that email is flawed and due for a complete overhaul or replacement - and then I think about it a little harder and I realize that it's actually really good at it's intended purpose. Other than fiddling around the edges with security improvements, spam filtering, and a few other nice-to-haves, there's not really much that need improvement. Some features of email that are nice: - It's completely open standard - I can host it myself if I want, or not. - It is completely decentralized and roughly point-to-point, subject to email routers. - Other than getting an email address, no other 'linkage' or prepwork with that person is required. - My address is not tied to any other service, like a phone number. (in contrast to e.g. WhatsApp) - It supports unsolicited communication from unsolicited sources (e.g. marketing) - It's easy to ignore communication I don't care about. (e.g. marketing) - Non-people are supported, like group emails/aliases (support@...) - I can trivially attach files, subject to some practical constraints - Email can be handled by the recipient in a wide variety of ways using different client mechanisms. - I can front-end my email in a variety of ways, such as with a contact form. Those are just the few I can think of off the top of my head. I'm sure there are others.
- fghgg 5y ago
  I think Matrix has got allt hat as well. And it has the security improvements and others as well (see features of e.g. Discord or WhatsApp). Anyways, I don't think I still use email for its intended purpose anyways. It mainly became something to tie accounts to and to 2fa
- mdavis6890 5y ago
  More: - It is designed well for medium-length content, say a few paragraphs or so per message. - It works well, and is mostly understood to be used for asynchronous communication. - Easily and usefully searchable. - Captures state/context well. - Threaded
- riffic 5y ago
  email, as ancient and flawed as it is, is a shining example of the Lindy effect in play - the future life expectancy of a technology or an idea is proportional to its current age. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect Any replacement will have to keep the above in mind because there's no test like the test of time.
anderspitman 5y ago
The ability to send messages is perhaps the less interesting role of email. I think maybe the real value comes from providing globally unique, federated identities. It's not perfect, but it's pretty dang good. If for no other reason, this is why no closed system will never supplant email. Even the biggest walled gardens like GOOG and FB bow to the power of email identities in the end, as the preferred (maybe even only) way to recover an account.
mikotodomo 5y ago
I think I have used email once I can't even remember what it was for. But I think the story is more true for SMS. If SMS was taken down, nobody could use their money or social media.
Jenda_ 5y ago
Another insane feature of WhatsApp (besides using phone number for an internet service) is that it only runs on Android and iOS (the web client is only some kind of "remote access" to the app, which requires the app to constantly run). I actually run Android-x86 VM on a server because of WhatsApp, which I need for work. And it has some problems, for example to allow the browser to access the app, you need to scan a QR code - but I did not find a webcam emulator (think: v4l2-loopback on normal Linux) for Android or a way to emulate a webcam in VirtualBox or Qemu, so I need to copy the VM image to a computer with physical webcam, scan the code by pointing the webcam to the screen, and then copy it back to the server. WTF. Or am I missing something? How do people without smartphones use WhatsApp (for communicating on a computer)?

316 points by deafcalculus 5y ago

Email is your proof of identity. It's absolutely critical. Anyone with your email can not only impersonate you, but gain access to many of your online accounts.

encryptluks2 5y ago
This is also why you should use aliases for each site you register for.

unixbane 5y ago

Email is a pile of garbage created with the same mentality of web and UN*X. This stupid shit in 2000 and 2020 still sends my IP address to the receiver for no reason so I have to use the web interface which removes it but then I can't control headers so I probably can't use PGP because some idiot wants to use that S/MIME shit (which was unsurprisingly broken due to the E-Fail bug). Coming up with a bunch of ad-hoc key-value pairs with keys you hope people will adhere to is not engineering. It's web shotting. When you do this it makes a sound of web being shot like *THWIP*. Coming up with yet another way of encoding key-value pairs (or any type of serialization) is not engineering; you have not addressed the concrete problem in any way what so ever other than explaining what the syntax will be. Like wtf is wrong with you people? How hard is it to call encrypt_message(your_message) and verify_message(their_message) without introducing RCE vulns? There is nothing hard about delimiting different entries in a list (for argv or whatever). This is pre-school stuff. The reason people omit it is becaues UN*X makes the path of least resistance to be insecure shit like system(), but even then it's still easy to work around it time after time if you are above the age of 12. Federation is also a hare-brained concept. Why in the hell do I want my address to be qualified with some stupid string? Is this so I can make a group and LARP about firing missiles from mydomain.com to yourdomain.com? How is it possible that XMPP was created with the same idiotic concept once we already knew email was garbage? Federation is absolutely and thorougly pointless. The literal only reason it makes any sense is because if it was fully centralized, the service would just be dead once comapny #1 dies. DAY OF THE SEAL SOON

citizenpaul 5y ago

Email is the last stand against millisecond invasiveness of tech in every living second of our lives. The reason that large companies struggle or fail to implement systems like slack and teams is not because they are superior to email. Its because these huge corporation treat employees as faceless cogs in a machine. Email fails email delays email sucks everyone knows this and accepts it so it becomes the only way to take a break from the corporate pressure cooker. I suspect in the future small companies that treat their employees as human and can use better tools effectively will eventually take over sufficient market shares to force large companies (they already are really) reevaluate the dispensibility of its workforce. The death of email is a social not tech problem.

h0nd 5y ago

Because as opposed to the mentioned alternatives, email is an openly defined protocol.

causi 5y ago

Email is our only reliable communication method between different organizations. I'm still of the opinion there should be public-option internet services. Everyone deserves an e-mail address that cannot be taken away from them without a court order.

ejb999 5y ago
Is there somehow a lack of affordable - and in many cases free - email options that we need a government solution to this?
- vital_beach 5y ago
  arbitrary account shutdown is a known issue with free email. losing your gmail account without explanation and with no recourse can be an awful situation for anyone, especially for vulnerable populations. This leaves the options of forcing private orgs to maintain email addresses or have a gov email for every citizen, both of which have significant drawbacks.
- vladvasiliu 5y ago
  I think the issue is that since email is more and more required to interact with the Government services, they should also provide a usable alternative. Why have your citizens rely on random foreign services from which they may be cut off because a bot somewhere is having a bad day? In France at least, many people (mostly the elderly) are having a hard time using computers and such. Some Government agencies have dedicated personnel to help them with filling in the forms and such on dedicated computers. It could probably be easier for them if they also provided email instead of relying on a third party provider. Grandma lost her password? No biggie. If she has her ID, we can reset it for her. Good luck getting any kind of support from Google / Yahoo in such a case. Of course, I will explicitly say that I would be very much against such a service being compulsory for the people. I just think it should exist.
  - sofixa 5y ago
    The post office ( La Poste) offer free emails, so there already is a non-foreign not-exactly-for-profit free email service out there. Plus all the ISPs also offer emails ( by default, you get an email with your plan, and on some ISPs you can't refuse it), but honestly that's just a terrible idea.

high_5 5y ago

> There are a huge variety of intra-organizational communication systems, to the point where pretty much every large enterprise provider seems to have one (Slack, Microsoft Teams, Discord, etc etc). That's why I find Delta Chat piggybacking on Push-IMAP such an interesting concept: https://delta.chat https://delta.chat

Demcox 5y ago
I like the idea alot. Too bad the app thorws errors left and right with Gmail and Live making it unuseable to me...
- jve 5y ago
  I set it up with gmail (It offered Oauth login which I did) and tried to chat with my exchange. First ping-pong had 0 errors on Android.
  - darau1 5y ago
    I've also used it successfully with gmail, and others.
- rakoo 5y ago
  The only issue I've had in my limited use is that a Deltachat email triggers a notification on the desktop before it is moved to a Deltachat-specific folder. The solution is to configure Sieve filters to do this upon reception, but just saying that we've lost all 99% of potential users
jve 5y ago
Oh, wow, finally something I started to "dream" about 2 years ago. Thanks for pointing out. Here's my ASK HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22854641 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22854641

wombatmobile 5y ago

> Email is our only reliable communication method between different organizations. Actually, that’s snail mail.

