434
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 10 Nov 2023
434 points (97.4% liked)
Technology
59340 readers
1411 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email#Issues
Not one of them seem to be major and inherent to the technology. Size limits are arbitrary. Privacy concerns can be addressed with the likes of encryption. Email fatigue is a ridiculous reason to gripe about.
Address spoofing is probably the most annoying but could be addressed my making the actual email the header. So that's an implementation issue.
Size limits aren't arbitrary. Email format translates attachments to ASCII which makes them larger and harder to process. Mail servers need to scan and handle messages which means they will need to impose limits to be able to work well. Back in the day when Gmail didn't it quickly started being abused by people using it as online storage.
Encryption is difficult to implement with a system that performs multi-point handoff, and works against some use cases like corporate use where you want virus scanning.
Try to design an alternative email system and you'll see how quickly you start losing features that make it interesting and useful. For example, for all its faults email is very user-centric and portable, you can easily take your domain and move your addresses to a different provider. How many other communication services can you say that about?