[creeble]

Agree 100% on both of these, and #2 is seldom listed as a big issue. Had IMAP addressed search in a better way, I think it would have made a huge difference.

Of course, it's not simple to set up a mail server that stays clean of spam RBLs, or that is Gmail-acceptable out the gate. But that's just the bar that got set as people went to Gmail because of the lack of other good alternatives.

Question is, is Gmail hegemony fixable now?

[thayne]

I think the best approach to breaking the Gmail hegemony is to replace email with something better. Some features I think such a system should have are:

1. End to end encryption 2. search as a first-class feature 3. decentralized/federated 4. standard minimal rich text format (maybe something like markdown), instead of an inconsistent subset of html 5. Fix some of the legacy limitations of email, like having to be ascii safe, line limit of 70 characters etc. 6. Possibly make it easier to have an identity that isn't tied to your service provider

The big questions are how would you get the general population to switch from email, and what to do about spam.

[aidenn0]

4 there's already a standardized rich text format for emails, called "enriched text" defined originally in rfc 1563 almost exactly 27 years ago, and last updated in rfc 1896 about 25 years ago.

It supports many things that markdown does not (setting font families, sizes, and color for one example), and nobody uses it anymore.

[thayne]

Another point is that markdown is still pretty readable as plain text, whereas html, or "enriched text" are a little harder for humans to read if it isn't specially formatted.

[thayne]

and afaik hardly any email clients support it. and even if yours does, chances are the recipient on the other end uses one that doesn't.

[aidenn0]

Right, so I don't know what inventing a new such format will do to improve things.

[anthk]

1> GPG.

2> Your MUA does that. Get one that doesn't suck.

3> Impossible and/or dangerous.

4> No. HTML is NOT part of a MIME standard, even.

5> That's an issue of netiquette, often you have to post lines over 70 chars in News servers, too.

6> That's a different issue.

[thayne]

1. GPG has a lot of problems. Perhaps the biggest of which is that there isn't a critical mass of people who use it, and it is pretty difficult to us at all, much less to use correctly.

2. I have tried several MUAs and haven't found one that IMHO "doesn't suck." Although search isn't always the problem. (The biggest problem I've run into is actually getting them to work with logging in using an SSO method like SAML or OIDC). And this point was specifically in response to the parents statment that "Had IMAP addressed search in a better way, I think it would have made a huge difference."

3. Not sure what you mean by that since email _is_ decentralized and federated. Meaning, if you use gmail as your email provider you can still send messages to people using a different email provider. As opposed to say something like Signal or Whatsapp, where you can only message people using the same service as you.

4. Well, some subset of html has become the de facto standard for rich text in emails. Although what subset that is depends on the client...

6. Different issue from what? It is a very real complaint I have with email. Changing your email address is a pretty big pain, possibly more so than changing your physical address or phone number. For many people, myself included, the thought of having to change my email address is a pretty good motivation for staying with the service I currently use. Now it is possible to use your own domain with many email providers. But doing so is beyond the technical skills of most people, and costs more for essentially insurance in case you stop liking your current email provider some time in the future. Unfortunately, I don't know of a good solution for this. At least not one that is scalable.

[secabeen]

Yeah, none of the IMAP server authors really thought of search as a first-class feature, nor did they seem to want to do the development to build the backend support. Resource constraints were also an issue back then, as well as a client-first approach. Most large mail servers only had enough resources to run the IMAP and POP services themselves; adding search index maintenance would have overloaded their CPUs. (Not that they couldn't have added more CPU, but this was all pre-cloud.)

[Avamander]

> Question is, is Gmail hegemony fixable now?

Maybe, if we get maddy working near-perfectly and kept up-to-date.