4 ms·

It's not just self-hosted email that's dead, it's email itself. The federated system where clients and servers exchange messages according to well-defined stand

by p-e-w 4y ago

It's not just self-hosted email that's dead, it's email itself. The federated system where clients and servers exchange messages according to well-defined standards doesn't exist anymore. Most clients now special-case Gmail because they have all but deprecated POP and IMAP. Push notifications, essential for seeing mail "in time", are a proprietary, inconsistent mess. Receiving servers use all kinds of voodoo to determine whether a message is acceptable to them, much of which is powered by proprietary software and semi-secret block/allowlists. Attachments are barely usable because Outlook uses a format that many other clients don't understand. Large providers have hardcoded logic for marking messages from "trusted" senders like banks and online shops, so some senders are more equal than others. Meanwhile zero meaningful progress in decades to address the protocols' basic shortcomings like lack of encryption, replies that don't involve sending hundreds of pages back and forth, ...

closeparen 4y ago
Practically every small business premise in every minor suburb of America contains (or used to) self-hosted email in a closet somewhere: Microsoft Exchange. As far as I can tell, IMAP has always been a sideshow, the real story has always been Microsoft.
- nrbsef 4y ago
  for the last decade those exchange installs have been disappearing in favor of office365
  - shapefrog 4y ago
    We once had a mainframe and storage servers in the cupboard, now its cloud based. Email has transitioned in the same manner, from local exchange servers to the cloud offering.
yessirwhatever 4y ago
Never ceases to amaze me how ignorant people continue to make such deranged and wide generations with little or no evidence. Let me guess, email is dead? RSS is also dead right? Literally no one ever uses them anymore. You probably think that all businesses should just all switch to TikTok and communicate with memes and dance routines.
- bscphil 4y ago
  I don't think this response is fair. RSS is dead as a widely used medium for distributing hypertext and media. A tiny number of people continue to use and promote it (myself very much included). Even for podcasts, where RSS represents the most obvious as well as original mode of distribution, a tiny number of people, probably < 5%, use RSS rather than a centralized platform. The OP was not giving a take on whether that's a good thing or bad thing, let alone saying that everyone should "switch to TikTok" or "communicate with memes", but rather simply commenting on the above hard to dispute fact.
  - yessirwhatever 4y ago
    Don't fall into the same trap as the other dude. Those statements are patently WRONG. "Tiny number of people" is millions and millions. "<5%" is the definition of a bullshit statistic that is: a) a guess, b) very wrong with just a google search, and c) means nothing as it can't be proven.
    - bscphil 4y ago
      > b) very wrong with just a google search, and c) means nothing as it can't be proven You contradicted yourself.
      - yessirwhatever 4y ago
        maybe, someone else saying it is not proof though, and either way you're still wrong.
        bscphil 4y ago
        > someone else saying it is not proof though, > and either way you're still wrong. Ironic. I guess you want me to take your word for it. Unfortunately for you, your mockery doesn't hold up to any kind of scrutiny. Libsyn, a podcast distributor which I associate with more nerdy podcasts and competent users compared to e.g. iHeart, released user-agent stats across their entire field quite recently, back in 2021: https://thefeed.libsyn.com/193-alexa-play-the-podcast https://thefeed.libsyn.com/193-alexa-play-the-podcast Mobile apps not named Spotify, Stitcher, or Apple claimed a total download count of 12.6%. That 12.6% is largely composed of: * 2.3% Google Podcasts * 1.8% Overcast * 1.3% Podcast Addict * 1.2% Castbox * 1.0% PocketCast To the best of my knowledge, all of the above are centralized and normally fetch the RSS feed on a server instead of the app functioning as the user agent. And so we can infer that at maximum, mobile downloads originating directly from RSS-fetching user agents represent 5% of the market for Libsyn. Desktop as a whole represented <15% of all downloads, and a huge chunk of that is going to be (once again) Apple Podcasts. Furthermore, there are a ton of extremely popular "podcasts" (though they barely deserve the name) that are entirely centralized, being available only on one platform. This is a large portion of the market which the above figures don't reflect at all. And so, on the basis of the evidence that is actually available, I pronounce RSS dead.
denton-scratch 4y ago
> Push notifications, essential for seeing mail "in time", are a proprietary, inconsistent mess. There isn't any such thing as "in time" for email, and there's no provision for "push notifications". I imagine parent is describing a web UI; webmail interfaces generally poll an IMAP server. Just like my desktop mail client. > replies that don't involve sending hundreds of pages back and forth That's not a problem with email; that's a user-education problem. Trim and contextualize.

