@newt well, smtp is for transfering mail. everything else is just remote control of mailboxes :) (regarding jmap: that looks like some web frontend devs thought "i can do mail, but better because json" ;)

so.. the problem is that someone you want to send an email to has a mailbox at a shitty provider. smtp is working perfectly fine. don't kill the messenger :D

@bonifartius json is better than the competition due to ubiquitous parsers for every language out there. Seriously, if your only criticism is json, you’re doing a very bad job.

I like the new "release" they've had, allowing for comments, superfluous commas and stuff like that. Even though it makes the parser a bit more complex, it's actually better if you don't have to pollute existing lines in diffs where you're adding new items at the end of a list / dictionary.

receipts and sauce: https://nigeltao.github.io/blog/2021/json-with-commas-comments.html

@mar77i @bonifartius we’re talking about a network protocol here, not files intended for humans to read

I've been using JSON myself for a lot of things. I like that it's widely supported and less hurtful to human eyes than xml, when pretty-printed. Trailing commas? Who needs them,

@newt @bonifartius Providers hating you isn't a protocol problem. Would you go on a rant about ActivityPub because some fedi instance blocked yours and some user on it didn't receive your posts?
Anyway, SPF Records and related configuration/trust hassles were what pushed my employer to switch from self-hosted Exchange to Microsoft 365. Big providers are tolerating outsider minorities less and less as it makes things marginally easier for them to exclude a class of spammers at the expense of pissing off a rapidly shrinking group of non-customers.

@birdulon @bonifartius except these factors are connected. Can you imagine what a pain in the ass it is to develop and maintain a decent email client? This is why providers like GMail are so popular. They provide good UI, among other things. And this is what allows them to treat other users, especially from smaller servers like trash.

Fedi isn't even as bad as email ecosystem is right now. 70% of all email traffic goes through GMail. If 95% of fedi servers disappeared overnight, it would be a disaster for fedi. If 95% of email servers disappeared, not that many people would even notice.

With that, not that many people actually use email for communication these days at all. A few old corporate farts, maybe. Open source devs, sure. For the rest of us, email is just a way to prove account ownership and receive spam from various services.

@newt @birdulon @bonifartius The reports of the imminent death of email have been greatly exaggerated for the last 40 years.

@pingviini @bonifartius @birdulon what's "death of email"? If by that you mean all servers shut down, this will probably never ever happen. But ask your friends around, when was the last time any of them wrote an email. My bet is, in the past 12 months none or close to none of them wrote a single message.

Most of emails I send are to various mailing lists and this is tightly related to my work as a software engineer. Outside of this field, email for me is dead.

@newt @bonifartius >Can you imagine what a pain in the ass it is to develop and maintain a decent email client?
How is any of that a protocol issue? Frontend is always going to be substantially more development effort than firing off mail via SMTP or interacting with a remote mailbox via IMAP. The protocols could be zero effort (and in fact practically are if you use existing libraries) and it wouldn't make a dent in this.

The main draw of webmail 20 years ago was having an email service that wasn't tied to your ISP - even as recently as 4 years ago I dealt with people who kept a bad ISP deal going because they deemed it too much of a business risk to change addresses given how many printed reports had that address on them. Being able to easily access the inbox from any computer was a bonus too.

The option was always there to self-host email with one's own domain, but that was never going to cut it for many people - many of which wouldn't have a 24/7 internet-connected machine. Even for those that did, keeping them secure was non-trivial, and being compromised almost always results in being used as a spam relay, which many providers don't appreciate and will happily block you for.

I don't see how blaming the protocols makes any sense, all of the issues come down to fundamental elements of asynchronous communications between digital nomads. The infrastructure has to be there to store and serve the mail in the absence of always-connected clients, and for better or worse Google has taken up that mantle for most email users. I'm sure someone somewhere has proposed some private-messaging-over-blockchain gimmick with striking similarities to Matrix, and that's just about the only protocol-level solution I see to those requirements.