SargeDebian 5y ago
I think you’ll find it hard to send me a physical mail through my employer. Especially with the office in lockdown it may not be read for weeks.
lrem 5y ago
Snail mail to my work address has about nine months average latency these days.

zekica 5y ago

The biggest blunder for me is that there were usable decentralized communication options before that were popular, but because of trying to monetize user's data FAANG started to tighten their grip on any decentralized solution, and I think they succeeded. They are already trying do to email the same thing they did to XMPP and RSS.

pjmlp 5y ago
Before Internet we had centralized networking, BBS, Compserve, and similar online services accessed point to point via modem services. What is old is new again.
- peoplefromibiza 5y ago
  That's only because running TCP/IP over a 1200 bits per seconds connection was close to impossible, but Fidonet had > 40 thousands nodes connect by 1990, so decentralization was already a thing back then. When modems became fast enough to handle a TCP/IP connection it was ~1994 and by then Internet was already (relatively) cheap and available.
cpach 5y ago
I’m not convinced that XMPP is actually such a great protocol. (I used it for many years.)
- lrem 5y ago
  It's objectively awful... But when you step back a tiny bit, that doesn't matter. What matters is the inter-organizational community it achieved. If these organizations wanted to continue, they could come up with a negotiation technique like in http - both ends can use whatever fancy thing they both support, but fall back unto riding dinosaurs if that's the only thing that works.
- hansel_der 5y ago
  email likewise lives on "not so great" protocols. "perfect is the enemy of good"

nsonha 5y ago

if this was twitter I would've commented with that meme of Newman from Seinfeld

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

lwhi 5y ago

I really hope that we end up moving back towards supporting open protocols. I was heartened (and a little surprised) that Jack Dorsey recently mentioned that the draconian control of the Twitter API was the worst thing Twitter had done [1]. The corporatisation of the Internet, has undone a lot of the great work that had traditionally underpinned the network. It feels like the slow, laborious and fundamentally equitable nature of standards ratification in the open has been seen to be at odds with the OKRs of tech businesses. Businesses that sell and work with natural resources are starting to wake up to the idea that a degree of cooperation and inter-market regulation with peer companies can positively impact individual performance. Sustaining business is even more fundamental than making profit. In the same sense; open protocols can help to develop rich and sustainable markets that benefit the consumer; as well as those businesses that operate in within it. [1] https://www.revyuh.com/news/software/developers/twitters-founder-admits-that-shutting-down-the-api-was-worst-thing-we-did-it-affected-users-and-developers/ https://www.revyuh.com/news/software/developers/twitters-fou...

gjvc 5y ago
It feels like the slow, laborious and fundamentally equitable nature of standards ratification in the open has been seen to be at odds with the OKRs of tech businesses. At the risk of sounding like I'm trivialising this comment (with which I completely agree), this difference in behaviours has as its root the difference between a long- vs short-term mindset.
- rocqua 5y ago
  I think the issue might be the huge amount of VC cash invested, and the need for such a player to have explosive growth to a huge valuation. Open standards of federated systems could lead to slow sustainable growth with a spot for the original designers and pushers of the protocol. But open standards won't let you fully dominate the market, they don't allow you to leverage all the VC cash, and so they don't pay back on massive investment. Because quite a lot of the benefits are shared. Moreover, slow growth can't compete with VC cash investment. The VC backed competition will have a better UX, more features, aggressive marketing, and in general be more developed. All because they can develop their product a lot faster because they have more money behind them.

feldrim 5y ago

Well, in Estonia, they have a different approach. 1. If you are a citizen or a resident, you get an ID card to use for every public service. It's just a smart card with a government PKI. 2. The public services provide an email account that can only be used within the e-government services. The card is used for accessing those services. 3. The email service accepts either identity number or registry number of the recipient. So the recipient can be a legal entity. 4. You can and almost always do provide a forwarding address, so that you don't need to check. 5. You can't use it for other purposes. No RFC defined email address is shared with you. And it's just an internal system for official issues. I've heard some countries issue mailboxes for citizens but I am not aware of the general use of these. Also, email services were designed to be decentralized but evolved into centralized systems, a current and unsolved problem. I am not sure about the privacy and security of government provided email services.

