Hi Keith,
At 09:46 AM 24-08-2023, Keith Moore wrote:
But some specific failures (in no particular order):
We have, IMO, largely failed to make email interoperable in the
presence of spam filters. Making email delivery reliable is
currently, as far as I can tell, a dark art.
The filters are there to catch unwanted mail. As an anecdote, there
was a public mailing list for Trust discussions. That mailing list
archives contained a lot of marketing messages. The people running
the service may have used some secrete recipes to make the mailing
list usable. It's about the same for other sites which run a mail
service. That is not to say that there aren't any deliverability hurdles.
The widespread use of email from mobile handheld devices has had a
tremendous effect on the usability of email for technical
collaboration, such as IETF does. I used to call this problem
"Blackberry disease" because I recognized that the people reading
email on Blackberry devices (i.e. some of the first handheld devices
to support email) were completely unwilling to read a message more
than a few lines long. You might think IETF would be in a good
position to address those issues, as we have long and deep
experience using email for collaboration on long technical documents.
I would view the adoption of email on smartphones as something
positive. Nowadays, people at my location use a social media app
instead of email to exchange messages, photos, etc. as that is what
works for them.
I would not use a smartphone to collaborate on a long document. That
is a matter of personal preference. There are web-based alternatives
for collaboration. It's up to the individual to choose the
alternative which, in his/her opinion, is the better alternative.
We haven't made emailed HTML work well, or even predictably, from
one MUA to another.
The change controller for the format was the W3C.
We have failed to keep email relevant, in the public's view, except
perhaps for business-to-business communications.
Yes.
Regards,
S. Moonesamy
