A farewell to email

Posted Oct 17, 2018 7:27 UTC (Wed) by halla (subscriber, #14185)
Parent article: A farewell to email

I was at first all like, no no! If email goes, the world ends. Then I realized that, despite getting still getting over a thousand mails a day from various mailing lists, my own project doesn't much use its mailing list anymore. No discussions -- discussions are on IRC of Phabricator. No user support, that's on the forum, or bugzilla (where it doesn't belong) or whereever the user is. Commits nor review requests nor patches go to the mailing list. The announcement for the weekly meeting on irc is what's mostly filling the archive.

A farewell to email

Posted Oct 18, 2018 2:17 UTC (Thu) by ThinkRob (guest, #64513) [Link] (4 responses)

So that's obviously one facet of the issue. And an important one. But you also touched on other mediums (forums and bugzilla), and made me realize that there's something else important here:

Aside from IRC and established FOSS web apps, e-mail is one of the few mediums that is inherently open and that cannot have that openness cut off by a single entity.

That last part is important, because without consideration of that you get people suggesting Slack c. 2016.

2016: "Oh, but it's got an IRC and XMPP gateway, so you can just use clients for that and it's totally fine and just as good as open!"

2018: "We're shutting off all non-Slack clients. Bye!"

e-mail is inherently federated, distributed, and multi-implementation. You can't effectively prevent open clients from using it, even if you wanted to. But any third party chat, discussion, etc. service? It's only as "open" as the platform-owners want it to be. And that's frequently inversely correlated with their hunger for profit.

A farewell to email

Posted Oct 18, 2018 7:59 UTC (Thu) by halla (subscriber, #14185) [Link] (3 responses)

But email from small domains or servers is increasingly being blocked. I cannot mail one of my customers, Intel, from my own mail server, hosted and managed by my provider, anymore because apparently it's got a "poor reputation":

"host mga04.intel.com[192.55.52.120] refused to talk to me: 554-mga04.intel.com 554 Your connection to this mail system has been rejected due to the sending MTAs poor reputation"

I don't know what to about that... Other than trying to mail Intel from my gmail account.

A farewell to email

Posted Oct 18, 2018 9:36 UTC (Thu) by gioele (subscriber, #61675) [Link]

> But email from small domains or servers is increasingly being blocked. I cannot mail one of my customers, Intel, from my own mail server, hosted and managed by my provider, anymore because apparently it's got a "poor reputation":
>
> "host mga04.intel.com[192.55.52.120] refused to talk to me: 554-mga04.intel.com 554 Your connection to this mail system has been rejected due to the sending MTAs poor reputation"
>
> I don't know what to about that... Other than trying to mail Intel from my gmail account.

There are many reputation services that can help you understand why your server is being blocked. A good, free and easy to use service is https://www.mail-tester.com/.

When it comes to reputation, it is not only your IP that counts, but also your network. For example, I have once been temporarily banned by GMail because my IP was in a "bad neighborhood" (subnet) in which other IPs where previously used for spam and many of them blacklisted. I notified the server provider and they contacted the blacklist operators resolved the issue.

A farewell to email

Posted Oct 18, 2018 10:36 UTC (Thu) by ptman (subscriber, #57271) [Link]

I've found it useful to monitor blacklists, e.g. with free https://hetrixtools.com/pricing/blacklist-monitor/

A farewell to email

Posted Oct 20, 2018 4:56 UTC (Sat) by ThinkRob (guest, #64513) [Link]

Fair point. But (donning my optimist hat): that's only on the relay side of the equation, not the client side.

Even if you do use one of the "big players" in the e-mail space -- and there are a lot of commercial e-mail providers out there, evil and otherwise -- it's still totally open on the consumption side. Until SMTP, POP, and IMAP are purged from the face of the earth, my provider can't reasonably prevent me from using whatever interface I'd like to access my mail[1]. And (thankfully) the stalemate between the various providers means that nobody's going to do that in the foreseeable future.

That's a vanishingly rare property for a hosted service nowadays, and it makes me quite reluctant to declare e-mail "dead"!

[1] Although IMAP is such a wacky standard that it may as well be obfuscated!