[uuid_to_string]

Part of the problem is that many years ago certain people decided it would be a good idea to tightly couple email to domain names (DNS). Previously email needed only IP addresses to work.

The result is that now when you are configuring SMTP you have to also configure DNS. That means more things that can go wrong, and more things to check as you are setting things up.

It also means you may need to pay a fee for a domain name. This is because we all submit to the notion of an ICANN root and commercial registrars selling (renting) names that cost nothing to create. Thus email is not solely under your control. You generally have to play the ICANN DNS game, only because your email recipients are playing. Nothing stops anyone from running their own root though. And this is what is done with private DNS inside organizations.

And then, as if that DNS complication was not already enough to take control of email away from you, you have various schemes trying to prevent spam that discriminate for or against mail you send based on IP address and domain name.

Can you operate email without DNS? Technically yes. There was a time before DNS, and email worked just fine. Practically speaking, today you need DNS, whether it's under ICANN's root or your own.

All this hassle steers you to just accept third party email hosting. Profiting from this arrangement has become a career for many a man. And with "the cloud" many are hoping to cash in yet again, as organizations who once ran controlled own email feel pressured to let a cloud computing vendor control it for them.

The fact that all this third party control makes warrantless search and surveillance so easy is but one side effect. Centralising hundreds and thousands of accounts in third parties make the spammer's job easier, too. If you think about it, there are many unwanted side effects of centralizing email. When every sender and recipient are connected directly to each other via a network, why would you want to prevent them from sending messages to each other directly?

With the constant connectivity and bandwidth we have today in many places, the centralisation and outsourcing of email is baffling to me... it is nonsensical... until you remember how much of a PITA it is setting up email.:)

It's no wonder we let third parties handle it. Is this PITA by design? Who cares? Let's just fix it. More of these projects should exist. Or made public (I imagine many of these are personal setups now being released for public use). I have my own that uses qmail.

[hug]

DNS is not the issue with mail and MTAs. Setting up an MX record is something you can do after googling and reading for about ten minutes. I have only anecdotal evidence to prove this, but that's basically how I set up my own first mail server.

What was a lot more difficult was setting up the actual mailserver itself. Even a simple, two-mailbox-operation was an exercise in frustration when it came to trying to get mail working on a little VPS of mine. Shit, you have to make the sendmail config. How balls-out insane is that?

More recently, there's little working tutorials to get yourself a working dovecot/postfix server, which are relatively easy to understand (thanks, digitalocean!) but I just checked out the first one I found on my google search and it's 2,800 words long. 20 pages if you were to print it out dead-tree style. I can give you a tutorial on DNS and MX records in much less time than it would take to go through setting up any MTA on linux, and that's the trouble.

[uuid_to_string]

Thank you for being honest.

But I am actually referring to something different: hosting your own mailserver.

So when I say "set up DNS" I mean set up a DNS server, not simply an MX record. This allows you to create your own domain names and hence email addresses. As I said above, these email addresses are valid so long as you and the recpipient use the same DNS root (e.g., ICANN's root in the case of the public internet).

As bad as things are in terms of the relative difficulty of setup, I think there are defenders of the status quo for email and I imagine this explains how I could be downvoted for my comment.

Don't get me wrong, I love email. It is the reliance on others to handle 100% of it that troubles me. It is purely a control issue.

[nodata]

What? It was so much better when we used ip addresses in e-mail addresses?

[uuid_to_string]

Are we discussing control of email, or aesthetics of email?

If you want to use names instead of numbers, then you can do that. You and your recipient must use the same DNS root.

[nodata]

You said using names instead of ip addresses was "part of the problem". ip addresses are normally non-portable, and difficult to remember and type.

[uuid_to_string]

No, you said that. I said that having email so closely coupled to DNS is part if the problem.

I'm not sure why you would have to remember IP addresses. We routinely "dial" telephone numbers by selecting from a list of contacts. IP addresses are approximately the same length as telephone numbers. The folk wisdom is that people can remember about 7 digits. But even if you disagree on all of this, what does that have to do with letting someone else control our email? The issue here is control, not whether we use names or numbers or something else when we enter the address of the recipient.

The nonportability of IP addresses is a problem in its own right, but I don't see the relevance here. Again, you are trying to engage me in a debate over domain names versus IP numbers. Perhaps that is an interesting issue, but here I am interested only in the issue of control over email (and because email and DNS have been coupled together, DNS). And that is what the OP is interested in as well.

I said that email and DNS are closely linked and this makes email more challenging for any user to control. 1. Because it complicates the setup and 2. because DNS as we currently accept it is controlled by third parties.

You are trying to suggest that I am advocating against having email addresses that use names instead of numbers. I am not.

If email is linked to DNS, and someone else controls DNS, then you cannot control email.

If you disagree with the preceding statement then please explain.