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email is an open protocol and works great. you can add pgp on top of it if you want security
by akkat 9y ago
email is an open protocol and works great. you can add pgp on top of it if you want security
- ascorbic 9y agoEmail does many things, but "works great" isn't one of them. PGP even less.
- CaptSpify 9y agoWhat doesn't work great about email? easy to use, easy to set up, easy to modify, easy to switch which software handles your email both server-side and client-side....
- s73v3r_ 9y agoHas a huge spam problem...
- cyphar 9y agoBut people posting tonnes of GIFs, emojis, and tagging @all on #general isn't spam? I don't disagree that email has a spam problem (though spam filters have gotten quite good in the past 20-30 years), just that spam isn't an email problem.
- NikolaeVarius 9y agoYou can easily choose to be not be a part of that. You do not have that luxury on email.
- CaptSpify 9y agoYou know you can filter email based on the content, right?
- ascorbic 9y agoIt's trivial to ban someone from Slack. The problem with email is how there's no authentication for incoming mail, and it's trivial to spoof the sending address so you can't block them. Sure spam is a problem on most platforms, but unauthenticated ones have it orders of magnitude worse than authenticated ones.
- CaptSpify 9y ago> The problem with email is how there's no authentication for incoming mail TYL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DomainKeys_Identified_Mail https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DomainKeys_Identified_Mail and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pretty_Good_Privacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pretty_Good_Privacy
- Spivak 9y agoThat's mostly a client problem than a protocol problem. Any mail client with a workflow for whitelisting contacts would stop spam immediately.
- CaptSpify 9y agoEvery submission system has a spam problem. How is email any different? I'd actually argue that email is one of the better systems, as I can manage and control my whitelist/blacklist myself. It makes things much more functional that way.
- wpietri 9y agoI'm not sure why this is getting downvoted. I love email and I'm sure I'll be using it in the retirement home. But it is not very popular among the youth: https://techcrunch.com/2016/03/24/email-is-dying-among-mobiles-youngest-users/ https://techcrunch.com/2016/03/24/email-is-dying-among-mobil... And there's good reason for that. Email is basically the electronic equivalent of postal mail, a first pass at digital communication that aped the old medium. But the first email RFC was 35 years ago. MIME is more than 20 years old, and that's the last major capability improvement. From the point of view of a teen who grew up on Facebook Messenger, Snapchat, Instagram, and Twitter, email is weird, old, and feature-deficient. They think of email in the way that I think of paper mail (mainly for formal and commercial use, not really for friends, somewhat quaint), or possibly how I think of a fax machine (quirky, obsolete, use only when forced).
- dullgiulio 9y agoE-mail is not preferred by the youth until they use it at work. Then it is a godsend that you can only ignore it and reply when you have time. We have been chatting since we have had networks. Believe me, e-mail is here to stay.
- nasredin 9y agoMaybe we could do something about voicemail then? ducks
- dullgiulio 9y agoWhat do you mean? Voicemail was never successful and the reason is simple: verba volant, scripta manent, spoken flies, written remains.
- wpietri 9y agoVoicemail was very popular in the US for an extended period. Email becoming popular helped reduce that; so, later, did texting, especially once we got past the T9 keyboard.
- tommorris 9y ago> you can add pgp on top of it if you want security Nobody does, sadly. Baking it into the protocol like Signal and WhatsApp did means nobody has to want it, they just get it included without having to bolt on any extras.
- cup-of-tea 9y agoBut what Signal and WhatsApp has is not PGP. Not even close. It turns out security isn't trivial.
- tommorris 9y agoIt is a cheap substitute. But you should try the cheap substitute: its not half bad and lots of people seem to find it pretty tasty.