<story><title>The Hostile Email Landscape</title><url>http://liminality.xyz/the-hostile-email-landscape/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>cm2187</author><text>The problem is not so much the attitude of the big guys. It is that smtp is fundamentally broken. we need a better mail protocol that ensures:
1. Traffic always encrypted and content always signed
2. Guarantee that the sender is who it claims he is
3. Decorrelating the email from the domain, a lot of users are prisoners of their current provider just because the address they gave everyone ends with the provider&amp;#x27;s domain name, very much like it is very hard to switch bank accounts
4. Ability to provide disposable adresses which can be deleted when spammed&lt;p&gt;3 and 4 would require a sort of token system</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>adekok</author><text>&amp;gt; It is that smtp is fundamentally broken.&lt;p&gt;Because the SMTP cabal is fanatically opposed to changing it.&lt;p&gt;The response I had 15 years ago was &amp;quot;It takes 10 years to deploy any serious changes to a protocol&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;Uh... so?  Does that mean we shouldn&amp;#x27;t do it?&lt;p&gt;Apparently, yes.  15 years later, there have been no substantive changes to SMTP.&lt;p&gt;Repeat after me, SMTP is perfect.  It&amp;#x27;s perfect!  Well, there are a few known issues.  But it&amp;#x27;s deployed!  It&amp;#x27;s too hard to change.  You&amp;#x27;re trying to change it?  You&amp;#x27;re a terrible person who doesn&amp;#x27;t understand SMTP.&lt;p&gt;I got that for 5 years before giving up and going to more productive lines of work.</text></comment>
<story><title>The Hostile Email Landscape</title><url>http://liminality.xyz/the-hostile-email-landscape/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>cm2187</author><text>The problem is not so much the attitude of the big guys. It is that smtp is fundamentally broken. we need a better mail protocol that ensures:
1. Traffic always encrypted and content always signed
2. Guarantee that the sender is who it claims he is
3. Decorrelating the email from the domain, a lot of users are prisoners of their current provider just because the address they gave everyone ends with the provider&amp;#x27;s domain name, very much like it is very hard to switch bank accounts
4. Ability to provide disposable adresses which can be deleted when spammed&lt;p&gt;3 and 4 would require a sort of token system</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>JoshTriplett</author><text>&amp;gt; Decorrelating the email from the domain, a lot of users are prisoners of their current provider just because the address they gave everyone ends with the provider&amp;#x27;s domain name, very much like it is very hard to switch bank accounts&lt;p&gt;This one seems completely uninteresting in a world in which $15&amp;#x2F;year can get you your own domain name, complete with reliable email servers, IMAP, and as many email aliases as you like at that domain.  Given that, why create an entire infrastructure to &amp;quot;decouple&amp;quot; email addresses from domains?</text></comment>