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

[John R. Levine]

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

Well, it's evolved quite a lot but I think we mean the same thing.

> 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.  ...

Huh, never heard anyone use "email" to mean that.

> 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.

If we use e-mail to mean what most people mean, store and forward messages 
with user at domain addressing, it's still the Internet's great success in 
federated interoperation.  For all that people moan and groan about 
Google, Outlook, and Yahoo, it's still quite possible to set up your own 
small mail server and exchange mail with them and everyone else.

Here's some scripts I wrote for ICANN that mostly automates installing and 
setting up a mail server on a linux VPS.

https://github.com/icann/eaiselfhost

> 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.

The EU has required instant messaging systems to interconnect, and the 
IETF MIMI working group is developing standard ways for IM systems to talk 
to each other.  It's a hard problem, partly because the existing systems 
weren't designed to interoperate, partly because of, sigh, spam.  It's a 
lot easier to keep spam under control on a closed system where you can see 
who all the users are and block or eject misbehaving ones.  If a system 
has to connect to anyone who asks, you're in the same situation as mail 
and you can expect the same problems.

You can see the drafts here:

https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/mimi/documents/

R's,
John