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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

#101

Post by BeetleB »

choilive wrote: post #99
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.

Yes, but I want the rate to be variable depending on volume. I want it to be $0.0001 for a simple personal email. But if you send 10,000 emails today, I want it to cost you $100 (or more).

Many schemes to do this. Things like:

The first 10 emails is $0.0001 each.

The next 10 will be $0.001 each.

And so on. You can always fiddle with the thresholds and costs.

Re: Modern email can be built from borrowed parts

#102

Post by BeetleB »

dfabulich wrote: post #96
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…

> 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.

That's partially handled by my other proposals: People need to pre-approve the senders (otherwise email gets held in a quarantine folder), and people can tack on a fee. Let's make the tack-on fee default to 5 cents.

> 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.

The lack of openness is the problem. I'd be happy with WhatsApp if it allowed me to set default policies such as "From person X, don't send me any forwarded messages" and so much more I can't do with WhatsApp that I could do with email.

Ultimately, the solution has to be built into the protocol, and it has to be designed to minimize bad actors not honoring the protocol. May involve cryptography, blockchain, etc (which is why it likely never will be implemented).

> 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.

Right idea, but wrong implementation. Google shouldn't decide it. You as the individual should have control over the filtering.

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

Very likely true. I can still fantasize.

Re: Modern email can be built from borrowed parts

#104

Post by flexagoon »

andros wrote: post #51
flexagoon wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's very annoying on mobile, covering half of the page all the time

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

Yes, but when I stop scrolling and scroll up even a little bit (by accident, or because I want to scroll up and read something I missed) they appear again. I think the only good UX possible is to have a button to show/hide them instead.

Re: Modern email can be built from borrowed parts

#105

Post by andros »

flexagoon wrote: post #104
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?

Yes, but when I stop scrolling and scroll up even a little bit (by accident, or because I want to scroll up and read something I missed) they appear again. I think the only good UX possible is to have a button to show/hide them instead.

I'm sorry, but I disagree. The lowest interaction cost is scrolling; it's a natural, continuous, and almost involuntary gesture. Having to click or tap a button requires the user to stop, evaluate whether the title interests them, and decide to make the effort to tap. The interactions you're describing are intentional and measured. I'm sorry but if the content is truly all you care about, I recommend the previous option or activating your browser's reading mode.

Re: Modern email can be built from borrowed parts

#106

Post by calvinmorrison »

stackskipton wrote: post #57
citizenpaul wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have no personal experience. I've just read a lot of peoples experience around trying to do their own email hosting. It seems the majority give up after a couple years of nonstop blacklisting problems. It could simply be only people with issues post about it. The stories have discouraged my from spending my time on it though.

As former Email Principal at major provider, sure, they run into blacklisting problems. However, most of time, it's not that providers are blacklisting because "Ha ha ha, screw the little guy" but more "Yea, they are hosting on IP blocks with terrible reputation and spammers are absolute liars. I refuse to trust whatever they say, period." If you have your own /24 or greater, you can become email provider. It's also…

and even as a provider, some are more aggressive than others. free.fr comes to mind

Re: Modern email can be built from borrowed parts

#107

Post by winstonwinston »

8organicbits wrote: post #70
philipwhiuk wrote: post #27

Old version: * DNS lookup for MX record New version * DNS lookup for A record * HTTP request for .wellknown/htmp/known_hosts Not sure why this is being considered as an improvement? > each mailbox of a domain on a different provider Why is this useful/necessary or even 'good'?

Email currently uses an HTTP request to https://mta-sts. /.well-known/mta-sts.txt, per RFC 8461. Depending on HTTPS/TLS instead of DNSSEC is one major reason you see this approach gaining popularity.

To be fair, it’s used by only those who choose to use horrendous “mta-sts” instead of DNS-based Authentication of Named Entities (DANE).

I might add that if you want to enforce SMTP TLS, you can do just that without mta-sts or DANE.

Re: Modern email can be built from borrowed parts

#108

Post by isaachinman »

HDBaseT wrote: post #100
HumblyTossed wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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.

Working in this exact space with marcoapp.io

We all deserve better, even self-hosted IMAP servers

Re: Modern email can be built from borrowed parts

#109

Post by isaachinman »

aboardRat4 wrote: post #20

Self-ejecting panels on three sides of the website are a horrible user experience. Other than that... The most important thing is not the protocol, it's the gui. At the moment email's gui is horrible on all platforms without exception. If/when a decent gui appears, protocols will follow. Also, JMAP did reading can probably be just WebDAV?

Can you provide more feedback? What do you hate so much about current GUIs? (Working in this exact space)

Re: Modern email can be built from borrowed parts

#110

Post by teddyh »

zahlman wrote: post #64
teddyh wrote: post #55

More people should be aware of their history. This text made the rounds in the late 1990s as spam was starting to become a problem. Everybody and their dog had their own “ultimate solution” to the spam problem, which they all thought was obviously the correct one, but all of them were more or less equally unworkable: https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt >

To be clear, "this text" refers to the link at the end, not to TFA, correct?

Yes. Sorry for being unclear.
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