41–50 of 257 posts
I think that governments should offer one free email account per citizen for life. Which you could use or not, but is there for you as a digital inbox… which are the options? - Self hosting is a bit elitist - not for the masses. - A paid-for option (proton, tutta,…) would be cataloged as elitist. People perceive email as free. - A free option provided by a Corporate player will gravitate towards monopolies and lack o…
I think that governments should offer one free email account per citizen for life. Which you could use or not, but is there for you as a digital inbox… which are the options? - Self hosting is a bit elitist - not for the masses. - A paid-for option (proton, tutta,…) would be cataloged as elitist. People perceive email as free. - A free option provided by a Corporate player will gravitate towards monopolies and lack o…
You’ll have a lot of distrustful Americans commenting how terrible this idea is and the government can’t be trusted. They’d rather get it from a corporation and be subjected to unlimited surveillance capitalism and manipulation.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The main benefit of Gmail and other big providers is the anti-spam, anti-scam, "Google knows best" approach works really well. When I last helped manage a mail server for a small business (late 2000's) SPAM was an absolute mess. You can really see why Azure etc has consumed on-premise Exchange. The massive downside is they are the deciders of who gets through their gates, and if you're on their shitlist, goodluck.
On the other hand, if the main economic mechanisms that help the major players did not exist, we might not have so much spam in the first place.
Spam was a massive problem long before big tech existed.
- The old USENET network which was/is a federated ecosystem of servers run by universities etc was overrun with unwanted spam.
- Compuserve dialup network was blocking spam and they were also involved in a 1997 court case (1997 is a year before big tech like Google Inc existed in 1998.): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CompuServe_Inc._v._Cyber_Promo....
- the infamous "spam solutions" webpage that was a snarky attempt at "educating" people about fixing spam was created around February 2004 which was 2 months before Gmail service was introduced: https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt
Other "small" areas of the internet are also universally hit with spam abuse:
- blogs that allowed "readers' comments and feedback" got inundated with spam and the blog owners added CAPTCHAS or disabled comments completely.
- small web forums like vBulletin and phpBB forums got hit with spam and admins put in "email signup and valid email verification link" workflows.
- even the newer modern decentralized communication networks like Nostr attract spam: https://old.reddit.com/r/nostr/comments/121ytwf/cutting_thro...
The existence of a big player like Gmail that was introduced in 2004 is not the reason for "so much spam".
Spam volume is always a problem on any communication network where the cost to create new identities is $0 and the cost to send messages is near $0.00. An extreme example of the opposite situation is Bloomberg Terminals chat system not having a spam problem. Why? Because it costs $25000 a year subscription to use. Bloomberg did recently "unbundle" their chat system for a lower price but the point is that the friction for new accounts is still high enough to deter spam abuse.
Running a mail server should be something anyone can do. And while this is cool, there are so many other problems to do it. It's the price we pay of letting big tech companies control so much of the virtual infrastructure: big tech has commoditized the internet so much into a platform for consumerism that it becomes a valuable target for spam. In my opinion, the internet would be much better if none of the big player…
What? Spam existed long before the big tech was around (admittedly the first Spam was probably from DEC, but before 'big internet tech' existed anyway) - it grew because of the amount of people/consumers on the internet. And credit where credits due: getting rid of spam was very time consuming until Google came out with one of the first effective filters.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The basic fact of the matter is that >99% of people will never be interested in hosting their own e-mail server, and that's okay. This means we need organizations to host e-mail for people. In a capitalist system, that means companies, and it leads to consolidation and monopolization. So far, governments have been seemingly uninterested in going after the large e-mail providers for anticompetitive practices; maybe th…
> In a capitalist system, that means companies, and it leads to consolidation and monopolization. No, a "capitalist system" does not lead to consolidation and monopolization.
I am a big fan of free markets, but the trend towards consolidation, at least in activities that profit from efficiencies of scale, is unmistakable, to the degree that it often kills the market unless prevented.
You probably cannot "consolidate" a market of book authors and musical bands, because quality of artistic expression does not scale with money. But the market of publishers and recording companies is quite consolidated, because money buys more efficiency there.
I think that governments should offer one free email account per citizen for life. Which you could use or not, but is there for you as a digital inbox… which are the options? - Self hosting is a bit elitist - not for the masses. - A paid-for option (proton, tutta,…) would be cataloged as elitist. People perceive email as free. - A free option provided by a Corporate player will gravitate towards monopolies and lack o…
Is it? Most people, including nomads & unhoused, seem to have smartphones these days (at risk of theft, but arguably easily replaceable). And 4/5G/PublicWifi connectivity in urban areas is so saturated.
I wonder, is it reasonable for me to want government investment and legislation (but no other state interference) into some open source server project that we can run on our phones for this? (heck, give us mesh network functionality too while you're at it).
And am I reasonable in my (left-leaning thought) that, like sexual health consumables, mobile phones should be subsidised by tax revenue, along with other necessities/'empowering tools'?
I think that governments should offer one free email account per citizen for life. Which you could use or not, but is there for you as a digital inbox… which are the options? - Self hosting is a bit elitist - not for the masses. - A paid-for option (proton, tutta,…) would be cataloged as elitist. People perceive email as free. - A free option provided by a Corporate player will gravitate towards monopolies and lack o…
You could create a public alias of the form firstname.lastname.n@eesti.ee, but creation of those was ended in 2018 and they were shutdown in November 2023. [1]
[0] https://www.eesti.ee/en/using-the-state-portal/terms-of-noti... [1] https://www.eesti.ee/en/closing-alias/closing-alias
I think that governments should offer one free email account per citizen for life. Which you could use or not, but is there for you as a digital inbox… which are the options? - Self hosting is a bit elitist - not for the masses. - A paid-for option (proton, tutta,…) would be cataloged as elitist. People perceive email as free. - A free option provided by a Corporate player will gravitate towards monopolies and lack o…