Think about it, you can pick an e-mail domain anywhere and use any e-mail client on any platform, to send an e-mail to someone anywhere else… We just take that for granted, but if e-mail were newly invented today by a company like say Meta, all the billions of people in the world would have to belong to that same single company in order to send and receive mail to anyone else…

E-mail’s greatest success lies in it’s open standards and decentralisation. It will no doubt me replaced at some point in the future, as all technologies will, but let us hope that instant messaging and social networks go back to being open and decentralised (like they too were once).

See https://www.sparkpost.com/blog/a-look-back-at-50-years-of-email/

#technology #email #decentralisation #openstandards #deletemeta

  • uberstar@lemmy.ml
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    3 years ago

    That’s all fine and dandy until you gleefully enter your email on websites or services, only to get a “Sorry! We don’t recognize that domain. Please use a Gmail, Hotmail/Outlook, Yahoo or iCloud address or fuck off!”

    And the trend to whitelist only a small number of email services and block everything else is becoming the norm, all in the name of “fighting spam”.

    • Lionel C-R@lemmy.coupou.fr
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      3 years ago

      Wow, that never happened to me In the ten years I’ve been hosting my e-mails but I would avoid those websites like the plague.

      The only weird thing I encounter is some site asking to replace my tld (.re) thinking that I’m mistaking

    • Echedenyan@lemmy.ml
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      3 years ago

      A good way to fight that is using custom domains whenever you give a mail address directly (in person) to a public administration or company.

      They will be forced to solve it if it doesn’t work and this will go as a reverse trend.

      Sending complaints to the services also work.

    • Helix 🧬@feddit.deB
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      3 years ago

      Well, I usually fuck off then and most of the time I’m rewarded by my information not leaking from people who don’t understand technology.

    • GadgeteerZA@lemmy.mlOP
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      3 years ago

      Yes true, and for that reason too around span. There are like three heavy steps to jump through to get your self-hosted mail recognised, but it is a bit of a pain.