5 ms·

Email is fundamentally flawed, or better put it is not up to challenges of time. While I am reading this ars articles with great interest and was toying with th

Email is fundamentally flawed, or better put it is not up to challenges of time. While I am reading this ars articles with great interest and was toying with the idea of rolling my own email server, series size and complexity serve as a best argument of email flawed state. We are fixing and patching and protecting something that fundamentally can't be that well fixed, patched and protected. We need to reinvent everything.

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
lukifer 12y ago
Nothing is perfect, least of all email. But it did one thing right, and it's a big one: any email user can send to any other email user, regardless of provider or platform. We still lack that capability when it comes to IM, social networks, and most software in general.
- rakoo 12y ago
  > We still lack that capability when it comes to IM No, we do have this capability: use XMPP. In fact, XMPP is functionally enough to completely replace email, and does also serve as IM.
  - MetaCosm 12y ago
    Theory versus reality. The theory of federated XMPP is exactly as you said. The reality is much more of a mess, with multi-device issues -- routing issues -- federation issues, not to mention a ton of non-XMPP messaging services.
    - frabcus 12y ago
      And most importantly, no identity system which end users know about. (i.e. people know about email addresses, but Facebook users use XMPP without knowing how to refer to people on other services)
    - A_COMPUTER 12y ago
      All these problems were applicable to email in the past as well. It took a lot of iteration to get everything working as smoothly as it appears to work now, provided we ignore the massive issue of spam and almost total inability to make it secure.
mnutt 12y ago
Email server administration has its challenges, and the tools could definitely get better. But email is one of the few decentralized forms of communication, and all of that fixing, patching, and protecting is the product of a decade of hardening the system so that it can survive. If we're lucky enough to have a decentralized social network get the kind of adoption that email has, it will have to tackle the same problems.
- coherentpony 12y ago
  Is Diaspora still being developed? I know one of their main developers passed away recently but it's not clear to me that it has had the same kind of adoption that Facebook has had.
  - bitJericho 12y ago
    If you want to setup something more complicated than email, setup Diaspora.
zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 12y ago
Could you be more specific? I suspect that what you consider problems of email there aren't actually problems of email at all, but it's difficult to say.
- binaryapparatus 12y ago
  The way I see it, SMTP protocol and email formats are root of the problem. Yes, they are great in connecting all kinds of devices and making communication easy. But they belong to times when one could write a postcard (text on the outside) and expect it to arrive to destination without being read loudly in every local pub from here to there. In times when we need proper enveloped email, calling postcards emails is inadequate. Another issue is number of tools and skills we need to implement email server locally, which I suspect is a result of same specifications, protocols and formats. I am no expert on this (not a real one anyway) but there has to be a point when effort to support a system outweighs convenience?
  - bitJericho 12y ago
    Most any decent email client allows for GPG encryption so your the source and destination provider can't read your emails. Further, most email is sent straight A to B encrypted (if both providers support it), along the unsecured internet, making anybody between A and B unable to review the email.
  - zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 12y ago
    As bitJericho already noted, nothing in the protocol or the format prevents encryption--and as a matter of fact, you can use end-to-end encryption with email now, even though it was not originally explicitly designed for that. That is one of the really great strengths of email: It can be adapted and extended in many ways as technology develops. Other than that, I still don't see what your criticism actually is. All of that is not to say that the email protocol stack is somehow particularly elegant (it most certainly is not), but most often when you hear people say that we need to reinvent email, they don't actually understand what the problems with email are and just seem to think it's bad because it's old--all while being completely oblivious of the lessons that have been learned with email. Despite its lack of elegance, it does actually incorporate a lot of wisdom, as well as its fair share of stupidity. But what tends to be overlooked in particular is that for quite a few of the most obvious problems with the usability of email (namely, authentication of senders and spam), those problems are not problems that the people who invented and extended the protocols and formats failed to consider, but that despite a lot of effort and intelligence applied to them, they failed to come up with a solution for. And the reason for that tends to be that those problems are fundamental social problems that just crop up in email just as they do elsewhere, which can not be solved by simply inventing "modern email". As for how difficult it is to set up your own mail server, I don't really have a clue. I mean, I do it all manually, but that's probably just because I learned how to do it quite a while ago, and now that I know how to do it all manually and I have a working setup anyhow, I don't know what easier ways might be available. But in principle, I don't see why it shouldn't be possible to put together a package of a pre-configured mail setup for standard cases which shouldn't be all that difficult to deploy. I mean, if you look at how many magnitudes more awful the web stack is, and ordinary people still manage to install and use a web browser, completely oblivious to the hilarious complexity of that piece of software.
cromwellian 12y ago
Email is a robust, federated, delay tolerant network. None of the 'solutions' to communications I've seen invented by startups in the last 20 years have captured those properties. Jabber is the closest. Most of the instant messaging clients over the last 20 years have given up enormous value that email brings. Email servers don't have to be complex. I wrote an SMTP and POP server in a single afternoon in the late 90s. The protocols have lot of optional parts, and if you want to get something quick up and running, there are simple implementations possible. The standard Unix servers are quite complex to administer but that's mostly because they were built for Unix system administrators. I mean, BIND configuration files are also complex, but that doesn't mean we should throw out DNS just because it's not trivially simple to implement. The only point to reinvent and reimplement everything is if you can make some revolutionary improvement, otherwise, we should just improve what we have.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

lukifer 12y ago

Nothing is perfect, least of all email. But it did one thing right, and it's a big one: any email user can send to any other email user, regardless of provider or platform. We still lack that capability when it comes to IM, social networks, and most software in general.

