On 2/2/2022 7:31 PM, Scott Mutter via mailop wrote:
Why is it impossible to take a look at what Instant Messaging protocols,
SMTP, SMS do that make them successful and then blend those together
into a new "email-like" system?
Because replacing widespread systems is vastly harder than one would intuit.
Staying with email as the focus, there was early desire to expand from
simple text to support multimedia. And there were multiple efforts,
from the latter 1970s onward.
What succeeded was not replacing existing email but rather adding to it,
with an optional layer -- MIME.
I'm not going to pretend to know what the ultimate solution might be.
One of the major issues with email is the address spoofing that goes
on.
It is popular to think that this can be solved, but the reality has so
far demonstrated that what cannot be solved in the real (wet) world
cannot be solved on the Internet. And spoofing, or the like, is part of
that wet world, as well as the digital one.
The schemes people propose to 'fix' spoofing wind up working less well
than hoped, such as by not scaling adequately, or by having collateral
downsides.
Would more
need to be done to lock this down? Absolutely. But it's at least A
Locking down tightly has downsides, as well as benefits.
Email was first invented in 1971 - that's over 50 years ago. We've
This being a list for technicians, forgive me for noting that Ray
Tomlinson did NOT invent email in 1971.
Email dates back at least to the mid-1960s. Tom van Vleck is the most
likely candidate for bragging rights.
What Ray did was to creat /networked/ email. And, of course, choose the
at-sign as the mailbox@host syntax.
Why not invent a new, more modern email alternative?
One of the wonders of the Internet is that you are free to go do that.
Create it. Deploy it. Develop support for it. If you can.
Something that takes a lot of what we've learned from email usage over
the years, what we've seen in instant messaging, SMS, and other computer
communication protocols and builds on that from the ground up? Wouldn't
that be better than constantly adding band-aids to email/SMTP to fix
problems that pop up?
Possibly, but also apparently not. It is spectacularly difficult, risky
and expensive to create a new, distributed infrastructure. By contrast,
it is only modestly difficult to add to an existing infrastructure (if
one is very careful.)
MIME managed to turn text email into multimedia without modifying the
global email infrastructure at all. Only the author and the recipients
had to adopt it. This is astonishingly cheaper than if they/we had had
to create an entire, global infrastructure for multimedia mail.
There will come a point at which there is a strong desire to add a
feature that we can't figure out how to add to the existing email
service. But over those 50 years, we haven't hit that limit yet, in
spite of so many changes needed.
And don't be afraid to say no when it comes to adding every little
feature into this protocol. I'm not a huge fan of mailing lists or
distributed mailings (forums accomplish the same thing with less of the
hassle of email deliverability concerns).
Centralized platforms are much easier to develop and run than
distributed ones, of course. But they also are a pain, moving
operational hassles to users, when one has to flit from one to the next,
checking for new postings. So, again: tradeoffs.
d/
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