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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

#71

Post by roryirvine »

throwaway_ocr wrote: post #21

X.400 is still in use today for things like sending invoices and orders through EDI. Yes, it is a pain to manage. Yes, it is all still mostly running on 20+-year-old hardware and software. It is slightly ironic that the main way we communicate X.400 addresses between parties is through modern email.

Is that actually true today? When I was doing EDI stuff ~20 years ago, it was mostly done using FTP, with some forward-thinking orgs moving to SFTP or (HTTPS-based) AS2.

I see that Wikipedia claims that "X.400 is quite widely implemented[citation needed], especially for EDI services", and that might once have been the case - but I doubt it was particularly widespread even at the time that article was first written. It's worth noting that that [citation needed] tag dates from October 2008!

Re: Email could have been X.400 times better

#72

Post by mohamed_azeem »

dpark wrote: post #52
jgalt212 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don’t want to be signed up to your useless email marketing list, useless is in the eye of the beholder.

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.

[dead]

Re: Email could have been X.400 times better

#73

Post by mohamed_azeem »

dpark wrote: post #52
jgalt212 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don’t want to be signed up to your useless email marketing list, useless is in the eye of the beholder.

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.

[dead]

Re: Email could have been X.400 times better

#74

Post by giantrobot »

PunchyHamster wrote: post #6

> C=no; ADMD=; PRMD=uninett; O=uninett; S=alvestrand; G=harald that would be very annoying way to write e-mail and no less prone to typosquatting (if anything, more) Both standards lacked hindsight we have today but x.400 would just be added complexity (as years of tacked-on extensions would build upon it) that makes non-error-prone parsing harder

Ah but the solution was an X.500 directory where you just look up the recipient! So you never type the e-mail address, you just look up "Joe Smith" to send them an e-mail. Like looking them up in the phone book. Ignore the fact that the directory may return multiple Joe Smiths at the same large organization, not return Joe Smyth you wanted to message, or that there's not even a hint of anonymity with such directories. Oh yeah the internal organization of a company could be easily enumerated from the outside.

Re: Email could have been X.400 times better

#75

Post by chuckadams »

jcranmer wrote: post #55
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…

WebPKI is derived from X.509, but I don't think X.509 lives on anymore. X.500 was stripped down to form LDAP, which is still in very heavy use today. There's still some X.400 systems in existence. I think some of the early cellphone generations may have used the ITU standards in the physical layer? Of course, the biggest--and weirdest--success of the ITU standards is that the OSI model is still frequently the way net…

There's an entire book devoted to ripping up the OSI model: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1iL0fYmMmariFoSvLd9U5nPVH...

Re: Email could have been X.400 times better

#76

Post by chuckadams »

philipstorry wrote: post #22

SMTP won because it was simpler, but it's probably good to look at why it was simpler. SMTP handled routing by piggybacking on DNS. When an email arrives the SMTP server looks at the domain part of the address, does a query, and then attempts transfer it to the results of that query. Very simple. And, it turns out, immensely scalable. You don't need to maintain any routing information unless you're overriding DNS for…

> so your email address was effectively a list of hops on the route

Who can forget addresses like "utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!allegra!mit-eddie!rms@mit-prep"

Re: Email could have been X.400 times better

#77

Post by foresto »

> The ugly addressing? It “provides solutions to certain problems and is ugly for good reason,” Betanov explains. “Make it less ugly, and it immediately loses functionality. Thus, the solution is not to make addressing nicer, but to hide it from the user,” something both internet email and X.400-powered software could easily do with headers, not so much with addresses.

Reminds me of IPv6. ;)

Re: Email could have been X.400 times better

#78

Post by chuckadams »

sam_lowry_ wrote: post #19
AdamN wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't unsubsubscribe unless I explicitly subscribed in the past. If I did not subscribe in the first place then it's spam (exception for small businesses who may not know better in which case I'll delete or unsubscribe).

There are unsubscribe headers that are used by mail user agents like mutt to unsubscribe from mailing list managers like mailman. These are "scanner-proof" so far but support in clients like Outlook or Gmail is non-existent.

Gmail not only understands the List-Unsubscribe header, it requires it for bulk deliverability.

Re: Email could have been X.400 times better

#79

Post by AnimalMuppet »

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).

That I want to be on? No. What usually happens is that I give my email to somebody (an auto repair place, say), for one-time use, and they add me to their marketing mailing list, even though that is not what I gave them my email for. That is not a list that I want to be on and willingly subscribed to.

Re: Email could have been X.400 times better

#80

Post by kstrauser »

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 was there for ATM, and I'm so freaking glad it lost. It's a prime example of "a camel is a horse designed by committee". A 53 byte cell with a 48 byte payload? Of course! What an excellent idea! We definitely want a 10% overhead on a ludicrously small packet, just so it has tolerable voice latencies if you scale it down to run on a 64Kb DS0, never mind that literally everything in the industry was scaling up to fatter pipes.

ATM was nifty if you had a requirement of establishing voice-style, i.e. billable, connections. No thanks. It was an interesting technology but hopelessly hobbled by the desire to emulate a voice call that fit into a standard invoice line.

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