On Sat, Aug 26, 2023 at 1:41 PM Keith Moore <moore@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On 8/26/23 13:21, Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote:
I am not sure what Keith is referring to but Mesh Messaging is interactive.Just to clarify, I haven't had your mesh in mind in any of these discussions. I don't claim to have a comprehensive enough understanding of it to evaluate it, and I personally suspect that it's still much easier to evolve the current email system to work better (daunting though this may be) than to transition to a clean-sheet design.
Keith
We disagree :-)
The point here is that these interactive applications are all applications that are normally the province of smartphone apps. So these are already separated from SMTP email.
I don't think SMTP email can evolve at this point and there is a good reason for that: It has already been evolved through 40 years of use. As a result, there are many existing uses of email that stand in the way of changing it further. Not the least of these being the whole spam filtering infrastructure.
The other reason for a clean slate design is that the only reason this stuff is remotely practical is that every message is signed and encrypted and subject to access control at the receiver end. It is not possible to send unwanted and indiscriminate messages in the Mesh. It is not possible to send a message and deny responsibility.
SMTP lacks access control and accountability and there is really no possibility of retrofitting them.
Mesh messaging is not going to replace general email overnight. But every Mesh messaging user can exchange messages with every other (after authorization and contact exchange). So I expect that just as people have moved from email to Signal for certain things, there will be a drift from SMTP mail to Mesh mail for non-interactive.
The devil is always in the deployment but there is a story here that is relevant because it is the story Roger Hurwitz told me when he convinced me to leave MIT and join VeriSign.
A man goes to the temple every day and calls out 'Lord! Lord! may I win the lottery'
This goes on day after day for forty years; 'Lord! Lord! may I win the lottery'
On the last day of the fortieth year, the man comes to temple and cries out 'Lord! Lord! may I win the lottery' and a booming voice is heard from the tabernacle, 'MEET ME HALF-WAY, BUY A TICKET'.
We will never know what is possible unless we try. What we are proposing is probably more likely than not to fail. But HTTP/HTML was after all not much more than an improvement on FTP, it was the missing link that unlocked a world of electronic commerce that added trillions of dollars to the global economy.
Nobody disputes the value of SMTP. But how much more value would a secure, reliable version bring? It might not be trillions of dollars a year but it would certainly have a major impact, it would add to the value of every technology business and it would bring real benefits to Internet users.
