<story><title>UUCP must stay; Fetchmail sucks (2001)</title><url>https://docs.freebsd.org/cgi/getmsg.cgi?fetch=585008+0+archive/2001/freebsd-arch/20010218.freebsd-arch</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>KirinDave</author><text>Well, part of this is on us. Let&amp;#x27;s think on the reasons Gmail is so popular:&lt;p&gt;1. It&amp;#x27;s very easy to get to.&lt;p&gt;2. It has incredibly fast search that has 0 setup.&lt;p&gt;We have never really even tried to address problem 1 as an open source community. Networks, name lookup, and VPNs remain incredibly complex topics that beginners cannot hope to wrestle with. The best we have is .mdns which either works magically or perversely refuses to work.&lt;p&gt;Similarly for free text search, the software world simply hasn&amp;#x27;t delivered a lego-like solution for email search. You CAN rig up any number of open source projects but it is neither easy nor instant. And even other professional products like Apple Mail struggle with a mere gigabyte of email.&lt;p&gt;Despite the fact that it&amp;#x27;s 2021 and every successful email provider aggressively solves these problems, the open source world still debates about the utility of ubiquitous search or pretends that local networking isn&amp;#x27;t a pressing problem.</text></item><item><author>rasengan</author><text>I used to use UUCP to get my email when I was on a dialup, non permanent connection. I was able to host my own mail server.  There were a lot of technologies back then helping the internet stay somewhat decentralized.  Now I, like most, just use Gmail.&lt;p&gt;What has become of our beloved free(digital)land?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jerf</author><text>&amp;quot;We have never really even tried to address problem 1 as an open source community. Networks, name lookup, and VPNs remain incredibly complex topics that beginners cannot hope to wrestle with.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;I kinda disagree. It&amp;#x27;s probably easier than ever to set up your own mail server, in some abstract sense. You can get a virtual machine, use docker, heck, someone can hand you a complete image that you just have to bring up and set up with some config.&lt;p&gt;The problem is, it literally doesn&amp;#x27;t matter how much the &amp;#x27;open source&amp;#x27; community comes together, it simply &lt;i&gt;can not&lt;/i&gt; provide a turn key solution as good as&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;     Desired email account: [________]@gmail.com
     Password:              [________]
     Verify Password:       [________]
     [X] I agree to have all my data used in arbitrary ways
&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;
It&amp;#x27;s not possible. There is no way to set up a server that easily, even in principle.&lt;p&gt;Or at least, not in a sane way. I can set up a site where you feed me your credit card number and pick a domain name, and I set up your AWS account for you, register your DNS name for you, configure DNS, and stand up everything you need and set it all up... but then we&amp;#x27;ve got a split ownership interest. I can hand it all back to you, but you don&amp;#x27;t understand the setup. I can give you root on the system, but when you change anything, my automation stops working.</text></comment>
<story><title>UUCP must stay; Fetchmail sucks (2001)</title><url>https://docs.freebsd.org/cgi/getmsg.cgi?fetch=585008+0+archive/2001/freebsd-arch/20010218.freebsd-arch</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>KirinDave</author><text>Well, part of this is on us. Let&amp;#x27;s think on the reasons Gmail is so popular:&lt;p&gt;1. It&amp;#x27;s very easy to get to.&lt;p&gt;2. It has incredibly fast search that has 0 setup.&lt;p&gt;We have never really even tried to address problem 1 as an open source community. Networks, name lookup, and VPNs remain incredibly complex topics that beginners cannot hope to wrestle with. The best we have is .mdns which either works magically or perversely refuses to work.&lt;p&gt;Similarly for free text search, the software world simply hasn&amp;#x27;t delivered a lego-like solution for email search. You CAN rig up any number of open source projects but it is neither easy nor instant. And even other professional products like Apple Mail struggle with a mere gigabyte of email.&lt;p&gt;Despite the fact that it&amp;#x27;s 2021 and every successful email provider aggressively solves these problems, the open source world still debates about the utility of ubiquitous search or pretends that local networking isn&amp;#x27;t a pressing problem.</text></item><item><author>rasengan</author><text>I used to use UUCP to get my email when I was on a dialup, non permanent connection. I was able to host my own mail server.  There were a lot of technologies back then helping the internet stay somewhat decentralized.  Now I, like most, just use Gmail.&lt;p&gt;What has become of our beloved free(digital)land?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sumtechguy</author><text>Another issue that needs to be solved is &amp;#x27;bad actor&amp;#x27;.  Basically someone gaming the system and overloading it with spam.  There is no real nice neat way to fix that.  Instead it is a mishmash of blacklists&amp;#x2F;whitelists&amp;#x2F;blocklists and sorta intelligent alg filtering.  Getting that all filled and working is not trivial either.  Oh its &amp;#x27;doable&amp;#x27; but kind of a pain for even someone with decent experience at it.</text></comment>