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Email could have been X.400 times better

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Re: Email could have been X.400 times better

#61

Post by dpark »

jgalt212 wrote: post #58
dpark wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I didn’t specifically opt in to receiving marketing emails (and no, failing to opt out is not the same), they are spam. I’ve never heard anyone say “I’m sure glad this company added me to their email list without my request.” The fact that you happen to work on a mailing list product does not change that reality.

I hear what you're saying, but irrespective of how one landed on such a list, the unsubscribe mechanism is broken. e.g. It's entirely possible and likely you've subscribed to one or more marketing lists, newsletters, transaction emails, etc that you want to be on, but your security software inadvertently unsubscribed you (without your permission).

I think this is extremely unlikely. Firstly because I almost never subscribe to newsletters or marketing lists. But also because I don’t believe my security software is submitting POSTs on random forms it finds links to. That would be insane behavior.

I can believe someone, somewhere has insane security software that does stuff like that. But I don’t believe it’s common.

Re: Email could have been X.400 times better

#62

Post by dpark »

yencabulator wrote: post #59
dpark wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you saying that email scanners were not only fetching the unsubscribe link but also submitting the “unsubscribe” button/form on the page? I find this hard to believe since everyone else seems to manage this without a Captcha.

I does sound like they made a HTTP GET request have side effects.

I suspect that’s exactly what they did. And then they “solved” it with a Captcha. Conveniently I bet human unsubscribes also dropped when that was instituted.

Re: Email could have been X.400 times better

#63

Post by fmajid »

MisterTea wrote: post #24
pjc50 wrote: post #14

>> 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…

> 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, Anyone remember the promise of ATM networking in the 90's? It was telecom grade networking which used circuit switched networking that would handle voice, video and data down one pipe. Instead of carelessly flinging packets into the ether like an savage, you had a…

I started my career at France Telecom's R&D lab in Caen, Normandy. They had their own home-grown X.400 email client, and even though they could have set up a SMTP server for free, they deliberately chose to MX to a paid SMTP to X.400 gateway out of OSI ideology.

It was complete garbage.

Another lab of theirs proudly made a Winsock that would use ATM SVCs instead of TCP and proudly made a brochure extolling their achievement "Web protocol without having to use TCP". Because clearly it was TCP hindering adoption of the Web /s

The Bellhead vs. Nethead was a real thing back then. To paraphrase an old saying about IBM, Telcos think if they piss on something, it improves the flavor.

One of the jobs I had applied out of college was to lead Schengen's central police database (think stolen car reports, arrest warrants etc) which would federate national databases. For some unfathomable reason, they chose X.400 as messaging bus for that replication, and endured massive delays and cost overruns for that reason. I guess I dodged a bullet by not going there.

Re: Email could have been X.400 times better

#64

Post by p_l »

MisterTea wrote: post #60
p_l wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty sure TSN is unrelated to ATM determinism, and comes from a completely separate area (replacing custom field buses where timing and contention is more important than bandwidth). Some of ATM complexity came from wanting to deliver the same quality of experience as plesiosynchronous networks provided for voice (that's how it got the weird cell size). Once those requirements dropped down (partially because people…

Not directly related but a consequence.

ATM semantics and TSN semantics are quite different, the closest overlap would be in AFDX (avionics full duplex ethernet) except AFDX creates static circuits

Re: Email could have been X.400 times better

#66

Post by beng-nl »

dreamcompiler wrote: post #47

Gall'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.

Well said. And similarly, it always seems to be the simple, bottom up, “let’s just build something simple and minimal that works” projects that get iterated on that do can do well, and start to strain when the technical debt and complexity accumulate.

Re: Email could have been X.400 times better

#67

Post by rstuart4133 »

pjc50 wrote: post #14

>> 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…

Doh! Of course it was easier to implement. IETF wants a working open source implementation before standardising.

Have you ever tried to implement an ITU standard from just reading the specs? It's hard. Firstly you have to spend a lot of money just to buy the specs. Then you find the spec is written by somebody who has a proprietary product, and is tiptoeing along a line that reveals enough information to keep the standards body happy (ie, has enough info to make it worthwhile to purchase the specification), and not revealing the secret sauce in their implementation.

I've done it, and it's an absolute nightmare. The IETF RFCs are a breath of fresh air in comparison. Not only can you read the source, there are example implementations!

And if you think that didn't lead to a better outcome, you're kidding yourself. The ITU process naturally leads to a small number of large engineering orgs publishing just enough information so they can interoperate, while keeping enough hidden so the investment discourages the rise of smaller competitors. The result is, even now I can (and do) run my own email server. If the overly complicated bureaucratic ITU standards had won the day, I'm sure email would have been run by a small number of CompuServe like rent seeking parasites for decades.

Re: Email could have been X.400 times better

#69

Post by ogurechny »

rstuart4133 wrote: post #67
pjc50 wrote: post #14

>> 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…

Doh! Of course it was easier to implement. IETF wants a working open source implementation before standardising. Have you ever tried to implement an ITU standard from just reading the specs? It's hard. Firstly you have to spend a lot of money just to buy the specs. Then you find the spec is written by somebody who has a proprietary product, and is tiptoeing along a line that reveals enough information to keep the sta…

Given that general public uses social network services for electronic messaging today, and those don't even pretend they want to be interoperable, we've got parasites of a totally different class on top of the Internet infrastructure.

Re: Email could have been X.400 times better

#70

Post by pseudohadamard »

pjc50 wrote: post #14

>> 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…

It's not so much that SMTP won, it's that X.400 lost because it suuuuucked. Anyone who's ever had to work with that piece of s*t, as opposed to rhapsodising over what it could theoretically do, can tell you stories about this. It made Microsoft Mail and Lotus Notes look good in comparison. Notes actually did X.400, so imagine Notes but even suckier.
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