JA WestenbergEmail is the cockroach of the internet - it outlives every wave trying to kill it. Forget Slack, forget Discord, forget chat apps. Email is universal, decentralized, and asynchronous. It's not sexy, but it's the ultimate survivor.
a7ndrew@Daojoan at work this holds up. We've got all sorts of communications methods, but if it was important, it would have been in an email.
SuperMoosie
🐧DaveNull🐧 ☣️pResident Evil☣@SuperMoosie More like trying to replacing it with shitty cro$oftmail in a trenchoat pretending to be email
saxnot ➡️ HOA, GPN@Daojoan I really like E-Mail
Janne@Daojoan I read this and wept: Standards behind delta chat: https://github.com/chatmail/core/blob/main/standards.md
Someone has taken the best out of the both worlds...
Jeff Miller (orange hatband)@Daojoan Email: it's older than the Domain Name System.
mbpazRemember "bang paths"? ( host1 ! host2 ! username )
Raise your hands, all of you who had an email address *without* an "@" sign.
I did. But I was young them, and now I'm 50.
Anne at Millrace
ChrisR@mbpaz @jmeowmeow @Daojoan I (briefly) had an email address with an @ but also a bang path! But my first email address would have been VaxMail, I can't quite remember the format, but maybe something like NT::cccar. Later, it was extended across Australia via the "InfoPSI" network! See https://unsustainableideas.wordpress.com/2020/01/03/australian-tertiary-education-networking-1988/
BillIhnp4!msu!web
rhempel@mbpaz @jmeowmeow @Daojoan I called an exclamation mark "bang" and the other developers looked at me like I was an idiot.
To be fair sometimes I am an idiot - whenever I make a mistake I tell the team about it, and try to make it a learning opportunity. I call it an "imadopium" hit.
Ah - the good old days of rec.toys.lego on USENET :-)
Ashwin Dixit🙋
I had a BITNET email address, with a % instead of an @
@purrperl @jmeowmeow @Daojoan I never got to connect to BITNET, but addresses with "%" were not rare during the transition from bang paths to domain addressing.
According to the Linux Network Administrators Guide (vintage 1991 or so): "... user %domainB@domainA is first sent to domainA, which expands the rightmost (in this case, the only) percent sign to an @ sign. The address is now user@domainB, and the mailer happily forwards your message to domainB, which delivers it to user"
Daniel Barlow (bike)@mbpaz @purrperl @jmeowmeow @Daojoan I had an address with a % in it in 1992 because it was (I think) on a computer which could only send email to the internet via Janet
At some point not long afterwards the admins did something magic with MX records and rewrites and in was able to replace the % with a .
At some point not long afterwards the admins did something magic with MX records and rewrites and in was able to replace the % with a .
@jmeowmeow @Daojoan wow, that's a lot of hands raised. I honestly didn't expect it.
@jmeowmeow @Daojoan Email on UUCP and Bitnet. I remember that
lobingera@Daojoan Agree.
Still, some want a different reality ...
https://social.wildeboer.net/@jwildeboer/114516238307785904
(Thread by Jan, who runs own email)
Jan Wildeboer 😷:krulorange: (@jwildeboer@social.wildeboer.net)
Attached: 1 image Dear #Letsencrypt, you helped secure millions and millions of servers, not just web servers. But your announcement at https://letsencrypt.org/2025/05/14/ending-tls-client-authentication/ about ending Ending TLS Client Authentication Certificate Support in 2026 because Google changes their requirements would result in your certificates becoming a risk for SMTP servers. You are literally risking an email collapse for many mailserver owners just to please Google? Please think again. Please. 1/5
Chris@lobingera @Daojoan I have read that thread and the forum discussion, and I run my own email server as well, and I get my certs from Let's Encrypt... but I don't see the acute problem.
Sure, the oligopolists want to kill off self-hosting, but I don't see how this move will achieve that.
Sure, the oligopolists want to kill off self-hosting, but I don't see how this move will achieve that.
Didzis 🚂
David Runge
David Nelson@Daojoan One could argue that email is basically another Fediverse where every message is a DM.* 🤔
*Including the part about DMs not being private since server admins on either end could read them if they wanted to.