cycomanic 5y ago
I always discover how Estonia is really amazing for lots of technology things. AFAIK they are by quite a margin the most advanced country in Europe when in comes to egovernment services. Moreover my (admittedly outside) impression is that they often go for technologically sound solutions not the ones which some large lobby organisation pushed for. This is particularly remarkable considering how small the country is, and in stark contrast to the mess that is egovernment services in Germany the richest country in Europe.
- simongray 5y ago
  If we are to believe the EU, they are #1 in digital public services and have a respectable place in overall digitalisation of society: https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_21_5481 https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_21_...
- fredley 5y ago
  Probably because they're so small they're overlooked by the salespeople and lobbyists from the big corps. I imagine that helps a lot. In the UK there are plenty of smart people in Government who can and would build things in a sensible way (and sometimes they do!), but there are also legions of smooth talking salespeople who usually bend the ministers' ears more easily.

_8j50 5y ago

Please HN, let email die. it is unsecurable (universal) in transit or storage (mta's) and because of its reliability and universal adoption a ton of security depends on it like a very rotten and rusted link in a chain even a small child can break. It is an almost 4 decade old tech where any security you find for it is purely opportunistic. I am very concerned how people here are stating how good, simple and reliable it is. They are not wrong but so is IPv4 and the C language. Sentiment has no place in a building a secure and proper future technology.

cycomanic 5y ago
Yes email is old and has lots of issues, it is still by a large margin the best we have. Name one protocol/program/service that comes anywhere close in its usefulness.
- _8j50 5y ago
  Sort of my point. It is shit but it is neccesary, any replacement is predicated on popular acceptance of the problem.
dqv 5y ago
I don’t get it. I was waiting for you to say “in favor of…” but you never got to that part. Let email die in favor of what? What is the viable alternative? Not a single messaging app I’ve used comes close to email. And I can’t use one messaging app, I have to have 6! I would be way more willing to move on from email if a solid viable alternative came along. XMPP, for example, is still too ephemeral and barely anyone uses it.
- aero-glide2 5y ago
  I was suprised to learn WhatsApp uses XMPP. Would be nice if all popular chat applications are interoperable.
  - BlueTemplar 5y ago
    "Is based on" rather than "uses" - AFAIK they deliberately broke compatibility ? (Ditto with Facebook Messenger and at least one of the Google chats ?)

Arathorn 5y ago

> As j. b. crawford notes, the prospect for another federated, Internet wide communication system seem very remote at this point in time, so email is it. I really don’t think this is true, and is defeatist at best. SIP and XMPP both had a good shot at creating a federated Internet-wide communication system, and we are doing our best to build one with Matrix or die trying.

zaik 5y ago
What's wrong with XMPP except Google decided to shut their instance down?
- MattJ100 5y ago
  Nothing. XMPP has an active community, mature servers for every kind of deployment, and many clients under active development for a range of platforms. My personal focus within the community these days is with improving the ecosystem UX through initiatives like https://docs.modernxmpp.org/ https://docs.modernxmpp.org/ You can follow XMPP development via the community newsletter (email or RSS): https://xmpp.org/newsletter/ https://xmpp.org/newsletter/
upofadown 5y ago
A short message instant messaging system can not replace a long message offline capable system like email. They are fundamentally different things. The achievable security is significantly higher for an offline capable medium for example: * https://articles.59.ca/doku.php?id=em:emailvsim https://articles.59.ca/doku.php?id=em:emailvsim It is clear to me at least that we are stuck with at least 2 problems here. I have wondered if you could at least generalize the two modes in a way that would allow you to have one client and let the user decide.
- rakoo 5y ago
  Both Matrix and XMPP can be used as instant messengers and asynchronous long-form messengers. They both have asynchronous encryption, and have had it for years now.

cube00 5y ago

Microsoft is chipping away at this by getting governments on to Outlook 365 on the basis that if all departments use it it'll be secure between them and can gain Top Secret certification.

arpa 5y ago

Protocols over something, i forget.

