[ih] deterioration of email (was Re: clever usc creation)

[Jack Haverty]

It's not just email that has deteriorated.  Lots of other pioneering 
services introduced on the Internet have similarly grown to involve 
large populations of users today.  But like email, that growth has 
occurred by a fragmentation of the initial "universal" connectivity 
introduced to the Internet into a plethora of separate and 
non-interoperable but functionally similar services.

Mbone is one example.   Also IRC (Internet Relay Chat).  Network news 
(NNTP).  rec.whatever forums.  Perhaps Gopher?  Even FTP, from ARPANET 
days.  There are probably others.   All of those may still be used, but 
none of them have evolved into a common standard that many 
implementations can deploy and interoperate with all the others.

Why did IP succeed as the substrate of The Internet, but so much else 
failed to do so?

/Jack Haverty

On 7/25/26 15:39, Ofer Inbar via Internet-history wrote:
> On Sat, Jul 18, 2026 at 12:51:04PM -0700,
> Jack Haverty via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
>> Over the last decade or two, I've suggested, several times, to
>> several ISOC administrations, that ISOC "walk the walk" with email
>> by serving as a prominent example of "how to do email right".   That
>> of course might require policies to possibly be changed, technical
>> flaws to be addressed, educational efforts, and even perhaps
>> governments' actions.
>>
>> Most Internet users today likely experience things like phishing
>> attacks, emails with forged sources, and other such effects that
>> make email untrustworthy in their views.   Most of the Internet
>> users have no idea how to protect themselves from such attacks.
>>   Most regulatory and government authorities seem to have no idea
>> what, if anything, they can do about it.
> A majority of younger Internet users (at least in the English speaking
> world I'm familiar with) - perhaps not an overwhelming majority, but
> quite certainly a majority - simply do not use email to communicate.
> They use it to verify their address for accounts, they use it to check
> for a specific thing that they know is going to be sent to them by
> email and that they know they want to see, and most of the rest of the
> time, they let their email pile up and they ignore nearly all of it.
>
> To actually stay in touch with friends, family, coworkers, groups
> they're part of, etc. - all the things email used to be for - they
> use messaging apps.  Discord, Facebook, Slack Instagram, and more
> like that.  Or SMS/RCS phone texts.
>
> All of the various problems with email today, including the ones you
> listed, are I think dwarfed by one big one that has caused this:
> spam.  This includes both scattershot scam-oriented spam, but also
> lots of lists that sign you up without asking permission.  You donate
> to a political candidate, and some sleazy "grassroots" database starts
> selling your address to loads of other campaigns of the same party.
> You pay for a meal at a restaurant with your phone, enter the email
> address for your receipt, and now not only are you on the email list
> for that restaurant, but also the next cafe or ice cream place or
> whatever where the payment system recognizes your card and offers
> to email your receipt and you didn't notice the small checkbox to
> opt out of signing up.  You RSVP to an event on some sleazy site like
> eventbrite, and now you're on several mailing lists for similar events.
>
> The majority of email is assumed to be spam or otherwise irrelevant,
> by people whose experience of email started after the explosion of
> spam that I described above.  They never knew what it was like for
> email to be relevant and worth checking, so they don't think of it
> as relevant or worth checking.  Knowing this, they also don't think
> it's a useful way to communicate with anyone they know.
>    -- Cos

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