A Look Back at 50 Years of Email - SparkPost
www.sparkpost.com
October 29, 2021 is a day to commemorate 50 years of email. Take a look back at how far email has come and where we're headed next.

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

  • VonMax@lemmy.ml
    1·
    3 years ago

    Well I don’t use Email for any business/confidential discussion, I use Matrix/Element chat for that. Email is mostly relegated to notifications on successful login, Terms of Service change, and so forth, that’s really it.

    Only idiots use email for confidential communication, it’s not end to end encrypted unless you go out of your way to use PGP, have your recipient give you the key and encrypt the email yourself.

    Plus email have a pretty tiny file size upload limit compared to Matrix/Element chat which support up to 100 MB out of the box.

    • GadgeteerZA@lemmy.mlOP
      1·
      3 years ago

      You missed encrypted attachments - I get lots of my bank statements and similar with encrypted PDF attachments on e-mail. In my own case certainly a good half plus of business communications come either via e-mail or SMS - both being open standards. The point I was actually making was not about us all going back to e-mail, but rather that many mainstream messenger services and social networks cannot be broadly used, as you have to belong to that specific service to be messaged or message someone else. Where it should be more like e-mail is with having more generic open standards to communicate BETWEEN different messaging and social networks, a bit like ActivityPub works across different social networks in the Fediverse.

      Some business I see adopt WhatsApp, but many people don’t use WhatsApp so that breaks as a universal messenger to reach everyone.