On 2022-02-02 at 21:31 -0600, Scott Mutter wrote: > Email - as we know it - should have been dead years ago. But instead > we keep adding band-aid after band-aid after band-aid to the system.
Maybe what you call a band-aid was actually preferable? > 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? https://xkcd.com/927/ > > 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. Maybe a spoofed address doesn't authenticate with SPF or > DKIM... but that only works if EVERYONE else uses SPF and DKIM... > that's the bandaid. Instant messaging and SMS can't as easily be > spoofed, they may be fake but senders have to register on the > platform in some way (be it a Facebook account, Twitter account, > phone number, etc). Would more need to be done to lock this down? > Absolutely. But it's at least A obstacle that potential abusers have > to overcome. Email doesn't have that. We have seen *a lot* of SMS spoofing (Poland, UK, you're not alone!). Say you receive a SMS with a spoofed sender of "MailopBank" containint a phishing link. Your phone will fill this with all the other (legitimate) SMS you received with a sender of "MailopBank". It's not really the phone fault. It has no other information to tell one "MailopBank" from the other (one might perhaps blame being able to use text as SMS senders). It has no sending IP, no SPF, no DMARC… The reason SMS is still in use is because it provides the lowest level technology, for sending a code to a phone user, be that a flip phone or the latest smartphone release. > Email was first invented in 1971 - that's over 50 years ago. We've > learned a lot about how people tend to use email and how people tend > to abuse email within the past 50 years. Instead of adding new > constructs to email. Why not invent a new, more modern email > alternative? 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? At which point does a system become "a more modern alternative"? We could build an email system that used protobufs rather than SMTP, for the sake of making something new, but if it doesn't provide an improvement over SMTP, it's better to use the extensibility mechanism of SMTP. Compatibility is very important. If your new system can be gradually rolled out, and is able to receive messages from the existing systems, that will be preferable. > 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). So you are advocating for a better email which is able to do less things than mail? Plus, a mailing list is just the ability of sending to multiple users. You could easily have a WhatsApp mailing list bot replacing groups. > Not a huge fan of automatic email forwarders/redirects, which tend to > break SPF and DKIM. Maybe things like these don't need to be > allowed? But the users *really* want to have all their messages on the same mailbox, even if they could easily access the other mailbox. Otherwise we wouldn't need email forwarding. > Yet those platforms don't seem to have an issue in getting people to > use them. Why couldn't a properly reimagined email replacement do > the same thing? And email don't have an issue in getting people using it.* The issues lie on a lower level, like not receiving /certain/ messages, or in the management by some clients, which is interface (you will however face some problems in getting a mail client for your new protocol that is as good as every existing one for "traditional" mail). * Many people don't actually know how to *properly* use email, but that's a slightly different issue. They manage to "use" it. _______________________________________________ mailop mailing list mailop@mailop.org https://list.mailop.org/listinfo/mailop