Three LLMs in a Trenchcoat
Jens Ljungkvist
rae@Daojoan if we ever get rid of email, where are all the companies that I need to sign up with to do anything supposed to send me their daily newsletter?
Arthur van der Harg
doboprobodyneCarrier pigeons also good for blood samples and other little things that are difficult to attach to an email.
A short BBC video alluding to some of the potential up-sides of using pigeons:
https://dn721906.ca.archive.org/0/items/twitter-860462001956507649/860462001956507649.mp4
Radical Anthropology@Daojoan happy with that. Academics!
ocnurb
Jörg Kastning@Daojoan I think its actually pretty difficult to run a self hosted email server. There's a large risk from spam and viruses, and it seems pretty common for the most prominent email providers to block self hosted email servers.
I do hate what discord and slack have done to the open web though. I miss when forums were more prevalent.
@HeckinChonker @Daojoan It's not that difficult. As always, you need to know what you are doing, but at least the days of a default setup being an open relay are long gone.
For me, good old Spamassassin is still quite effective at filtering the garbage out.
Getting blocked is mostly dependent on where your server runs and if your IP (or subnet) has been burned already, worst case you need to cancel and re-order your machine until you get an IP without bad reputation.
D. B. StuckI hear you on the forums part. Everyone participates in social media in asking and answering questions, which is fine and good. But forums were where the knowledge of the group was distilled down to something traceable. Cell phone forums, woodworking forums, and the other niche ones caught the issues and the solutions into amber. They made it easier to research as a noob on a topic.
Anthony Sorace@HeckinChonker @Daojoan I mostly disagree with this. I’ve run my own for a long time now. It’s a little harder than a few decades ago, but as long as you can host it somewhere reputable and not at home, add a SPF record, and have a valid forward and reverse DNS, you should be mostly in good shape (at the smtp level; getting in someone’s spam folder is another story).
It’s not trivial, but it’s not bad.
@HeckinChonker @Daojoan I don’t do DKIM or… what’s the other one, DMARC? It hasn’t mattered. att.net hasn’t talked to me for years and wont say why. I have had exactly 1 sender require TLS from recipients (in violation of the standards), which I don’t support. Apparently MS’s corporate services make this an option admins can turn on. I fear I’ll have to add that to the list soon, which is unfortunate, but still not too onerous a list.
beaumains@HeckinChonker @Daojoan its not that hard. I run my own (I suppose it can't be done by a complete layperson though), and its been a rewarding and fulfilling venture.
@mwl wrote a book about it.
You're right about Microsoft and Google and all that rabble making it difficult though. Lots of hoops to jump through and they always want to make if worse.
Sjoerd Aalbers 🇪🇺🇾🇪🇺🇦@Daojoan But it is not safe of its own. People are not aware of that. Additional measures are needed when emailing PII.
cmdrSprocket
maastorontti@Daojoan email provides back-traceable evidence with server handshakes and timestamps. Some instant messages do too, but they’re usually hidden in the service backend and possibly unreachable and volatile.
It's not quite as good as handshakes and timestamps, but you may enjoy ARINC-664 (AFDX) whose patent should expire this year, I think. If I understood correctly it uses Asynchronous Transfer Mode instead of IP. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asynchronous_Transfer_Mode
#arinc664 #networking #ethernet #afdx #avionics #aircraft #ATM #IP #AFDX
HolgerH 霍尔格@Daojoan
Yup, and when you add end-to-end-encryption to every email, the future has just begun.
Yup, and when you add end-to-end-encryption to every email, the future has just begun.
Erwin Rossen 🔸
Tuta
David Palk#RejoinEU 💖🇪🇺🤎🕊@Daojoan You are so right. And beyond email , letters and stamps even!
<undef>
Neromabene@Daojoan There is something about the simplicity and sheer efficiency of email that's hard to replace.
Juancho@Daojoan It is unsafe per se. It has its function. It's not going to go away. And it doesn't replace anything.
"And it doesn't replace anything."
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jwz
Simon Lucy
Darshak Parikh(Cue epic guitar solo)
Kinene@dubiousdisc @simon_lucy @jwz @Daojoan They stab it with their steely knives...
but email lives on.
sarah tonin@Daojoan i want to say, same with irc
Roni Laukkarinen@Daojoan It's always funny when someone says "This app eliminates email" or "you don't have to use email after this"... But, why? I love email!