[ubernostrum]

The SMTP RFC says that mail servers MUST NOT

The email RFCs require supporting a lot of things that are now horrendously outdated, and forbid doing a lot of things that should now be best practices.

The RFCs should lose that battle.

[axaxs]

See, at surface value I agree. But at a deeper level I don't. The problem is too many broken protocols exist via RFC only (dns, smtp, etc). Rather than violate that, or force it into something it's not, we should be writing newer, better protocols. The friction against this is huge, mainly by those who capped out at the previous RFCs, though. Email(well, smtp) itself is so outdated and broken, I can't believe it's still so widely used.

[JdeBP]

IM2000 protocols have already been written. (-:

* http://jdebp.eu./Proposals/IM2000/

But of course you are already using a pull-style messaging system, that is right in front of you.

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10405864

[axaxs]

Fair point, but I was thinking something like Signal, WhatsApp, or the like. So, I like to think of email as a bit dated, not only in security but in model. That said, the beauty of email is that you have a unique identifier that doesn't force the other party into your walled garden. If we could develop something akin to Signal, but that didn't require the second party to have to sign up explicitly for that service, I think that could finally start the process. Which, of course, would also require some level of initial adoption, probably the hard part.

[avaika]

smtp might be broken, but it would be extremely hard to replace it to something incompatible, as it's a very core of the nowadays internet.

Moreover it has the advantage no other popular communication service has: people somehow managed to agree on protocol standard so anyone is able to run own smtp server. In modern days of huge corporations a new popular standard like this seems impossible.