You can do it from a terminal. Us Linux kids will never let it die.
yeah, aerc and neomutt are two decent options
telnet email_server_ip_addr 25
Helo server.net
ehlo
E-mail barely hanging on between spam, broken HTML and an oligopoly of providers.
Yeah email is one thing I don’t bother to run on my own server, because all the oligopoly providers mark unknown servers as spam by default, so you can’t send emails to anyone anyway…
IRC and forums as well to a lesser extent.
Much much lesser. IRC has basically died to successors. Everybody still uses email sometimes.
IRC is still a pretty strong backbone for Twitch chat. At least it was a couple of years ago.
IRC is mainly a thing for hardcore 2000s re-livers and lobste.rs users nowadays lol
Forums are still banging around however. Lots of places still use them, and thank god for that.
Not so much though.
There was a moment when forums were the only kind of community but now forum use is dwarved by discord and reddit.
Everyone has to provide an email to make an account somewhere, if they don’t do the whole integration with Google/Facebook/etc
asynchronous
Any form of text based communication is asynchronous
For the people, yes.
With email, message delivery can be async as well.
as in the server chats with another
Centralized servers in which 2 users talk can be considered “synchronous” because they get the message nearly instantly, but yea, we often use NoSQL async calls for instant messaging apps
Oh on a technical level yes. But on the surface it’s still asynchronous, as long as you can’t tell whether the other person has read your message (which, to be fair, a lot of messaging applications have as a feature)
IMAP is useful. POP can crawl back to the bowels of hell from whence it came.
JMAP is apparently the shiny new thing trying to replace IMAP.
Neat! I just did a quick read about it. JSON over HTTP would offer a lot of new features, most notably not requiring a persistent connection in the transport layer like IMAP in TCP. I’ll keep my eye on it. Thanks for the heads up!
This is why I kind of hate microblogging platforms. This could just be part of a conversation, but shown of context every post is turned into a soundbite and takes on levels of faux-profundity that they can’t possibly support. Yeah, email has been around forever; so what?
What faux-profundity is on display here? Sometimes people just talk. Sometimes this includes observations. Kinda like what you did with your comment. I don’t understand why you’re bringing hate to a tea chat, but I suppose it can be good to get off your chest.
Something could replace it easily if they tried to use the open standards and decentralized system like email has. But tech companies have gone too greedy, they won’t make anything that works with other tech companies. Every one of them are trying to pull users to themselves. Now we have people with account in 5 different websites to communicate with different people instead.
It is sad how far the technology has come. It’d allow so much improvements in quality of life and yet it’ll all being used to extract more money, making life shittier.
Remember when Steve Jobs said FaceTime was going to be an open protocol? Pepperidge Farms remembers.
Hahahaha, good one!
Mail has the big advantage of being totally cross platform. And it works, basically everywhere.
All the application protocols were supposed to be cross-platform! It’s something the corporatisation of the net undermined to an extent
Have to put every damn thing over port 80 (well, 443 now). HTTP(S) was never meant to do this shit.
JavaScript was originally designed to have cute little interact able things and to talk to a server.
Not whatever nonsense web devs come up with this week haha
It’s an ongoing debate in one of the projects I work with if we should move to a more forge oriented development process. For all it’s faults email does provide a good record of discussion as well as evidence of review.
I’ve not heard of this before, and a search finds a lot about Minecraft?
Forge is a newish term for systems like github, gitlab, forgejo, gitea, etc that provide source control, project management, issues, and discussion features for projects.
And more to the point, Forge is a free, open-source server that allows players to install and run Minecraft mods. It was designed with the intent to simplify compatibility between community-created game mods for Minecraft: Java Edition.
It sounds like maybe OP and their crew were maintaining Minecraft compatibility via e-mail prior to the release of Forge.
Wait does that mean comment thread OP isn’t using any of those things?
It’s not uncommon for older projects to use plain git, patch files, and email groups. Linux kernel development still gets done that way every day.
Ah right. I thought you meant that there was no project management or revision system. That does make more sense
The project management capabilities of GitLab are pretty nice, for what my opinion is worth.
Then Sourcehut is built around email, so that might be a good middle ground.
We use GitLab for hosting and CI as well as the issue tracker. Just the patch workflow goes over email although we have considered just maintainers submitting pull requests once the review and tags have been collected on list.
A lot of the more senior maintainers find the process of patch review in the webui suboptimal compared to email.
It’s reliable, it’s simple, it’s free, and virtually everyone who uses the internet has one. Email won’t be replaced for a LONG time.
There’s kinda no replacement
I wouldn’t call it reliable at all but it works good enough. All the other points are so big that they make up the flaws more than once.
Finally someone who understands email is a best effort model.
To be fair, if it is “free” you are probably paying your mail provider with your data.
Not necessarily. My university provides a mail box for every student and their privacy policy is quite transparent and honest. The only limitations are related to the rate you can send emails, to prevent spam.
Wouldn’t recommend it.
That’s like using your company email.
Ive met a bunch of people who deeply regret sending everything to their university email to have that inbox shut down after a few years. Heck, had a junior hire recently complain that her university email was the primary for her banking, and once it was shut down, she was struggling with trying to reset her password.