ThePhysicist 5y ago

E-Mail is one of the last remaining federated systems on the Internet, but I doubt it will survive long as the large players slowly sabotage it. I think already more than 90 % of all e-mails are delivered by three or four large companies, which is a trend that will continue.

bullen 5y ago
They have been trying to sabotage it for two decades, they can't because it is distributed. Just like HTTP/1.1 can't be deprecated because too much infrastructure depends on it. These protocols are simple and as complexity fails we all need to go back to them!
- ThePhysicist 5y ago
  But HTTP is client/server whereas e-mail is server/server (or client/server/server/client). Small independent server operators are at the mercy of the large companies as those can just stop processing their e-mails (which they already often do). That's different for HTTP (though gatekeeping happens there too via discoverability and other mechanisms).
  - bullen 5y ago
    Both HTTP and SMTP are client/server because you cannot read SMTP without a "client"... The crucial part of these protocols are simple text that use DNS for distributing the connecting. HTTP can be used for server to server too... and I recommend it. So to repeat you need to implement HTTP, SMTP and DNS in you server software so that you can self host all 3 on your own hardware. This means asking your fiber ISP to open all ports (25, 53, 80) and give you a static IP! DNS is centralized for now... but eventually it wont be.
    - ThePhysicist 5y ago
      I'm not saying you can't do it, I'm saying it won't help you because nobody will want to "play" with you. Open protocols mean nothing if the playing field is not level and the big guys can just bully around smaller players in whichever way they wont. That's not a problem that can be solved by technology (IMHO).

bullen 5y ago

I'm going to build my instant messaging on top of SMTP adding a list of allowed "from" addresses. SMTP will prevail and at some point all the messaging will be done over it just like HTTP/1.1...

hprotagonist 5y ago

If nothing else, the freenode/libera hard fork showed that IRC is not only a federated protocol, it’s one that is relatively easy to pick up and move!

mark_l_watson 5y ago

Good points made in the article. Siloed services like Slack, etc. do have an advantage that you don’t get SPAM. I prefer E-mail and SMS person to person communication but there is the SPAM… Most people in my family and closest friends prefer SMS, even texting large image and video files (not really what the protocol was designed for, right?). Anyway, I tend to use what my people use.

nunez 5y ago

Let’s hope that email remains a “simple” protocol (envelopes are plaintext with some encoding, transmission is simple enough to do over Telnet) instead of something more complicated whose standards are drafted and maintained by the FAANG cabal.

dspillett 5y ago

> Email is our only reliable communication method between different organizations. For certain definitions of “reliable”! (though reliably available at least which can't be said for anything else, no matter how reliable in other senses)

nunez 5y ago

I don’t think email is as decentralized and federated as it used to be. In theory, email is a service that is simple enough for anyone to run themselves. Most Linux distros come with sendmail, so theoretically it should be as easy as reading the manual and exposing some ports. Spam is performed server side both at the origin and at the destination to mitigate bad actors, and because email is simple, there should be no shortage of clients to choose from. In reality, 1/4 of all email users globally are on Gmail. Apple Mail is the most popular mail client followed by Outlook, then Gmail. SMTP and IMAP are theoretically simple, but the bellwether providers use APIs on top of these protocols that have added some functionality at the expense of restricting the proliferation of email clients. Many large companies that used to run their own email (through Exchange, Zimbra, etc) are moving to hosted Office 365 or Google Workspace. One major AWS-scale outage in Gmail or Azure will incite (and has caused) serious panic and disruption (which is great for SREs like me since we’ll continue to get paid serious money to keep all this stuff running while maintaining a healthy work-life balance, but I digress). Furthermore, one doesn’t simply “stand up” their own email server unless they don’t care about landing in people’s spam folders. Additionally, many companies outside of the US _do_ use WhatsApp (Facebook) for official communication. I’d posit that this trend is only accelerating. I agree that email is fundamental technology, but I can see a future where it disappears in favor of something like federated Slack (or, worse, instant messaging centralized and controlled by the FAANG cabal with insurmountable cost-of-entry). Given the suppression of “free speech” on Twitter et al during peak COVID/peak insurrection (for valid reasons), this is slightly worrying.

