Why kernel development still uses email

If we're assuming pervasive use of mobile devices, with no fixed static IP addresses, and quite possibly dynamic IPs even for stationary devices, several of the avenues to establishing reputation, identity, and routing get difficult.

If the idea is to offer a very large number, rather than a small number, of messaging hubs (equivalent to, though offering more services than, an email server), then issues of reputation, configuration, and administration come into play. You want something that's simple, bulletproof (not in the spam-friendly sense), robust, and useful.

Many erstwhile email replacements are premised on a single global directory. I don't think this can work, nor is it on the whole desireable, though it's certainly simpler to get started.

For point-to-point messaging, especially if we're including realtime protocols (chat and voice/video, not just text/files), you need a system in which either scheduled contacts can be made, or in which at least certain trusted/whitelisted parties can reach a given device, regardless of location, within seconds, or at the outside, a few minutes, so long as both parties are online.

Avoiding central peering and routing structures should be part of the system, for privacy and resilience reasons.

Addressing a few of the other issues I mentioned above, including standards for comms and the like, should also be supportable.

We say we do like it, but the truth is that we don't.

1. Clients (and some servers) mangle email. This isn't a complaint about email; it's a complaint about bad software in general. It's also not my problem; I don't use such clients or servers and it's up people who use them to work around these flaws.

2. Privacy. Real privacy is achievable via email with PGP; everything else is no different than literally any other form of communication. Privacy will always be between Alice and Bob. The transport layer is just a transport layer. With email, those who want it know where to get it. Sure, it's not simple, but if it were simple it would not work. With other solutions, it's frequently not even almost an option. I don't get to audit Whatsapp's server logs; who knows what agencies have access.

3. Users. All systems of communication rely on compliance by users. Just about none of your thoughts on this topic are specific to email. There is no 'go fmt' for human expression, and whenever someone tries, human expression is no longer present. Always speak to your audience, even in an email. It's up to you to decide if a given audience is important enough to acculturate to their norms.

4. File formats. You can send anything -- thank god.

5. The directory. This has no place in the layer. It's like complaining that they didn't build the concept of a web sitemap into TCP/IP. Twitter, Facebook, and HN are one-to-many communications platforms, some of which have hacky ex-post-facto one-to-one mechanisms. Email has been n-to-n from day one. Pretending that it is universally desirable to map addresses to individuals and vice versa is incredibly naive. I not only have several email addresses for different roles, but I have several phone numbers and several postal addresses for different roles. On twitter, facebook, and HN, I would have to jump through hoops to achieve this, and on some services it's even against the TOS. This lack of outside force regarding how I handle email messages is its greatest strength -- I can trivially set up a mailing list, which is nigh impossible on, for instance, twitter, and utterly impossible on hacker news.

6. Spam and spoofing. Absolutely a problem. Will remain a problem until solutions get specific buy-in from multiple interested parties -- and that last part makes all the difference. Each time some SV megacorp institutes a real-name policy, or a captcha, or or or... another class of users is sidelined, disenfranchised, or otherwise excluded from the communications process. Email does not have that, because there are standards to adhere to, and some random project manager does not (quite yet) have the power to shove new standards down our throats. Thank God.

7. Reputation. This is now and will continue to be the universal problem across all of the internet. Solving this problem by trusting a third party service provider to do all of your vetting for you will fail, because all they do is push that problem downhill to the users. Joe Random wants to be friends on Facebook. Now I have to do casework to decide if I want Joe to access my inbox, and if Joe is even Joe. Susan User would like to add me to her professional network on LinkedIn. Same problem. The only difference is that when I run an email server I maintain agency to manage the entire scope of these decisions, instead of trusting that Facebook or LinkedIn is reasonably sure that Joe might actually be Joe, or that Susan is not in fact a ten-year-old Martian girl mining my profile for password recovery answers.

Is email perfect? No, of course not. But it and IRC are the closest things we have to level playing fields for someone willing to do the work to take their place as a first-class citizen of the internet. They will only ever be replaced by standards; no proprietary product will ever unseat them.

Mail clients written in the eighties can still work today. Mail stores created then are still readable by today's clients. The protocols and processes involved have definitely changed, but they've _evolved_, rather than getting thrown in the trash and replaced with version 2.0, then 3.0, etc, ad infinitum, ad nauseam.

Given the choice between an evolving collaboration and reliance upon the goodwill of some stranger I can't even name, my choice will always be the former.

git-am and git-send-email are used by some people. Submitting patches using those tools is just a matter of setting up the necessary parameters (email server and authentication information). But you can use any email client to participate in discussions about a patch series regardless of whether or not it mangles text (since review comments or further discussion obviously do not need to be applied to one's local copy of the code).