Your entire post amounts to "I like HTTP" and "old stuff bad."
Email is another clusterfuck of a protocol (well, several protocols) that barely functions despite dozens of modern pseudo-standards plastered over it. I’ve written extensively about that too.
DNS is frequently the source of amplification DDoS attacks. It’s another protocol that made sense once upon a time but has struggled to keep pace with modern advancements in technology
IRC is probably the best of the bunch here but even that has struggled to keep pace and can be subject to undocumented behaviours (like line length).
…and these are the protocols still in use. The ones replaced by HTTP were either crazier or over simplistic that they offered nothing over HTTP.
I’ve written my own clients for every one of those examples and had to deal with the pains of their protocols. I’ve also written my own web browser. And while HTTP has some warts too, I’d take that over FTP and SMTP any day of the week.
> What would you suggest to replace e-mail while retaining its flexibility?
There’s no reason why we cannot redesign the email paradigm around a totally new protocol. The problem isn’t that’s it’s technically difficult, it’s that SMTP is too prevalent now. It would take someone like Google abusing their market share so bring in a successor.
Also any replacement would need to be at a protocol level. A lot of the attempts I’ve seen have also tried to modernise the experience as well (like Google Wave) but the reason email is successful is because it is familiar.
Granted it's already nicer for clients not to need to configure SMTP to begin with.
Acessing port 25 of server is usually blocked by ISPs as a way to prevent spam.
Authentication with mail is separate, usually to allow for relaying whilst anyone can usually drop emails IFF your server is the destination.
Confusing and needlessly complex? Yep. Natural result as of uncontrolled evolution? Yep.
SMTP is one of last of decentralized open communication protocols that is still widely used by business. It evolved over time, gained some additions and stayed alive. The biggest issue I have with e-mail nowadays is companies like Microsoft and Google acting like they go out of their way to break protocols and deliver less and less messages from perfectly well working but decentralized sources.
Microsoft is especially bad of the two, with years-long tradition of acting against standards (Outlook Express connecting to recipients' MX, cloud offering accepting messages for delivery and never delivering them [1] etc). Google, I believe, as soon as they find a better way to get hold on user's invoices and receipts, will teach their users that they should use something else instead.
Stating that standard barely functions just because anti-privacy corporations only pretend to use standards in way there were intended, but concentrate on breaking them, is not how I would describe current state of e-mail-related stuff.
It started "not being anymore" with corporations - and once again I bow before Microsoft and Google - using less and less lube over time when telling their own clients what their role is at the ecosystem.
I will absolutely fight any attempt at calling e-mail protocols broken just because a corporations can't figure out their revenue around it.
Email dates from an era when it was safe to trust people connecting to your server because everyone knew those individuals personally.
That methodology hasn’t scaled in 30 years.
I see arguments for "non-modern" not "broken". Some wines aging better doesn't necessarily mean that others deteriorate.
And this isn’t even touching on the problems with IMAP and the insanity that POP3 is even still a thing.
Last time I attempted setting up messaging accounts with beforementioned companies, it wasn't possible to use Mutt or bare Thunderbird - one had to use client software allowing some kind of RCE to set up access to those services. Add Google's bubbling[0] and Microsoft's repeated mail losing, and we no longer really have globally functional e-mail based on standards.
When some of the biggest actors don't follow rules describing delivery without proposing changes - yes - e-mail is being broken but not because protocols underneath are broken. It's because people trust these companies and possibly don't know that they may be victims of careful information filtering.
I have done some e-mail - related work for hosting companies in the past. For some years now, POP3 is not really a thing. It exists, it is being set up by mistake from time to time but the number of POP3 users compared to IMAP users was barely noticeable and I don't think it grew. I'm afraid to ask what your issues with IMAP are...
[0] I suspect that Google bubbles its e-mail customers just like its search users. Most non-technical people I know treat "spam" folder like it would literally burn their fingers upon touching. They act similarly, like trained to only look inside there when not seeing awaited messages in the inbox. Google delivering perfectly fine messages straight into "spam" folder has comparable results to Microsoft losing/destroying their customers' mail.
finger was conceived in a time and environment where you would reasonably assume a lot of things which stopped being true a long time ago.
many users per machine/users actually logged in to that machine/users being in walkable distance or in the same building/no compartmentalization, i.e. your demon has access to every users' home directory
and that's just the top of my head.
if you see finger as "everyone has a place to store a message and people can read it" then yes, you might say it wasn't worse than HTTP - but I think the plan feature wasn't even the original intention, it was more "is person X at their desk right now?".
So all features aside, it has so many assumptions baked in, I'd have to think hard how to replicate it in a modern way for a company and still fit the protocol.
I'm not sure I 100% agree with the protocol being silly (merely not great, BUT it's been years since I read the RFC - it's short, you should), it's kinda simply plain text with some wonky hostname shenanigans, but the whole concept hasn't aged well. But that is if you completely ignore anything about security (see what I wrote above) and privacy.
We now all go about our daily bakery shopping in the fancy sports car instead of a small rusty bike.
And people have differing opinions whether this is the best timeline to have...
Finger on the other hand is would be a very narrow API to for a certain service without ANY of the flexibility of HTTP. No custom headers, no Basic Auth, not even the difference between GET and POST.
So yeah, maybe the original comparison between finger and http is already flawed, but unless HTTP/2 gives you something that HTTP/1.1 can't do then HTTP/1.1 is still perfectly valid, and probably will be in 10 years, at least for low-traffic situations. (finger should be reaaally low-traffic in comparison).
That is the point. The flexibility is not free. Every conditional doubles the number of possible execution flows. This brings complexity. To some extent it is mitigated by the economies of scale because now everyone uses HTTP for something, so collectively we get that more complex code more polished. But there is no such thing as the bug free code - so every participant will have to deal with patch cycle and generally preventing bitrot.
For a small well bounded custom protocol which solves a well defined specific use case, one can hope to write a dependency-free implementation that can be tested and work well enough and left alone.
I recently was at an event with a few thousand wifi devices.
About a third of the internet traffic was updates..
I think I like the idea of a "spec" inside the same "protocol" more. For example if you understand HTTP you can quickly reason about any spec of a REST API that's done with JSON payloads without caring for the HTTP wrapper layer, just as you don't care for TCP around it.
Yeah, reusability and layering of engineering knowledge is useful - it makes dealing with complexity easier.
But it also makes it easier to build complexity without spending thinking of a simpler solutions. Because time to market.
And thus we have exhibits at https://mobile.twitter.com/internetofshit
That's essentially where every other protocol is. HTTP gets all the energy, active development, updates regularly rolled out. Meanwhile if you tried to make, say, FTP more rational by transmitting data over the control connection, nobody would be able to use it since all the servers are still running 25 year old wuftpd with the minimal patches to not get pwned and they have no interest in updating (if they even remember the servers exist).
Personally I think we've lost something valuable when only one protocol exists, but I'm one of those Luddites who still reads email with Thunderbird so what do I know.