On 8/21/23 17:51, John R Levine wrote:
It appears that Phillip Hallam-Baker <phill@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> said:SMTP email is not the only messaging format in use and it has been
gradually losing market share.
I suppose, although people have been predicting the death of e-amil for decades and it's still the only messaging system we have that actually interoperates.
It interoperates rather poorly these days. Spam filters are a
big part of the problem, but there are several others, including
increasing variation in MSP behavior.
Person to person communication is no longer limited to email, there is
instant messaging, chat, voice and video all growing in popularity. The EU
has decided those infrastructures are going to interoperate no matter what
the execs of certain trillion dollar enterprises would like to happen. And
they certainly have widespread popular support for that.
Yup. I suppose it would be nice to send messages from Whatsapp to iMessage but we all know how hard it is to do that without letting everyone in the middle read it.
That's far from the only problem. I remember the days of several
different incompatible email systems that barely interoperated.
That's exactly where we'd be again if we relied on the various
proprietary messaging systems to talk to each other. And those
systems are going to want to keep differentiating themselves from
one another, keep joggling for market share, keep compromising
their customers' privacy (regardless of what they claim) whether
to monetize the information they mine about their users, or sell
it to the government, or what.
So it is a matter of when, not if a mail format is added to those other
messaging formats once interop is achieved.
But mail achieved interop forty years ago. It may have its problems, but that's not one of them.
It's become somewhat worse since then. What's the chance that a
legitimate first message sent from a random sender to a random
recipient will get there? I'm guessing about half. Ordinary
people routinely try to send messages to and from different
addresses in order to get past spam filters.
IETF has basically failed to maintain email for the last several
decades, and the negligence is showing.
Keith
