SMTP: email messages are sent through parties that neither the recipient nor the sender HAS ANY CONTROL of. Legitim messages are often not delivered (for various reasons), and unsolicited messages often pass through.
SMTP is fundamentally flawed.
The email system is deteriorating continuously, and as of 2017 no one in their right mind should trust that messages pass as they should
- or even that emails reach the recipient.
It is not some small problem that could be fixed easily.
SMTP is fundamentally flawed.
There are multiple ways to pass messages.
- Some are guaranteed to reach the recipient
- eg. wiki, webdav, git, [ethereum.org], Tor hidden services, and many others
- Some are not guaranteed by nature
- can be filtered intentionally. Yes ! and filtered admittedly... It would be stupid to think that filtering tweaks are never used for (possibly dirty) business advantages
- Some methods are not guaranteed, and CANNOT be guaranteed because of fundamental flaws in the underlying system
- eg. involve passing messages (without feedback) through parties that neither the sender, nor the recipient can control.
It is unreasonable to use the message passing that is not guaranteed, when there are guaranteed alternatives (for lower labor cost and lower technical cost )
- some might claim that "email is free" and nothing can be lower cost than that, but of course that is simply neglecting
- the real cost of labor due to administration and "fighting against spam"
- and the real technical costs of the unnecessary hops
- and the real business and other losses related to unreliability, and lack of privacy
What are alternatives to SMTP ?
eg. wiki, webdav, git (these can be "direct", eg. via server controlled by the recipient)
- [ethereum.org], Tor hidden services, and many others'''
- These can be "direct", eg. via server controlled by the recipient, but more usually they are indirect, but (unlike SMTP email) using feedback to provide strong guarantee.
- so if the commit does not succeed through one connection (or a set of Tor nodes) it will be noticed and succeeds automatically through another (normally within seconds). The lack of this feedback makes the SMTP messaging catastropical.
25 cent doorbell
Sending a message should not cost "anything" if the recipient desires, but it should cost nonzero if the recipient finds it disturbing under the actual circumstances
The "25 cent doorbell" solved this (the exact time is irrelevant, but IIRC in the 1920's; patent nr ?) simply:
- any "friend" got the 25 cent "back" (or even in advance),
- but unsolicited usage/users of doorbell (eg. agents) did not get it back
It has never been so important as today, when SMTP causes hundreds of billions of dollar damage (by being flawed in multiple ways)
[ethereum.org] made it trivial to (eg. recipients issue their tokens so anyone can reach them who they want) solve the micropayment infrastructure (although it is possible to solve many different ways, even more efficiently than with ethereum)
Friends get the tokens in advance (together with the recipient address),
- others can send their first message for minor temporary fee (1 click through crypto currency market), fee returned to them in days if message is legitimate.