Naveen Akunuri
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
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.
Mario Guerra@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: (@[email protected])
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
ocnurb@Daojoan and we all forgot Wave!
Heckin' Chonker@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.
Stuck HereI 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.
@Daojoan Even spam did not kill it.
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
David Palk#RejoinEU 💖🇪🇺🕊🌈@Daojoan You are so right. And beyond email , letters and stamps even!
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."
2 Favorites
jwz@Daojoan gmail is the roach motel
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 Rolle 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!
Daniel
Cesare Pautasso
WTL
Troed SångbergOnly if you use one of the allowed big email services. Set up your own and you might be secretly black holed and your emails will randomly not reach the intended recipients.
... and not just self hosters: ProtonMail has had to fight Microsoft and Google on this for years.
(Looks like the hotel me and my son are traveling to in three weeks haven't received photocopies of our documentation either through Booking's internal email system or to their Gmail. I'm sending through ProtonMail, and my _guess_ is that it's due to the large size of the attachments. No errors returned ...)
@troed @philleu @rolle @Daojoan I have a (rarely-used) Proton Mail account, and have do not recall ever having issues emailing Gmail or MS account, but I’ll certainly test it.
If you’re sending something over the file size limit, you should get an error notification, but not always (some servers just silently fail, which is annoying).
MarkAssPandi@Daojoan email is decentralized until google decides it does not like ur server so 90% of email users can't get your emails 
@MarkAssPandi that is just as decentralized (according to your definition) as the fediverse users not being able to talk to twitter users or if meta decides to unplug threads from the fediverse, most users are there
I have an email server set up recently some weeks/months ago and it federates just fine with gmail, we should remove more power from such big email providers and self-host more email servers, and provide it to users, take a look at https://chatmail.at
@adbenitez @Daojoan I'd more compare it to certain fediverse instances blocking some instances
but I agree, I'm mostly joking about issue with email that despite it's decentralized nature, it pretty much became centralized
Setting up your own email server/using smaller email provider is def a good idea and I'm not saying it's not!
but I agree, I'm mostly joking about issue with email that despite it's decentralized nature, it pretty much became centralized
Setting up your own email server/using smaller email provider is def a good idea and I'm not saying it's not!
@Daojoan @adbenitez Tho I am in general against email as form of communication cus email itself is broken but that's a different thing
@MarkAssPandi that doesn't mean it can't be fixed, I think the chatmail approach I linked is pretty cool:
it only allows encrypted email to start with so there is no spam problem or spam filters, and registration is open,
DKIM is enforced so no spoofing,
metadata is reduced a lot, not even subject is leaked,
storage is temporary so hosting it is dirty cheap (my instance has +3.1k users and is using 1GB of RAM and ~6GB of disk)
and with Delta Chat client you have even MITM protection
@adbenitez Yeah but that's layer over regular email usage
It's cool, but won't replace how people use regular emails
It's cool, but won't replace how people use regular emails
RejZoR@Daojoan It's the same with forums. They have existed for eternity and despite all the Twitters, Facebooks, Discords that were calling doom of forums and yet forums are still around very much still thriving.
Erwin Rossen 🔸
Andreas K@Daojoan Email is decentralized?
Try getting email set up nowadays on your own email server and domain, with your own software, and let's see how long it takes you to make Google & Microsoft accept your emails. Ah, and the local level boss of irrational email delivery, T-Online. Yeah, Email is global, so even admins on other continents will encounter this level boss at some point.
Dragon@Daojoan less decentralised than I'd like these days Google/Microsoft have so much power
Neo@Daojoan i really wish there was something established similar to that but with being able to exchange more information at once (i mean things like videos, sound files, etc.)