2 ms·

Email is decentralized. The client provides the spam protection and moderation.

• mattstir 3y ago
  Email is a fantastic example of something that's technically capable of being decentralized but in practice has something like 70%+ of all traffic handled by three major companies (Google, Microsoft, and Apple). No one can stop you from making your own email client and using it, but your emails will most certainly get black holed and discarded as spam by most major services much more frequently.
  • greentea23 3y ago
    Well it's still decentralized and scales in that there is significant competition participating in an open protocol. Even though most use the big 3, many smaller players have enough legitimacy to be whitelisted by gmail, e.g. fastmail and protonmail. But for fully custom, sure gmail is annoyingly aggressive these days, but it's not a black hole, the emails still send and more importantly receive. Does anyone other than spammers send cold email? I usually am receiving or replying. When I do send cold, it's to someone who is expecting it so they will check their spam or already have me in their contact list so it doesn't go to spam. It's not for everyone or for all situations, but fwiw I've found it very useful to exercise the fully distributed nature of email for personal and professional reasons, so I would still defend it as a fair example of a distributed protocol that scales :).