What has become of our beloved free(digital)land?
1. It's very easy to get to.
2. It has incredibly fast search that has 0 setup.
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.
Similarly for free text search, the software world simply hasn'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.
Despite the fact that it'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't a pressing problem.
Spam/botnets have a lot to answer for.
Of course, it's not simple to set up a mail server that stays clean of spam RBLs, or that is Gmail-acceptable out the gate. But that's just the bar that got set as people went to Gmail because of the lack of other good alternatives.
Question is, is Gmail hegemony fixable now?
1. End to end encryption 2. search as a first-class feature 3. decentralized/federated 4. standard minimal rich text format (maybe something like markdown), instead of an inconsistent subset of html 5. Fix some of the legacy limitations of email, like having to be ascii safe, line limit of 70 characters etc. 6. Possibly make it easier to have an identity that isn't tied to your service provider
The big questions are how would you get the general population to switch from email, and what to do about spam.
2> Your MUA does that. Get one that doesn't suck.
3> Impossible and/or dangerous.
4> No. HTML is NOT part of a MIME standard, even.
5> That's an issue of netiquette, often you have to post lines over 70 chars in News servers, too.
6> That's a different issue.
2. I have tried several MUAs and haven't found one that IMHO "doesn't suck." Although search isn't always the problem. (The biggest problem I've run into is actually getting them to work with logging in using an SSO method like SAML or OIDC). And this point was specifically in response to the parents statment that "Had IMAP addressed search in a better way, I think it would have made a huge difference."
3. Not sure what you mean by that since email _is_ decentralized and federated. Meaning, if you use gmail as your email provider you can still send messages to people using a different email provider. As opposed to say something like Signal or Whatsapp, where you can only message people using the same service as you.
4. Well, some subset of html has become the de facto standard for rich text in emails. Although what subset that is depends on the client...
6. Different issue from what? It is a very real complaint I have with email. Changing your email address is a pretty big pain, possibly more so than changing your physical address or phone number. For many people, myself included, the thought of having to change my email address is a pretty good motivation for staying with the service I currently use. Now it is possible to use your own domain with many email providers. But doing so is beyond the technical skills of most people, and costs more for essentially insurance in case you stop liking your current email provider some time in the future. Unfortunately, I don't know of a good solution for this. At least not one that is scalable.
It supports many things that markdown does not (setting font families, sizes, and color for one example), and nobody uses it anymore.
Maybe, if we get maddy working near-perfectly and kept up-to-date.
3. dealing with spam is a massive PITA
Seriously, mu4e search on modern hw is incredibly fast (and I have a 10 year work email archive).
I kinda disagree. It'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.
The problem is, it literally doesn't matter how much the 'open source' community comes together, it simply can not provide a turn key solution as good as
Desired email account: [________]@gmail.com
Password: [________]
Verify Password: [________]
[X] I agree to have all my data used in arbitrary ways
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've got a split ownership interest. I can hand it all back to you, but you don't understand the setup. I can give you root on the system, but when you change anything, my automation stops working.
I partially agree, but I think we could get a lot closer than we are now. It feels like the main reason this isn't possible is because you need to go through a registrar to get a DNS name, and that's tricky to do as part of a FOSS project. Maybe you could integrate with the APIs of a few registrars, but... it's not ideal.
As far as the "run thing on server" side of it goes, though, projects like Sandstorm[0] have gotten really far re: making it a simple process. I stood up this instance of Etherpad with a few clicks on a web UI, for example: https://sandstorm.terracrypt.net/shared/aR2HXaoLSkLuXLhhAQon...
Sandstorm in particular doesn't quite work for mail servers just because the software is heavily oriented towards webapps, but there's no reason a similar system couldn't work in principle.
I can't agree, getting a domain is much easier than it is to configure the abysmal shit that is Postfix+Dovecot+WebGUI. God forbid you want proper search as well.
What can't so easily be done programmatically is DNS registration, because it involves money changing hands and there's no standard "registrar API". You'd have to either support an arbitrary number of differently-shaped APIs of different registrars or pick a "blessed few" to support.
GoDaddy, GCP/google=domains, AWS, Azure, DigitalOcean and a couple others would provide enough for a LOT of people. Especially since godaddy and google domains include dns, and DO doesn't charge for it.
I've setup a script to make it easier to manage a handful of dev domains (commit to a repo, and it updates via build/event pipeline) with DO.. was surprisingly easy. I don't think doing similar for the biggest cloud/dns providers would be all that hard to integrate.
I think something that could be like sandstorm but using docker containers might be a good thing, but there's still the "you need to hand me your credit card if you want me to register a domain for you" which is a big barrier vs. the screen I showed above. A credit card off the top is already 4-6 entry fields, and everyone knows to be a bit nervous about entering those....
Thunderbird plus global search
Recoll + client of choice
I used to run personal email server some years ago. The spam was harder and harder to manage - first local SpamAssasin was fine, the I had to tweak rules, then I tried distributed filtering (DCC)... and then I gave up and started paying for Fastmail. This ended up working much better than I could ever do.
Usenet was similar -- I remember looking at the newgroups which were at more than half spam (and some were 95%+ spam) and then just leaving for forums. (plus there were a major UX annoyance: unlike with email, there is no simple way to sync read status across multiple devices)
Our free(digital) land has been killed by a handful of bad actors. I no longer believe in "free for all" systems. The best we can do is many independent systems, each with its own rules and policies.
In ten years of running this mail server, I have only had one persistent spammer I couldn’t manage to get filtered with these settings, but then I just created a custom rule.
And you're right, the centralization is crazy, and opposite of what techno utopians predicted/promised at the time.
There was no ISP in my area back then, not even dial-up. Again, around 1991.