Re-Thinking Electronic Mail
Author makes the implicit assumption that the problem he experiences are the experience of everyone. They aren&#x27;t.<p>Specifically:<p><i>Spam</i>: I used to get a lot more spam, today I get some, but with client side-filtering, it&#x27;s something like a message every one or two days. And my address is very visible online, and I get dozens of legit messages per day; a good number even excluding mailing lists.<p><i>centralisation</i>: This _is_ a problem for me - my provider is being swallowed by MS Outlook365. But that&#x27;s not driven by spam detection IMHO. (PS - spam did not go down significantly when this happened.) Actually, whatever standard you use - it&#x27;s extremely likely that if it&#x27;s free and anybody can ran an &quot;email-plus&quot; server, then Google and Yandex and GMX etc. will run those, and web services to access them, giving you centralization again.<p><i>Scam</i>: I feel I have this under control personally, but I recognize that some people might fall prey to that.<p><i>Standards for digitally signed email ... not great</i>: I dunno, seems to work fine for me. I mean, sure, mail clients could use better integration of encryption and signing, but other than that no serious complaints about email as such.<p><i>a future where hosting email yourself makes you suspicious.</i> Now _that_ is a problem. In fact, it&#x27;s a problem _right now_.<p><i>difficult to hide who is sending email to whom.</i> So, me and the author may believe this is a general problem, but many&#x2F;most people don&#x27;t care about this. Unfortunately.<p><i>HTML email is not well standardised, and is a security and privacy risk.</i> It&#x27;s a menace! For me, this is a serious problem. People write crap HTML and send it to me.<p><i>HTML emails can embed ... from the Internet</i>: Easily disabled entirely with reasonable mail clients. The problem is in the client, not the protocol. After all, with any messaging protocol, you could send markdown or HTML as though it was plain text, and a client could choose to interpret it as it sees fit.<p><i>Attachments fill disks:</i> I&#x27;m annoyed by this to no end, many people are perfectly fine with it since for them it&#x27;s just webmail, so not their disk. Also, it&#x27;s unlikely you can have your protocol prevent transferring files. At worst it would go back to the days of binaries-over-IRC.<p><i>The technologies and standards for email are getting ridiculously complicated.</i> This is at most a problem for programmers. Also, it&#x27;s a problem from the 1980s and early 1990s... MIME is quite complicated, and in fact, I challenge anyone here to point to any mail client properly support complex MIME structures, with hierarchies including multipart, alternative and so on. But most users are none the wiser.<p><i>The email tech stack is getting so hard to understand that it’s difficult to even use:</i> If you&#x27;re a power-user&#x2F;administrator - maybe. If your&#x27; an end-user of webmail or a mail client - not really IMHO.<p>never mind implement correctly. Never mind that the complexity results in more effort to operate and keep the servers secure.