There was only one major addition to MIME. Basically created on a napkin by two guys, MIME never went further than 1.0 because nobody agreed to upgrade it. By today standard, this format is very hard to parse and has been awfully abused with HTML emails, trackers, etc. Emails are encoded in a very impractical format called MIME 1.0. The impact of monopolies on email impacted the format of emails themselves. And even that is though as Cory Doctorow learned. You need a mail server properly configured with a permanent connection to act as a sender identity. One clear consequence is that you can’t send email from your computer anymore as it was originally intended. It might not have been on purpose but it was the case (source : I maintained multiple independent mail servers between 20). Having lots of power, those huge monopolistic beasts could easily reject mails from independent servers as spam, making their service even more attractive to customers. This had the side effect of making it harder and harder to set up your own mail server.Īs homemade mail servers were harder to build and less reliable, email started to consolidate into a small oligopoly: Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo and a handful of others. You could receive spam in a language you didn’t even speak.Ĭomplex protocols have been added on top of SMTP, relying once again on DNS (SPF, Dmarc,DKIM), to try controlling the spam by making email a sender-and-receiver protocol (a notion I will describe in a subsequent post). By random spam I mean that spammers were really generating random mail addresses (or scrapping them over the web) and sending trillions of emails to every possible address. 15 years ago, most of the mail traffic was random spam. The first and obvious problem with email is that it has been developed 40 years ago as a receiver-only protocol. It became so long I figured it should be an independent post on its own. This post was written as part of another one where I described how I’m building Offmini. This prompted me to write about what was bad with email. I’m currently thinking deeply about Offmini, a protocol which would be to email what Gemini is to the web. The mail protocol has followed a similar evolution but it’s a bit more subtle and has often been summarised as « too much email. ![]() If you are on Gemini, you probably see what I’m talking about. Lot has been said about how the web evolved to become a kind of monstrous entity. Blog Livres Software À Propos The Monstrosity Email Has Become
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