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Modern email can be built from borrowed parts

en.andros.dev

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Re: Modern email can be built from borrowed parts

#91

Post by rbanffy »

The fact nobody reinvented e-mail on top of a different set of standards is a good indication that the current stack is not as broken as some people would like to think.

It reminds me of a previous life, at a previous time, when everybody reinvented the content management system based on slightly different approaches, because they thought existing CMSs were too big. It starts with serving pages, then you want multiple templates, then you want accessibility, then you want to authenticate with LDAP, then you want to use the LDAP groups as your groups, and then you need to tie groups to roles, because groups mean one thing to the org, and roles mean another just to the CMS, then you realize a relational database isn't that good a match, then you realize it would be convenient to attach some logic, and a document database is no longer a great idea, then you need multiple datastores for content, then you need new workflows on top, then...

The devil is in the corner cases. They have been solved in different ways, by different parties, for decades, not always documented ("because it was just a simple thing, that once, and we fixed it"). Unless you've been there, you are doomed to make the same mistakes, and nobody was everywhere to avoid all mistakes.

Why not dedicate an effort to migrate all the COBOL code currently running almost every banking transaction? That should be easy ;-)

Re: Modern email can be built from borrowed parts

#92

Post by BeetleB »

miki123211 wrote: post #87
BeetleB wrote: post #73

I don't want to replicate email. I want to fix it. Sending email should not be free. It should be really, really cheap to send an email to one person (like a fraction of a fraction of a cent), but get exponentially more expensive the more you send. People shouldn't be able to send emails to you without your prior approval (which you can revoke at an instant). The recipient should be able to charge a tack-on fee for h…

This is impractical because micropayments are impractical. I have a better idea; split the problem into two. First, require all messages to include an `Automated: 0|1` header; eventually downranking / banning providers that don't include it, like we now do with DKIM, SPF, DMARC and such. For messages with `Automated: 1`, require informed consent, mediated and verified through the recipient's provider. It's impractica…

> This is impractical because micropayments are impractical.

Well, one can dream :-)

Micropayments may be impractical, but email as it is currently used is also impractical for personal use cases. Outside of the tech world, how many people do you know how primarily communicate via email?

Most have switched to texting, or to closed systems (WhatsApp, etc). Some of these closed systems make it easy for you to block others, and also can tightly control spam.

> First, require all messages to include an `Automated: 0|1` header; eventually downranking / banning providers that don't include it

How do you handle bad actors who set it to 0?

> It's impractical to require pre-approvals on every message, because many people genuinely want human-to-human contact from semi-strangers.

You pre-approve the person, not the message. Once approved, no further approvals are needed.

And human-to-human contact, for me, means more or less 1:1 (or at most 5:1). If a semistranger wants to talk to me, by all means, I'll approve him. What's the concern?

> On the other hand, requiring consent without verification is ineffective, because it is too easy to pretend consent.

Right now I do it by whitelisting the email address. Obviously, it's fragile. In practice, it's never a problem. The only failures are when I get spam with a From address that is mine. No company ever impersonates a friend's email address to get to me.

(Not saying your solution is unworkable, but would need more details).

Re: Modern email can be built from borrowed parts

#93

Post by BeetleB »

beaugunderson wrote: post #85
BeetleB wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if 10% of the emails are some new marketing thing it's easy to see and unsubscribe I built my system because I tired of finding ways to unsubscribe. Now I can subscribe without abandon and never worry about any of those emails coming into my inbox.

i like it in theory but there’s something in me that doesn’t want emails just discarded like that… i want to be off the list. a personal failing, i’m sure. :)

The thing you have to ask yourself is: Which do I prefer?

1. Someone puts me on a list and I have to do the work to get off.

2. They work to get me on their list, and I do virtually no work to get off the list.

I went with 2.

Re: Modern email can be built from borrowed parts

#94

Post by HumblyTossed »

rbanffy wrote: post #91

The fact nobody reinvented e-mail on top of a different set of standards is a good indication that the current stack is not as broken as some people would like to think. It reminds me of a previous life, at a previous time, when everybody reinvented the content management system based on slightly different approaches, because they thought existing CMSs were too big. It starts with serving pages, then you want multipl…

>> The fact nobody reinvented e-mail on top of a different set of standards is a good indication that the current stack is not as broken as some people would like to think.

email is one of those technologies that "just works" but so many people seem to think it needs to be "fixed". it's generally very reliable and so people should just accept that and be grateful. It could be worse - it could be enshittified like so much other technology.

Re: Modern email can be built from borrowed parts

#95

Post by raggi »

BeetleB wrote: post #73

I don't want to replicate email. I want to fix it. Sending email should not be free. It should be really, really cheap to send an email to one person (like a fraction of a fraction of a cent), but get exponentially more expensive the more you send. People shouldn't be able to send emails to you without your prior approval (which you can revoke at an instant). The recipient should be able to charge a tack-on fee for h…

Honestly we should just do this. Maddy and Stalwart have cheap enough concurrency and good enough scalability they could easily delay SMTP accepts server side for a time delay based on a combination of a local and global heuristic. We could easily start to produce an auditable global heuristic as well and start prototyping the solution today. Over time the community will have to decide how to work with the Cabal, or more specifically the Cabal will have to learn to start to re-engage with the community.

