- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
Interesting history and analysis of SMTP’s history. How can we prevent fedi and other open protocols from suffering the same fates?
You must log in or register to comment.
I know there are problems with big email providers subverting decentralisation to benefit their business models, and throttling mail from independent or self-hosted domains. But I couldn’t take the analysis seriously past this statement:
You may know me as a Bitcoin educator and engineer.
Yeah well, in that case, fuck you and the hypercapitalist horse you rode in on.
“Sent from my iPhone”
I hate this meme vehemently
I think you might be 180° missing the point of the meme
Probably, my media literacy is at an all time low, like the rest of the US. The microplastics, social-media induced ADHD, and antipsychotics have turned me into a gibbering mess.
It’s an ungoogled Android actually, but I can see how that ruins your joke 🙂
Based Lemmy user
You may know me as a Bitcoin educator and engineer.
Yeah well, in that case, fuck you and the hypercapitalist horse you rode in on.
This guy is a protocol engineer, talking about protocols. You may not like like Bitcoin, but it’s pretty hard to argue it’s not one of the most successful, widely-used, and forked open source protocols developed in the last several decades. Bitcoin core is in the top 100 starred repos on Github. It has a unicode character.
Bitcoin’s market cap (> 1 trillion USD) is bigger than Sweden’s GDP and it moves billions of dollars around the world every year. You can use it to send money to anybody with a phone and a halfway reliable internet connection in under a second for pennies in fees, and it settles instantly. And it’s been working for 15 years without a single hour of downtime, bank holiday, or hack despite pandemics, wars, financial crises, and attempted bans by global powers.
Like, be mad if you want, but it’s a pretty successful and robust protocol. And if you don’t like it, you can fork it and change it, because it’s open source.
http, https, ssh, ntp, ftp. These are all algorithms some of us use every day. Bitcoin is a protocol, true, but it’s not a good one. And it’s one that most people have not used, and don’t intend to
It has a lot of forks? that is neither here nor there. it’s a tech buzzword. of course there are going to be a lot of forks. Do any of them actually go anywhere though? not really
God damn bitcoin >> SSH?? (1999)
That’s a pretty steamy take if I’ve ever heard one
@Sethayy nobody made that take…
‘One of the most successful, widely used, and forked protocols’
SSH is also a protocol, tho I’ll admit maybe its ‘one of the few’ above bitcoin - but I can come up with a page of examples that top it if you need (HTTP, TCP, UDP, RTSP, RGMII…)
@Sethayy cool, go ahead. But still nobody made that take, so … you are arguing with the wind.
Bitcoin is hypercapitalist? A decentralized value store not controlled by any one country and immune to money printing inflation? What are you smoking?
Bitcoin is more widely seen as a vehicle for speculation rather than a decentralized currency. Unlucky.
well to be fair bitcoin is on point as a decentralized currency.
And threads will be the death of decentralized lemmy. But we still have mailing lists, and most of my mails go to decentralized users on those lists. You just gotta know where to look, and you’ll find gold.
You can’t successfully use a home email server.
Mostly true (server can be home but using the ISP network directly probably won’t work)
You can’t successfully use an email server on a (cloud) VPS.
Bullshit
You can’t successfully use an email server on a bare metal machine in your own datacenter.
Bullshit
As such, it is my distinct displeasure to declare the death of SMTP. The protocol is no longer usable. And as we can see, this devolution occurred organically.
Bullshit
You can’t successfully use an email server on a bare metal machine in your own Datacenter
Calling complete BS on that. I work in a medium size company and we do just that. Don’t know what he’s thinking.
I’m going to add “bullshit” to the first. I’ve gone 2 decades running a few email domains on my home servers, on 3 different ISPs. Its not rocket surgery.
Same here minus about 15 years
Same here. Static IP though. I did set up another experiment with a haproxy vps just to see if I could do it if I lost my static IP, worked perfectly done that way too.
Fail2ban, pfblocker, and soamassassin work great.
Ive been using DDNS :p
My sending got blocked from dynamic IPs, maybe things have changed though
Can, yes.
Should, maybe.
Enjoy doing, unlikely.
And for sure your home isp has all the email ports blocked upstream.
With all that being said, to call SMTP dead is wildly insane. I do figure it will die someday though. Probably around the same time of universal IPV6 adoption during the year of the linux desktop.
My ISP doesn’t. It an electric company that offers fiber, so not your typical telecommunications company. Still though, not a single blocked port.
On topic, I tried an email server and it is too much of a pain in the ass IMHO, without the requisite training and experience, but certainly not impossible.
My most recent ISP does CGNAT. They don’t hide it, it’s mentioned in their support pages. A quick email is all it takes to switch you over to an open address though.
Anyway I’ve got a $5/mo server with akami that looks after my email and it’s associated domain.
It took about three hours of following a guide to set up DMARC and etc etc and it works unobtrusively, and is about ten times faster than my old ISP IMAP account that I had for about twenty years.
Do you have a link to the guide by any chance? I might try it again using one of my throw away domains as a test.
It was one of LinuxBabe’s guides - this one:
https://www.linuxbabe.com/mail-server/setup-basic-postfix-mail-sever-ubuntu
There is a more recent one that uses a shell script to install all the bits and pieces but I prefer to do it myself so I’ve got at least some idea of how all the pieces work.
This is very helpful. Thank you!
I should have expected the rug-pull at the end when I read:
You may know me as a Bitcoin educator and engineer
However, I was still surprised!
Immediately skeptical by the ai generated tombstone as the article image, and the skepticism was warranted. Massive L take from a “bitcoin educator”.
I don’t buy this. I’m still using SMTP on my own domain and it’s working fine, a bit of spam but not unmanageable, real messages get read. Main challenge is digesting so many potentially-interesting list messages, indicating email’s continued dominance for professional topics. Seems this author has another agenda.
Having said that, it’s a pity the world never agreed a protocol for micro-payment for emails (and for many other services), which would resolve the spam problem, and not be a burden for honest users.
