On Wed, Dec 21, 2022 at 1:12 PM John R. Levine <johnl@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
>>> This month there has been a marked increase in the amount of IETF
>>> e-mail that my ESP classifies as junk
>>> Something has changed, either in the headers that the IETF is putting
>>> on its e-mails or in the criteria that the ESP uses to classify
>>> e-mail, I would think.
Pretty sure it's the latter since as we've seen other people don't have
that problem. Microsoft's spam filtering is famously random.
For once I agree with Keith, set up the IETF's IMAP server in your MUA and
subscribe to the folders for the lists you're interested in. The initial
setup in Thunderbird is kind of a pain because it makes helpful
assumptions that are wrong, but once it's set up, it works well. Having
the messages sorted into folders for each list makes things considerably
eaier to follow.
That works for folk who use a single machine to process all their mail.
Works less well for those of us who switch between three primary machines (desktop, laptop, tablet) during the day and multiple secondaries (phones).
Gmail is hardly ideal, it is a bit of a faff to have to remember to set up a filter each time I join a list.
But again, this requirement is a subset of the requirements for a killer Fediverse reader/interaction application. And we are likely to be seeing several of those. The developers of several bird site apps have switched development to Mastodon.
My expectation is that over 2023, we will see the emergence of a new feedreader application with the following properties:
1) Consume social media feeds in multiple open formats (RSS, ActivityPub).
2) Support end-to-end asynchronous and synchronous messaging.
3) Support legacy proprietary social media (Twitter, Facebook).
If you map out the trajectories, it is actually very plausible that under the right conditions, such an application can consume the SMTP world. That is not going to happen in 2023 but conditions will be set that make that possible.
Such an application would also be the final nail in the coffin for telephone service.
To be clear, I don't expect anyone to be shutting down email or telephone immediately. But the emergence of an open infrastructure will establish conditions similar to what we saw with fax which was rendered functionally obsolete by MIME in 1995 but was still an essential business tool that I still needed support for in 2005. Sometime between 2005 and 2015, I unplugged the telephone line that serves the office and I haven't sent or received a fax since.