by p-e-w 4y ago

closeparen 4y ago

Practically every small business premise in every minor suburb of America contains (or used to) self-hosted email in a closet somewhere: Microsoft Exchange. As far as I can tell, IMAP has always been a sideshow, the real story has always been Microsoft.

nrbsef 4y ago
for the last decade those exchange installs have been disappearing in favor of office365
- shapefrog 4y ago
  We once had a mainframe and storage servers in the cupboard, now its cloud based. Email has transitioned in the same manner, from local exchange servers to the cloud offering.

yessirwhatever 4y ago

Never ceases to amaze me how ignorant people continue to make such deranged and wide generations with little or no evidence. Let me guess, email is dead? RSS is also dead right? Literally no one ever uses them anymore. You probably think that all businesses should just all switch to TikTok and communicate with memes and dance routines.

bscphil 4y ago
I don't think this response is fair. RSS is dead as a widely used medium for distributing hypertext and media. A tiny number of people continue to use and promote it (myself very much included). Even for podcasts, where RSS represents the most obvious as well as original mode of distribution, a tiny number of people, probably < 5%, use RSS rather than a centralized platform. The OP was not giving a take on whether that's a good thing or bad thing, let alone saying that everyone should "switch to TikTok" or "communicate with memes", but rather simply commenting on the above hard to dispute fact.
- yessirwhatever 4y ago
  Don't fall into the same trap as the other dude. Those statements are patently WRONG. "Tiny number of people" is millions and millions. "<5%" is the definition of a bullshit statistic that is: a) a guess, b) very wrong with just a google search, and c) means nothing as it can't be proven.
  - bscphil 4y ago
    > b) very wrong with just a google search, and c) means nothing as it can't be proven You contradicted yourself.
    - yessirwhatever 4y ago
      maybe, someone else saying it is not proof though, and either way you're still wrong.
      - bscphil 4y ago
        > someone else saying it is not proof though, > and either way you're still wrong. Ironic. I guess you want me to take your word for it. Unfortunately for you, your mockery doesn't hold up to any kind of scrutiny. Libsyn, a podcast distributor which I associate with more nerdy podcasts and competent users compared to e.g. iHeart, released user-agent stats across their entire field quite recently, back in 2021: https://thefeed.libsyn.com/193-alexa-play-the-podcast https://thefeed.libsyn.com/193-alexa-play-the-podcast Mobile apps not named Spotify, Stitcher, or Apple claimed a total download count of 12.6%. That 12.6% is largely composed of: * 2.3% Google Podcasts * 1.8% Overcast * 1.3% Podcast Addict * 1.2% Castbox * 1.0% PocketCast To the best of my knowledge, all of the above are centralized and normally fetch the RSS feed on a server instead of the app functioning as the user agent. And so we can infer that at maximum, mobile downloads originating directly from RSS-fetching user agents represent 5% of the market for Libsyn. Desktop as a whole represented <15% of all downloads, and a huge chunk of that is going to be (once again) Apple Podcasts. Furthermore, there are a ton of extremely popular "podcasts" (though they barely deserve the name) that are entirely centralized, being available only on one platform. This is a large portion of the market which the above figures don't reflect at all. And so, on the basis of the evidence that is actually available, I pronounce RSS dead.

denton-scratch 4y ago

> Push notifications, essential for seeing mail "in time", are a proprietary, inconsistent mess. There isn't any such thing as "in time" for email, and there's no provision for "push notifications". I imagine parent is describing a web UI; webmail interfaces generally poll an IMAP server. Just like my desktop mail client. > replies that don't involve sending hundreds of pages back and forth That's not a problem with email; that's a user-education problem. Trim and contextualize.