[xoa]

>I feel like you just described email (or rather, "the" email spec, as if there was a single one) in general.

But the concept of email is extremely useful, valuable, understandable, and it's standardized and out of the centralized control so common for anything developed these days. I'd be happy to see some sort of email 2.0, cleaned up, with modern encryption by default and so on that served as a replacement. But I don't know of anybody even proposing such a thing. Instead the rage is to create yet another fucking instant messenger or slack thing or whatever.

Everyone knows the spec is ancient and has had a lot grafted onto it. But it's not going anywhere without a good replacement and even with that the transition would take a very, very long time. So as is so very, very often the case in computing we just have to deal with that.