Well this discussion has turned from “there’s no free emai!” to “I don’t recommend using free email from your university because I heard this caused trouble to somebody else once” which is not the point, so I’m not sure how I’m supposed to reply.
Generally email that’s tied to your school or job is only active as long as you are a student/employee there, and given how many services don’t let you transfer email accounts at all even if you know you’re about to lose access and start migrating away you might not be able to.
Best practice is to separate out business, personal and academic into separate accounts and separate devices. No personal crap distracting you from your studies, no personal stuff that might endanger your job on your work email, and no sharing your personal email with randos at your job
I also have a work email address, but I use it for work stuff and I lose it if I end my contract. Can you keep your university address after you graduate?
I can keep the basic “user@university.br” one, I can’t keep the optional department-specific ones like “user@bioinformaticslab.university.br” if I quit my position or graduate.
Or your ISP just provides you with one when you sign up.
Their point still stands
I mean, not necessarily in that case I’d imagine, since one presumably pays the ISP for internet services, so any “free” things bundled with it could also simply be priced into that contract already.
That ToS definitely gives them the right to sell whatever data you provide to them though, at least in the US.
Sure, but won’t that happen regardless of if you use their email service or not?
Yes. The point I was saying stands is the “paying with data” bit more than the “free (as in beer)” bit. I know youre still paying to use an ISP :p
Not all of them anymore. Verizon doesn’t, for example.
Can never trust ISPs with that data.
They’re marketing companies too. And imagine sending critical health emails to a company who wants to also sell you services, and suddenly, you get ads for it.
critical health emails
If you’re concerned about privacy, then that’s a no-no. Unless your clinic accepts PGP encrypted messages.
And we both know they don’t.
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I assume he meant free like speech, not free like beer.
There are no gatekeepers to email, anyone can get a domain and their own server.
There are definitely gatekeepers. Even if your hosting provider isn’t blocking port 25 by default, SPF, DKIM and DMARC will see your emails going straight into the recipient’s junk folder/spam filter if not correctly configured. Hosting your own mail server at home is also a fantastic way to piss off your ISP, lose emails to downtime, have your IP blacklisted from many services and open up your environment to exploitation. It can be done but let’s not pretend that it’s easy or that there aren’t barriers to entry.
Mail servers are like filo pastry. Sure, you could go to the inconvenience and effort of making it yourself and I’m sure it’ll be very satisfying to do so. But 99% of professionals use the store bought version, and for good reason, because it’s a lot of effort for an end result that is no better and in all likelihood probably worse.
Mostly agree, but as someone who has been hosting my own email for years I can tell it is, in fact, better.
Quick note for hosting one on a residential IP - that would no longer piss any ISP off. You would simply not deliver anything anywhere due to IP being blacklisted by default.
If you don’t know what you’re doing, hosting an email server will not be a good time. It’s very easy to produce an environment that is easily exploited.
A somewhat inexpensive shared hosting plan allows you to host your own email though. I get it done for <$100/yr. and have little to no limitation over self-hosting.
You try that once, but it doesn’t last.
SPF, DKIM, and DMARC would like to have a gatekeeping word
Blacklists, greylists, whitelists. All just a big fuck you from the big vendors to anyone trying to self host.
There are four tiers of email hosting in my mind.
Tier 1: self hosted by nerds
Tier 2: sketchy fly by night scammers
Tier 3: new hosting companies trying to offer something different than what’s available
Tier 4: the big boys
I don’t want anything to do with tier 2. I want tier 2 wiped off the face of earth. This means tier 1 is just not gonna happen as long as tier 2 is around.
My mail server is in the cabinet above my desk.
I guess you’re right - my mail provider does have all my data - but my mail provider is Me!
I think WhatsApp has done it already in places like India
FidoNet was the gateway drug.
My emails are just: bullshit, crap, order confirmations as most stuff is bought online and boatloads of phishing.
My emails are: correspondence, article follow-ups, LAN party planning, and of course the occasional Luis Vuitton handbag offer (quite reasonably priced, actually).
I do have the kind of transactional message slop you describe, but I have a seperate email address for those.
And even instant and encrypted when using https://delta.chat/
its pretty cool
Sidenote: Remember when having an email address was enough, you didn’t have to have a fucking phone number as well? Stop trying to de-anonymize the internet, you’re making more problems than you’re solving
They will never willingly do it. Email marketing works very well compared to the money and effort companies put into it, and so does SMS. They will use every trick they can to get you to signup for one or both while avoiding being labeled an illegal spammer.
They’re not trying to solve any problem beyond their own, potential resistance to false authority.
or at least fill out the online forms for us
why put it on my web browser since they have us all pretty pretty pretty pegged my friend
The old internet was a crucible for robust software. Slow, small, unreliable, the very protocols that send data over the wire and through the air had to build in all kinds of fail-safe features to even approach usefulness. From this we got things like email (POP & SMTP), internet relay chat (IRC), and the world-wide web (HTTP). Things used to be so bad, that these technologies endure as extremely over-built in the modern era. And if things get worse, it will keep working as it always has. They’ll probably stick with us because of that.
