This is a presentation about the historic evolution of email, how implementations gradually diverged from the specification given corporate forces, the onset of spam with the prevalence of personal computing, the erosion of distributed delivery networks of mail due to fast/lazy/loose whitelists, the ossification of the protocol compounded with decades of backwards compatibility, and the modern tools used to navigate the bazaar of format compliance as it continues to evolve as a moving target. Nevertheless, the conclusion remarks about emails notably resilience to centralisation and enshittification.
I hope that protocols such as ActivityPub will fair just as well, if not better, than email. Although, I’d hazard a guess that the forces of monetization and dark patterns are now much more prevalent than they were in email’s infancy.
Thanks for sharing this talk. I watched it a few day ago and thought of sharing, but then forgot about it. As pointed out in the video description: “Email is too big to change, too broken to fix… and too important to ignore.” The bit about the first marketing email was interesting (video timestamp) and is relevant for our times.
That is such a great quote! Here is my attempt at such a quip:
Email’s own complexity, legacy, and backwards compatibility divines its own Incorruptibility.