Email gateways and gatekeeping

Email is generally undervalued by most people I know.

We should realize its inherent value as the location to send messages to a user at a domain, and work tools to fix people's UX problems. All these other messaging services are just skirting the problem, and generally reducing my ownership of the system.

I say this as someone with a barely functioning inbox...

Both this post and the original that inspired it a pretty well balanced, and don't really say anything close to "Email sucks, let's do everything different!" which is good. I guess I'm just old enough now that I've been reading "Death to email" and "This new thing is going to replace email" for so long I now thing nothing will ever replace email. I bet at some point I even thought "Death to email" and now email is just a part of life.

I liked this quote from the linked Register article:

“I’m not saying that there will be a move in any time that I can see – my crystal ball’s broken – but I do think there needs to be expansions in the way people can enter that workflow,”

I think that's a good way to look at this entire email thing, not just as it applies to the Linux Kernel, but in general.

>“But e-mail is so much better for discussion and patch review” it’s hard to differentiate sometimes between “better because I’m more familiar with it” and “better because it has features I care about”.

>Again, there is documentation out there to explain how to contribute but it doesn’t actually need to be this complicated.

I'm not sure... email provides a nicer patch review system in many ways than any web-based patch review system. If it doesn't need to be this complicated, why haven't those other systems caught up? It's not clear to me... and at least for now, those features aren't replicable without email.

The bigger problem is how many ISPs handle email. First, they block outgoing port 25, so you can't actually SEND email.

Then they forget that some of their customers need to actually send email from their computers and out to the internet, as opposed from using some third party service. Or they make it available only on "professional" over priced subscriptions.

Back when I started hosting my own email, o my ADSL, I called my ISP and just told them, "I setup postfix, I can recieve mail, but I can't send it out?" They told me the outgoing port was blocked, but that I was free to use their email gateway, they gave me the hostname, and all was good.

When I switched to fiber, I called my ISP and asked them what their email gateway was, they gave me the hostname, and all was well in the world.

But last time I switched ISP, I couldn't get the hostname of their email gateway, support kept giving me some URL for their webmail, and I couldn't explain to them that I didn't want to use their email service, I had my own, and I wanted to send mail out onto the internet thankyouplease. They then told me, that if I used my own, I should call the company that hosted it for me.. I explained to them that there is not company, just my computer. They told me it was not possible to send mail directly from a computer because outgoing port 25 was blocked.. I explained to them, that I knew! That the very fact that I was having this conversation was because they blocked port 25 and needed to provide me with the hostname of their email gateway/relay server. No success.

I did some grey area research, and found their stupid relay server, but it rejected relaying me mail with a nonsensical error. I called support again and explained the error, nobody knew what that machine was, but that their webmail was located at...

Fast forward, I befriended a technician at the ISP and he told me the name of a netops guy, I found him on linkedin, and explained the error.. He told me their relay host would only relay mails for IPs that reverse-dns resolved to the FROM domain.. Fair enough I guess..

Called customer support, asked for reverse-dns, I couldn't convince them that such a thing exited and they kept telling me I needed to contact a DNS provider and pay for the domain.. I told them that I had the domain, and DNS configured, but that that company couldn't possibly assign reverse dns to my IP at this ISP.

Back to netops guy, I owe him some beer, but he setup a reverse dns for me.. And I could send email.

It didn't feel like a triumph, it feels like "The Internet" is deeply fucking broken and I fear for the future, I fear that next time they change infrastructure, or I move to a new house, I'll have to go through this hell again.

I get why people are not happy with git send-email, because, getting the privilege of actually sending a fucking email from your "Computer PC" in 2020 seems next to damn impossible.