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It is time to ban email

shkspr.mobi

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Re: It is time to ban email

#21

Post by samus »

kylehotchkiss wrote: post #13

Email is one of the best communication protocols humanity has ever invented. Do you want to give Meta the keys to all your communications? Or Slack, who sends them off to AI training models?

The major feature of email, federation, is also it's biggest weakness.

Rhese days, most emails travel between Microsoft, Gmail, Yahoo, and a few others, and they are in an arms race with spammers. Smaller providers have increasingly trouble keeping up with that fight and with the measures of the big providers because they can be out of business quite quickly if they relay spam and the major providers stop trusting them. Monopolization is also happening in that space.

Re: It is time to ban email

#22

Post by edent »

TZubiri wrote: post #18

And replace it with.... Email is a neutral protocol, in a natural monopoly, very hard to replace unless you want to choose a state sanctioned monopoly like you would to Facebook's Whatsapp or Apple's messenger. This sounds like fatalistic throwing the baby with the bath water, I know that there's a fine line between operator's error and bad system design, but when a piece of technology has been stable for 40 years, a…

> when a piece of technology has been stable for 40 years, and there is a fuck up, you can't reaally blame it on the tech.

After 40 years of the same fuck up - what should you blame?

Re: It is time to ban email

#24

Post by edent »

kylehotchkiss wrote: post #13

Email is one of the best communication protocols humanity has ever invented. Do you want to give Meta the keys to all your communications? Or Slack, who sends them off to AI training models?

Google and Microsoft probably already have the keys to 90%+ of all email comms. They probably already use them to train AI.

It is well known that the Enron emails were used to train early AIs

* https://qz.com/work/1546565/the-emails-that-brought-down-enr...

* https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~enron/

But, if it is one of the best comms protocols, why then do people flock to WhatsApp, Slack, and other non-email products?

Re: It is time to ban email

#25

Post by samus »

krunck wrote: post #16

Sure let's dump email in favor of a new non-proprietary, open standards, decentralized and non-commercial protocol. Name one If you like.

Jabber/XMMP? I know it doesn't fulfill the same purpose, but since TA is comparing it with instant messaging services I guess it's still relevant.

Re: It is time to ban email

#26

Post by butlike »

myst wrote: post #6

Email is the worst form of communication. Except, all others are even worse.

It's a "you-to-anybody" messaging system. Which is kind of cool.

Also, the more prolific the email address, the more popular the person, essentially.

Re: It is time to ban email

#28

Post by jjkaczor »

krunck wrote: post #16

Sure let's dump email in favor of a new non-proprietary, open standards, decentralized and non-commercial protocol. Name one If you like.

ActivityPub? (Runs for the hills, couldn't resist - /jk - I prefer email)

There are several relevant xkcd comics about multiple competing "standard" protocols IIRC...

Re: It is time to ban email

#29

Post by imiric »

> When was the last time you used carbon paper to make a copy? Have you ever dictated to your secretary who a memorandum should be blind-copied to?

When was the last time you filed a document in a physical folder? Or used a physical clipboard? Have you ever found a physical bug in your computer?

These are all concepts that were once common in the real world, adopted to make computing more familiar and approachable. Whether the physical concepts are still in use is irrelevant. What matters is if the technology is useful, and email most certainly is. Claiming it should banned because some people misuse it is asinine. If anything should be banned because of misuse then it's surely social media, which is actually harmful to society.

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