"SMTP has outlived its usefulness" (was: Forwarding services)

At least for my purposes in this side-thread, the context is growing authoritarianism in previously-liberal-democracies, and so the (eventual) threat-model I consider - in terms of a threat to society generally in being able to organise itself to resist in the face of some future significant over-reach - is the nation-state and its SIGINT, for a value of SIGINT that acknowledges that many of these previously-liberal-democracies co-operate and share wrt SIGINT. Even if other members did not wish to support a particular member engaged in some over-reach, the sharing of data and of exploits may /already/ have been carried as a routine thing prior to whatever over-reach and civil issues that arise.

You or I may not face any threat today. We don't know about the future. We may not even participate in any wrong-doing/resistance, but some "AI" tool may flag us as suspicious for whatever combination of various innocuous things the "AI" hallucinates as suspicious, leading to some agent then blindly putting the various threads in the data together to figure out that dskoll.ca was paid for by various cards belonging to you and putting further agents on the case to "just doing their job" to haul you in and ransack your house and anything else to look for further evidence.

We're not there yet, but we're sliding towards to it.

Now, the point where we still feel we don't /really/ need anonymity, the point where we can see how "Think of the Children!" is a fair trade-off, the point /before/ the over-reach that leads us to need anonymity, is the point where the authorities remove anonymity from us - quite naturally. And this is the point where we should resist that, even though there are seemingly reasonable "But... the children!" arguments.