zaphar 5y ago
Email's federation is an escape hatch. It's presence means that I can go to any provider I want to if I'm dissatisfied with my current provider. I can even run my own as a last resort. (Or first resort if that's your preferred mode of operation). Until that escape hatch disappears, which is unlikely, I will always have choice of providers. I don't have whatsapp, or discord for that matter. I have slack for work but I don't use it externally. I will probably never have those systems for my personal communication which means that if a company wants to communicate to me they are going to have to use email, full stop. I think there is a large barrier to email ever going away. Removing it from the market would require coordination that most companies and providers will probably never want to engage in. It's a lowest common denominator that all of them will want to support to avoid their users getting silo'd into a system that is not theirs.

encryptluks2 5y ago

I'd suggest everyone setup a custom domain with SimpleLogin and start using aliases for every site. Also, use isync and goimapnotify to backup your email automatically. Then if Google or some other company shuts you out of your hosted email you can easily get back up on a new provider and not need to change your email address which almost every site you register on now requires.

mdavis6890 5y ago

I always have this feeling that email is flawed and due for a complete overhaul or replacement - and then I think about it a little harder and I realize that it's actually really good at it's intended purpose. Other than fiddling around the edges with security improvements, spam filtering, and a few other nice-to-haves, there's not really much that need improvement. Some features of email that are nice: - It's completely open standard - I can host it myself if I want, or not. - It is completely decentralized and roughly point-to-point, subject to email routers. - Other than getting an email address, no other 'linkage' or prepwork with that person is required. - My address is not tied to any other service, like a phone number. (in contrast to e.g. WhatsApp) - It supports unsolicited communication from unsolicited sources (e.g. marketing) - It's easy to ignore communication I don't care about. (e.g. marketing) - Non-people are supported, like group emails/aliases (support@...) - I can trivially attach files, subject to some practical constraints - Email can be handled by the recipient in a wide variety of ways using different client mechanisms. - I can front-end my email in a variety of ways, such as with a contact form. Those are just the few I can think of off the top of my head. I'm sure there are others.

fghgg 5y ago
I think Matrix has got allt hat as well. And it has the security improvements and others as well (see features of e.g. Discord or WhatsApp). Anyways, I don't think I still use email for its intended purpose anyways. It mainly became something to tie accounts to and to 2fa
mdavis6890 5y ago
More: - It is designed well for medium-length content, say a few paragraphs or so per message. - It works well, and is mostly understood to be used for asynchronous communication. - Easily and usefully searchable. - Captures state/context well. - Threaded
riffic 5y ago
email, as ancient and flawed as it is, is a shining example of the Lindy effect in play - the future life expectancy of a technology or an idea is proportional to its current age. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect Any replacement will have to keep the above in mind because there's no test like the test of time.

anderspitman 5y ago

The ability to send messages is perhaps the less interesting role of email. I think maybe the real value comes from providing globally unique, federated identities. It's not perfect, but it's pretty dang good. If for no other reason, this is why no closed system will never supplant email. Even the biggest walled gardens like GOOG and FB bow to the power of email identities in the end, as the preferred (maybe even only) way to recover an account.

mikotodomo 5y ago

I think I have used email once I can't even remember what it was for. But I think the story is more true for SMS. If SMS was taken down, nobody could use their money or social media.

Jenda_ 5y ago

Another insane feature of WhatsApp (besides using phone number for an internet service) is that it only runs on Android and iOS (the web client is only some kind of "remote access" to the app, which requires the app to constantly run). I actually run Android-x86 VM on a server because of WhatsApp, which I need for work. And it has some problems, for example to allow the browser to access the app, you need to scan a QR code - but I did not find a webcam emulator (think: v4l2-loopback on normal Linux) for Android or a way to emulate a webcam in VirtualBox or Qemu, so I need to copy the VM image to a computer with physical webcam, scan the code by pointing the webcam to the screen, and then copy it back to the server. WTF. Or am I missing something? How do people without smartphones use WhatsApp (for communicating on a computer)?