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Comment by wmeredith | Hacker News Reader

This raises the obvious question, then who is going to pay for them?

Who pays for e-mail?

In gmail - ads

E-mail is an open protocol, but clients and hosting are generally not free. You can pay for them, or you can subscribe to ad-supported services where they data-mine your inbox so they can target ads to you. But someone is paying for it.

Private companies big enough to warrant a proper GApps account or their own mail server (or many).

With my personal email - google. They handle the costs of storage and transport and in exchange they show me ads and collect high level data. With my work email - my company. They pay to keep the email secure and contextual and in exchange I keep it mostly related to work.

The cost of storing and transporting e-mail is potentially so low that I would claim you are overpaying Google.

Who pays for e-mail?

This is the question of a zen master. In four words you've said more than the entire hagiography of TFA. Yes of course, someone has to pay for electricity, but when using an open protocol the user chooses who pays and what they're paying for. If Facebook could go back in time and kill email, they would in a heartbeat. The communications of free people should not be supervised, whether by dictators or by capitalists.

Google and every other company that invests the immense time and money required to keep it clear of spam. Email without a large spam filtering infrastructure is unusable.

I used email before there were infrastructure-based spam filters. It was very usable with client-based spam filters. You can't do encrypted email without either a whitelisting system or client-based spam filters.

Interesting question. Anyone and everyone.

I may host my own email server or I might pay someone to host it. Or the government could host it, or my university could host it. Or I could get it for free by agreeing to be served some ads.

But who pays for it doesn't matter. I can send you an email even if we use very different providers (from the point of view of both technology and payment). For messaging I don't see this yet.

I feel like XMPP was supposed to be the chosen one. I had a google account but chatted to my gmail contacts through my self-hosted jabber server. I wonder if this new generation of messaging apps will get to that point anytime soon.

users could certainly pay ..but through a donation model similar to public radio or maybe Wikipedia. there's a carefull line to walk if 'sponsors' come on board but it's possible.

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