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Email could have been X.400 times better

buttondown.com

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Re: Email could have been X.400 times better

#51

Post by dpark »

jgalt212 wrote: post #2

> You could have been notified when the message was read a full 15 years before email had something similar tacked on. Thanks to email security scanners this feature is largely broken. And so are single click to unsubscribe links. So much so that we have to put our unsubscribe page behind a captcha. rant over

Are you saying that email scanners were not only fetching the unsubscribe link but also submitting the “unsubscribe” button/form on the page?

I find this hard to believe since everyone else seems to manage this without a Captcha.

Re: Email could have been X.400 times better

#52

Post by dpark »

jgalt212 wrote: post #48
trollbridge wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it’s largely broken because of spam. I don’t want to be signed up to your useless email marketing list, and I want to use an email client that makes unsubscribing as easy as possible.

> I don’t want to be signed up to your useless email marketing list, useless is in the eye of the beholder.

If I didn’t specifically opt in to receiving marketing emails (and no, failing to opt out is not the same), they are spam. I’ve never heard anyone say “I’m sure glad this company added me to their email list without my request.”

The fact that you happen to work on a mailing list product does not change that reality.

Re: Email could have been X.400 times better

#53

Post by pjc50 »

pabs3 wrote: post #28
pjc50 wrote: post #14

>> SMTP "“didn’t win because it was ‘better,’” he argued, but “just because it was easier to implement." Yes - and this is actually really important! It's true of most of the important early internet technologies. It's the entire reason "internet" standards won over "telco" (in this case ITU) standards - the latter could only be deployed by big coordinated efforts, while internet standards let individual decentralize…

The critical part of that quote "Like a car with no brakes or seatbelts."

It doesn't seem to have worked out like that? You might as well say "like a car without a man walking in front of it with a red flag" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_flag_traffic_laws

Re: Email could have been X.400 times better

#54

Post by aworks »

toast0 wrote: post #46
slackfan wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

However did we live during the era of the White Pages phone directory.

Sure, but then you have the problem of figuring out which Sarah Connor in Los Angeles. To say nothing of popular names.

My name is not particularly common although I was the first to claim firstname.lastname@gmail.com. I've been getting email intended for other people with the same name for decades.

I've seen estimates that there are only 10,000 people with my last name in the US. Back in the days of local telephone directories, I was always the only one with that last name.

Internet scaling is an interesting thing. I don't know if I feel less unique or that I'm in an exclusive club.

Re: Email could have been X.400 times better

#55

Post by jcranmer »

pjc50 wrote: post #14

>> SMTP "“didn’t win because it was ‘better,’” he argued, but “just because it was easier to implement." Yes - and this is actually really important! It's true of most of the important early internet technologies. It's the entire reason "internet" standards won over "telco" (in this case ITU) standards - the latter could only be deployed by big coordinated efforts, while internet standards let individual decentralize…

WebPKI is derived from X.509, but I don't think X.509 lives on anymore. X.500 was stripped down to form LDAP, which is still in very heavy use today. There's still some X.400 systems in existence. I think some of the early cellphone generations may have used the ITU standards in the physical layer?

Of course, the biggest--and weirdest--success of the ITU standards is that the OSI model is still frequently the way networking stacks are described in educational materials, despite the fact that it bears no relation to how any of the networking stack was developed or is used. If you really dig into how the OSI model is supposed to work, one of the layers described only matters for teletypes--which were are a dying, if not dead, technology when the model was developed in the first place.

Re: Email could have been X.400 times better

#56

Post by msla »

pjc50 wrote: post #14

>> SMTP "“didn’t win because it was ‘better,’” he argued, but “just because it was easier to implement." Yes - and this is actually really important! It's true of most of the important early internet technologies. It's the entire reason "internet" standards won over "telco" (in this case ITU) standards - the latter could only be deployed by big coordinated efforts, while internet standards let individual decentralize…

Yes, the TCP/IP protocol stack beat the OSI protocol stack comprehensively, even down to four layers beating out seven unless you're so wedded to the Magic Number of Seven that you see Session as distinct from Application in the modern world, like how Newton was so wedded to seeing Seven Shades of Light in a spectrum he was sure to note indigo as distinct from violet in the rainbow.

(Presentation and Session are currently taught in terms of CSS and cookies in HTML and HTTP, respectively. When the web stack became Officially Part of the Officiously Official Network Stack is quite beyond me, and rather implies that you must confound the Web and the Internet in order to get the Correct Layering.)

https://computer.rip/2021-03-27-the-actual-osi-model.html - The Actual OSI Model

> I have said before that I believe that teaching modern students the OSI model as an approach to networking is a fundamental mistake that makes the concepts less clear rather than more. The major reason for this is simple: the OSI model was prescriptive of a specific network stack designed alongside it, and that network stack is not the one we use today. In fact, the TCP/IP stack we use today was intentionally designed differently from the OSI model for practical reasons.

> The OSI model is not some "ideal" model of networking, it is not a "gold standard" or even a "useful reference." It's the architecture of a specific network stack that failed to gain significant real-world adoption.

Re: Email could have been X.400 times better

#57

Post by cwillu »

“If the history of email had gone somewhat differently, the last email you sent could have been rescinded or superseded by a newer version when you accidentally wrote the wrong thing. It could have been scheduled to arrive an hour from now. It could have auto-destructed if not read by midnight.”

That would have required a lot of changes to computing history beyond simply email, and I doubt many of them would have been improvements.

Re: Email could have been X.400 times better

#58

Post by jgalt212 »

dpark wrote: post #52
jgalt212 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don’t want to be signed up to your useless email marketing list, useless is in the eye of the beholder.

If I didn’t specifically opt in to receiving marketing emails (and no, failing to opt out is not the same), they are spam. I’ve never heard anyone say “I’m sure glad this company added me to their email list without my request.” The fact that you happen to work on a mailing list product does not change that reality.

I hear what you're saying, but irrespective of how one landed on such a list, the unsubscribe mechanism is broken. e.g. It's entirely possible and likely you've subscribed to one or more marketing lists, newsletters, transaction emails, etc that you want to be on, but your security software inadvertently unsubscribed you (without your permission).

Re: Email could have been X.400 times better

#59

Post by yencabulator »

dpark wrote: post #51
jgalt212 wrote: post #2

> You could have been notified when the message was read a full 15 years before email had something similar tacked on. Thanks to email security scanners this feature is largely broken. And so are single click to unsubscribe links. So much so that we have to put our unsubscribe page behind a captcha. rant over

Are you saying that email scanners were not only fetching the unsubscribe link but also submitting the “unsubscribe” button/form on the page? I find this hard to believe since everyone else seems to manage this without a Captcha.

I does sound like they made a HTTP GET request have side effects.

Re: Email could have been X.400 times better

#60

Post by MisterTea »

p_l wrote: post #30
MisterTea wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's the entire reason "internet" standards won over "telco" (in this case ITU) standards - the latter could only be deployed by big coordinated efforts, Anyone remember the promise of ATM networking in the 90's? It was telecom grade networking which used circuit switched networking that would handle voice, video and data down one pipe. Instead of carelessly flinging packets into the ether like an savage, you had a…

Pretty sure TSN is unrelated to ATM determinism, and comes from a completely separate area (replacing custom field buses where timing and contention is more important than bandwidth). Some of ATM complexity came from wanting to deliver the same quality of experience as plesiosynchronous networks provided for voice (that's how it got the weird cell size). Once those requirements dropped down (partially because people…

Not directly related but a consequence.
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