rakoo 12y ago
> We still lack that capability when it comes to IM No, we do have this capability: use XMPP. In fact, XMPP is functionally enough to completely replace email, and does also serve as IM.
- MetaCosm 12y ago
  Theory versus reality. The theory of federated XMPP is exactly as you said. The reality is much more of a mess, with multi-device issues -- routing issues -- federation issues, not to mention a ton of non-XMPP messaging services.
  - frabcus 12y ago
    And most importantly, no identity system which end users know about. (i.e. people know about email addresses, but Facebook users use XMPP without knowing how to refer to people on other services)
  - A_COMPUTER 12y ago
    All these problems were applicable to email in the past as well. It took a lot of iteration to get everything working as smoothly as it appears to work now, provided we ignore the massive issue of spam and almost total inability to make it secure.

mnutt 12y ago

Email server administration has its challenges, and the tools could definitely get better. But email is one of the few decentralized forms of communication, and all of that fixing, patching, and protecting is the product of a decade of hardening the system so that it can survive. If we're lucky enough to have a decentralized social network get the kind of adoption that email has, it will have to tackle the same problems.

coherentpony 12y ago
Is Diaspora still being developed? I know one of their main developers passed away recently but it's not clear to me that it has had the same kind of adoption that Facebook has had.
- bitJericho 12y ago
  If you want to setup something more complicated than email, setup Diaspora.

zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 12y ago

Could you be more specific? I suspect that what you consider problems of email there aren't actually problems of email at all, but it's difficult to say.

binaryapparatus 12y ago
The way I see it, SMTP protocol and email formats are root of the problem. Yes, they are great in connecting all kinds of devices and making communication easy. But they belong to times when one could write a postcard (text on the outside) and expect it to arrive to destination without being read loudly in every local pub from here to there. In times when we need proper enveloped email, calling postcards emails is inadequate. Another issue is number of tools and skills we need to implement email server locally, which I suspect is a result of same specifications, protocols and formats. I am no expert on this (not a real one anyway) but there has to be a point when effort to support a system outweighs convenience?
- bitJericho 12y ago
  Most any decent email client allows for GPG encryption so your the source and destination provider can't read your emails. Further, most email is sent straight A to B encrypted (if both providers support it), along the unsecured internet, making anybody between A and B unable to review the email.
- zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 12y ago
  As bitJericho already noted, nothing in the protocol or the format prevents encryption--and as a matter of fact, you can use end-to-end encryption with email now, even though it was not originally explicitly designed for that. That is one of the really great strengths of email: It can be adapted and extended in many ways as technology develops. Other than that, I still don't see what your criticism actually is. All of that is not to say that the email protocol stack is somehow particularly elegant (it most certainly is not), but most often when you hear people say that we need to reinvent email, they don't actually understand what the problems with email are and just seem to think it's bad because it's old--all while being completely oblivious of the lessons that have been learned with email. Despite its lack of elegance, it does actually incorporate a lot of wisdom, as well as its fair share of stupidity. But what tends to be overlooked in particular is that for quite a few of the most obvious problems with the usability of email (namely, authentication of senders and spam), those problems are not problems that the people who invented and extended the protocols and formats failed to consider, but that despite a lot of effort and intelligence applied to them, they failed to come up with a solution for. And the reason for that tends to be that those problems are fundamental social problems that just crop up in email just as they do elsewhere, which can not be solved by simply inventing "modern email". As for how difficult it is to set up your own mail server, I don't really have a clue. I mean, I do it all manually, but that's probably just because I learned how to do it quite a while ago, and now that I know how to do it all manually and I have a working setup anyhow, I don't know what easier ways might be available. But in principle, I don't see why it shouldn't be possible to put together a package of a pre-configured mail setup for standard cases which shouldn't be all that difficult to deploy. I mean, if you look at how many magnitudes more awful the web stack is, and ordinary people still manage to install and use a web browser, completely oblivious to the hilarious complexity of that piece of software.

cromwellian 12y ago

Email is a robust, federated, delay tolerant network. None of the 'solutions' to communications I've seen invented by startups in the last 20 years have captured those properties. Jabber is the closest. Most of the instant messaging clients over the last 20 years have given up enormous value that email brings. Email servers don't have to be complex. I wrote an SMTP and POP server in a single afternoon in the late 90s. The protocols have lot of optional parts, and if you want to get something quick up and running, there are simple implementations possible. The standard Unix servers are quite complex to administer but that's mostly because they were built for Unix system administrators. I mean, BIND configuration files are also complex, but that doesn't mean we should throw out DNS just because it's not trivially simple to implement. The only point to reinvent and reimplement everything is if you can make some revolutionary improvement, otherwise, we should just improve what we have.