Just start.

Re: Modern email can be built from borrowed parts

#96

Post by dfabulich »

BeetleB wrote: post #73

I don't want to replicate email. I want to fix it. Sending email should not be free. It should be really, really cheap to send an email to one person (like a fraction of a fraction of a cent), but get exponentially more expensive the more you send. People shouldn't be able to send emails to you without your prior approval (which you can revoke at an instant). The recipient should be able to charge a tack-on fee for h…

> It should be really, really cheap to send an email to one person (like a fraction of a fraction of a cent), but get exponentially more expensive the more you send.

The problem is the cost of creating fake identities. As long as creating fake identities has a fixed cost (increasing linearly with the number of identities you create), there's no way to charge the "same person" exponentially more for sending more email. They'll just create new identities to send new emails.

Some people realize this and then start imagining how to forbid fake identities (forbidding truly anonymous email), but that requires a centralized identification authority, which many participants in the system are actively trying to avoid.

If you want a centralized authority for sending messages without spam, then you should just use a popular centralized messaging app. Each messaging app is controlled by a centralized authority, for better and for worse; the general consensus is that spam is a much smaller problem on centralized messaging apps than on email. But centralizing authority is a very high price to fight spam.

Today, each email client just reads the emails and tries to categorize spam, assigning each email a spam "score" and quarantining mail over a certain threshold. We track email identities only by top-level domain names, which do have a cost. Emails can be signed with DKIM/SPF, and we can penalize emails that don't sign themselves. We don't have "central authorities," but there are very popular email services, following a power law, and they're close enough. If Gmail thinks your domain reputation is too low, you're gonna have to buy a new domain name if you want to email anybody on Gmail.

Without one official centralized authority, I think that's about as good as it's ever gonna get.

Re: Modern email can be built from borrowed parts

#97

Post by dfabulich »

miki123211 wrote: post #87
BeetleB wrote: post #73

I don't want to replicate email. I want to fix it. Sending email should not be free. It should be really, really cheap to send an email to one person (like a fraction of a fraction of a cent), but get exponentially more expensive the more you send. People shouldn't be able to send emails to you without your prior approval (which you can revoke at an instant). The recipient should be able to charge a tack-on fee for h…

This is impractical because micropayments are impractical. I have a better idea; split the problem into two. First, require all messages to include an `Automated: 0|1` header; eventually downranking / banning providers that don't include it, like we now do with DKIM, SPF, DMARC and such. For messages with `Automated: 1`, require informed consent, mediated and verified through the recipient's provider. It's impractica…

Today, Gmail and other major providers do this by tracking sender reputation at the domain level. If users mark your emails as spam, that hurts your domain's reputation. If a domain's reputation gets low enough, Gmail won't deliver mail from that domain.

It's better than nothing (much better than nothing, IMO), but but spam will continue to be an issue as long as we want/expect to receive incoming mail from strangers, and as long as we plan not to have a centralized authority for email identities.

Re: Modern email can be built from borrowed parts

#98

Post by andros »

zahlman wrote: post #65
andros wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you scroll down, they should all disappear. Do you have JavaScript disabled? What browser and device are you using?

FWIW, I'm on desktop but I do have JS disabled (more precisely, I use NoScript). This results in the top and left-side bars staying decorative and unobtrusive, but the concurrent visitor counter thingy is floating well above the bottom-right of the page. But then, as I shrink in the page width, the left-side bar and the concurrent visitor counter swap sides , and also a bunch of the content from the top is added to a…

If you want to eliminate any friction, I recommend enabling JavaScript. Otherwise, you can read it in terminal mode with: curl -H "Accept: text/markdown" [URL]

Re: Modern email can be built from borrowed parts

#99

Post by choilive »

BeetleB wrote: post #73

I don't want to replicate email. I want to fix it. Sending email should not be free. It should be really, really cheap to send an email to one person (like a fraction of a fraction of a cent), but get exponentially more expensive the more you send. People shouldn't be able to send emails to you without your prior approval (which you can revoke at an instant). The recipient should be able to charge a tack-on fee for h…

Sending email is already cheap, not free. Just so happens the cost is subsidized/hidden for most regular people and its so cheap that they give it away for free. For those of us that run transactional email, the cost is ~ $0.0001 per email for AWS SES, already at the fraction of a fraction of a cent you suggest.

Re: Modern email can be built from borrowed parts

#100

Post by HDBaseT »

HumblyTossed wrote: post #94
rbanffy wrote: post #91

The fact nobody reinvented e-mail on top of a different set of standards is a good indication that the current stack is not as broken as some people would like to think. It reminds me of a previous life, at a previous time, when everybody reinvented the content management system based on slightly different approaches, because they thought existing CMSs were too big. It starts with serving pages, then you want multipl…

>> The fact nobody reinvented e-mail on top of a different set of standards is a good indication that the current stack is not as broken as some people would like to think. email is one of those technologies that "just works" but so many people seem to think it needs to be "fixed". it's generally very reliable and so people should just accept that and be grateful. It could be worse - it could be enshittified like so…

> it's generally very reliable and so people should just accept that and be grateful

It's only really "very reliable" if you use Google or Microsoft for email, since they are the arbitrator of modern email.

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