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Comment by reynard_le_faux | Hacker News Reader

As a company we realised about 12 months ago that email can no longer be considered a reliable method of communication. I understand the reasoning but the result is the result. Many new clients we deal with have whitelists on and we have to pester our clients to add us to their lists. Not a great experience for anyone. I think we should consider email pretty much moribund at this point.

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It is literally one of the last free and open channels on the Internet – I suggest you work on supporting its use and keeping it that way rather than moving to something controlled for profit or data harvesting.

It being free and open is exactly what the big providers can't stand and why they are coming up with ever more "standards" that are complex to configure as well as "reputation" scores that are hard for small senders to clear.

Also why they do non-standard stuff like accepting mail but then simply not delivering it, rather than bouncing it.

DMARC is not hard.

"Reputation scores" and blacklists / greylists started in late 1990s / early 2000s as multiple grassroots efforts when spam started to overwhelm systems. Gmail did not exist, outlook.com did not exist, it was easy and expected to run your own SMTP (which I did). And it was very unpleasant.

DMARC appeared 10 if not 15 years ago. There's no reason for a sane MTA configuration not to have it.

Outlook.com is a rebranding of Hotmail.com which absolutely did exist in the 90’s.

Indeed, Hotmail was sold to MS in 1997, which I incorrectly remembered to have happened past 2000.

Microsoft has provided free email addresses to the public for decades.

Calling it a "free and open channel" when 80% of consumers are on Microsoft/Google addresses that control who can deliver e-mail is laughable. It's dead, Jim.

Fair point - I meant free in the sense that the protocol is open. I didn’t mean that it’s not under threat.

You seem to miss the point WHY customers go there. I, for one, switched when I realized Google filters spam effectively.

That WHY seems to only address a very small slice of the market. Some other WHYs I've encountered

- it was a way to outsource the mail server administration and already free in our corporate package

Which is pretty much all I have from the corporate side. On the personal or small business side its most often

- I don't really care that much about running my own stuff

- I needed a personal email address

All these are valid reasons/motivations but none explicitly argue that email messaging should become proprietary.

There is no such thing as a free and open channel on the internet that will not suffer the tragedy of the commons.

It can be reliable, but requires an explicit agreement between the two parties. When my server connects to your server and sends a message, that part is reliable enough. If your server decides to delete the message after receiving it, that's entirely on you. You could configure it to never delete messages from me and then it's fine. The problem is that in reality nobody does this, so your vendors and customers get treated identically to random spammers.

Strengthen your contracts / terms of service. Make it their responsibility to configure their email systems properly so they receive emails sent from your domains.

So what have you switched to instead?

Spoiler alert: no method of communication is reliable anymore. All of them are controlled by companies that will route your messages to spam.

If reliable means the message gets through no matter what, then it's good that no channel is reliable. Such a channel will inevitably be used for spam and attention grabbing.

Postal mail still works.

Most of the world has switched to sending SMS to user's phone numbers.

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