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

[Jack Haverty]

If by "email" you mean ARPA's system using addresses with @s, there is 
still interoperability across many ISPs and applications.

But for many, perhaps most, people "email" now means whatever they now 
use to communicate with their friends.   It might be Facebook, or 
Instagram, or Telegram, or Facetime, or SMS texting, or many other 
options.   Corporations, such as banks or other financial and 
governmental players have their own mail systems and use @email only to 
notify you that there is a message waiting for you inside.

Some of my relatives use Facebook or SMS exclusively.  They usually have 
an @email address but rarely check it.  We haven't found any way to, for 
example, send an @mail which includes some kind of address that ends up 
in a Facebook message.   Or vice versa.

Such interoperability may exist but if so it's not easy to find.  In 
contrast, in the early days of email ~1980s there were multiple systems 
but they were often somehow interconnected.

Like email, many of the other early Internet communications mechanisms, 
such as MBone, IRC, etc., have similarly fragmented into multiple walled 
gardens that are not interoperable but compete in hope of being the winner.

/Jack

On 7/29/26 10:23, John Levine wrote:
> It appears that Jack Haverty via Internet-history <jack at 3kitty.org> said:
>> -=-=-=-=-=-
>> -=-=-=-=-=-
>> -=-=-=-=-=-
>> -=-=-=-=-=-
>> 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
> Are you saying that email doesn't interoperate any more, or that people
> are fragmenting into other communication systems?
>
> The first is clearly not the case, while the second is.
>
> R's,
> John

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