>> 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…
> In the end, internet swallowed telephones and everything is now VOIP.
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 fat…
note that it was 'tolerable latency without echo cancellation in France', most other places had long enough latency anyways that they needed to have it anyways. and of course now everything needs echo cancellation. I think standards are important, and I'm sad that no one bothers anymore, but stuff like this and the inclusion of interlace in digital video for that little 3 year window when it might have mattered does…
I'd forgotten about the French connection here.
BTW, I searched Kagi for "tolerable latency without echo cancellation in France" and saw your comment. Wow. I didn't realize web crawlers were that current these days.
My first job at college was wrangling campus email, both X.400 and SMTP. As the article points out, SMTP won out because it was simple and developed in the open, not buried in standards committees, and SMTP code was widely available. It was the Cathedral and the Bazaar hypothesis playing out in real time.
Just seeing that X.400 notation is giving me bad memories!
> 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
> we have to put our unsubscribe page behind a captcha.
Hope you're not ever sending email to EU residents!
Have you ever heard of `List-Unsubscribe`? It solves your problem without massively annoying people and breaking accessibility and/or the law.
> 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…
> Instead of carelessly flinging packets into the ether like an savage, you had a deterministic network of pipes I love this. Ethernet is such shit. What do you mean the only way to handle a high speed to lower speed link transition is to just drop a bunch of packets? Or sending PAUSE frames which works so poorly everyone disables flow control.
> If the history of email had gone somewhat differently, the last email you sent could have been rescinded or superseded by a newer version when you accidentally wrote the wrong thing. It could have auto-destructed if not read by midnight. Immutability is one of the best things about email.
As a platform for sending invoices and official communications it’s fine. As a way for people to talk with each other it sucks. These days I’m of the opinion that most messaging should just be auto deleted after a month. If there’s something particularly important you want to keep, note it down. Otherwise just let it be forgotten.
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.
> 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.
Yeah, use `List-Unsubscribe`. Has the additional advantage that I don't need to find the "unsubscribe" link at the bottom of some bloaty HTML, works across languages etc.
If the email scanner of your recipient insists on clicking "unsubscribe" on their behalf without that being the desired outcome, that's not on you to prevent them from.
I still think the missing opportunity with e-mail was for the USPS (back in the US-dominant internet days) to take a leading role and implement "e-stamps." Provide a subscription service that managed a per-user account, cost a 1¢ stamp to send a message, and guaranteed delivery of messages received with a 1¢ stamp on them -- with the received stamp value being put in the user's account, so a user who received more mail than they sent would never spend a penny. (Messages received from other services could be rejected, delivered, or binned for later inspection at the user's discretion.) This would have the obvious downside of centralizing a major early-Internet feature (although federation is certainly possible as well), but it would have the upside of penalizing companies sending millions of e-mails, but not users using it for person-to-person communication, or companies using it for per-(valuable)-customer communication. We could have had a world without spam… and if USPS took 10% off the top (0.9¢ of each incoming message given to the user account), or similar, I could imagine it having a big impact on their budgetary issues.
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.