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On 10/10/13 00:27, Martijn Grooten wrote: > On Thu, 10 Oct 2013, Simon Waters wrote: > >> Email is long overdue an overhaul > > I've long argued against this. Spam, which many see as proof that email > is broken, isn't a good argument for such an overhaul. Mass-surveillance > may be, though I'm still not convinced. I was actually thinking from a general technology perspective, it wasn't terribly clever (just simple) to start with, and has accumulated a LOT of extras. So much so it is almost certain your mail client supports dross like uuencoding, 7 bit armoring, even dare I say "SMTP" (rather than dialects of) and other stuff that almost certainly isn't needed, and is either rarely used, or overused and wasteful. As a result email is a huge cost to generate clients for, the functionality is largely moribund (all those extras mean you can attach a file a bazillion different ways, and it is less likely to be plain text somewhere but it basically feels like it did before IP protocol took over except you have a bigger network), because any radical change has to be slowly evolved in. Kind of hoping something like Google Wave would catch on, although ideally federated. We are seeing a lot of experimenting, to the point now where most of my interactions are not via email. Facebook, Twitter, other micro-blogging, Skype, and other mostly proprietary formats are taking the lion's share of my interactions. Although email still works pretty well for this sort of discussion if people follow the conventions. I don't think any single proprietary format will win out because they are ultimately exclusive. There a some folk Facebook really don't want, and they'll want to talk to people, possibly each other. I agree on spam in that if you want to allow anyone to contact you with no major hurdle or impediment you'll get spam. Even if there is a small cost, like SMS, if the cost is below the message's worth people will pay it. You can design systems to block spam easily, but they all throw the baby out, as you can't then talk to someone without an introduction (or some other big barrier being crossed). You can move the costs of spam somewhat by designing systems like DJB did where the message is kept by the sender, but that has other drawbacks. -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq