The X.400 world would have had different spam economics because metered usage by your telco (who would be acting as a "Value Added Network" provider and delivering your X.400 mail) would likely have been the norm. As other comments have pointed out, this is still A Thing today with X.400 VANs being used for EDI.
Email could have been X.400 times better
41–50 of 211 posts
Re: Email could have been X.400 times better
#42>> 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…
I'll note that while X.509 certificates are deployed widely on the Internet, they are not deployed in the manner the ITU intended. There is no global X.500 directory and Distinguished Names are just opaque identifiers that are used to help find issuers during chain building. That hardly counts as a win for the ITU in my book.
Re: Email could have been X.400 times better
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
All we need is an x.500 directory of all addresses in the world, which won't be abused by anyone at anytime!
However did we live during the era of the White Pages phone directory.
Spam and scam had to work on a human scale, via locals paid something resembling a living wage, not automated machines sending millions a second or people working for pennies a day.
I want a phone that can only ring if the source of the call is within artillery range.
Re: Email could have been X.400 times better
#44> 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
> You could have been notified when the message was read a full 15 years before email had something similar tacked on. Which spammers and marketers would have loved . I have "load remote content" disabled on my e-mail client so that tracking graphics/pixels do not leak such information to the sender.
> I have "load remote content" disabled on my e-mail client so that tracking graphics/pixels do not leak such information to the sender.
Often times that's meaningless as email scanner software will load and inspect all links and images regardless of the human's email client preferences. It basically comes down to can Constant Contact, or similar, detect if a link was clicked by security software or an actual human. And security software wants to look like an actual human because if security software looks like security software it's very easy for bad actors to serve safe payloads to security software and malware payloads to human actors.
Re: Email could have been X.400 times better
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
> and is triggered by email scanners Did you mean "and is NOT triggered by email scanners"? AFAIU, "email scanners" get more aggressive over time, so there is no once-and-forever solution. I guess AI-enabled email scanners can attempt to solve captchas as well.
I mean if your unsubscribe link unsubscribes someone just because Microsoft Email Phishing for Copilot visited the link to see if it was a Virus, then you need to “get gud” as the kids say.
The fault lies with Microsoft Email Phishing for Copilot or with the European Commission.
Re: Email could have been X.400 times better
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
All we need is an x.500 directory of all addresses in the world, which won't be abused by anyone at anytime!
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.
Re: Email could have been X.400 times better
#47Gall's Law:
"A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked."
https://lawsofsoftwareengineering.com/laws/galls-law/
In my naive youth I always thought top-down design was the sensible way to build systems. But after witnessing so many of them fail miserably, I now agree with Gall.
Re: Email could have been X.400 times better
#48> 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
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.
Re: Email could have been X.400 times better
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
If I cannot just click a button and unsubscribe, guess what, you are malicious spam.
And if you can't figure out how to make an unsubscribe page that doesn't require a captcha (and is triggered by email scanners) you are incompetent. Claude can figure it out.
Email scanners don't exactly publish the methods by which you can reliably determine if a page was loaded or a link was clicked by a security scanner. If they did not appear human, then they'd be easy to trick and then not do their security job well.
Re: Email could have been X.400 times better
#50> 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
I think you're referring to things like tracking pixels, whereas the author was likely referring to _actual_ email read receipts, where the sender can request a read receipt, and the receiver's MUA will prompt them to send one.
Yes, same feature, different implementations.