On Fri, Jun 13, 2014 at 7:55 AM, Miles Fidelman
<mfidelman(_at_)meetinghouse(_dot_)net>
wrote:
Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
Phillip Hallam-Baker writes:
> My point is that mail is an old protocol and people who expect that
> it can be kept going unaltered in its original form serving all the
> purposes that it was never designed for but have emerged over time
> are going to be upset no matter what.
True, as far as it goes. However, there is need for a push protocol
that allows you to receive contacts from authors you don't know yet,
in other words, a medium that is designed to be flexible enough to
accomodate new modes of communication.
It's not obvious to me that this need can be satisfied while at the
same time denying spam. If it is indeed impossible, I don't see why
that purpose can't continue to be served by email, while most mail
(which is correspondence among acquaintances) gets redirected into
authenticated channels.
Just a quick reminder here: Postal mail is still going strong, after
100s of years.
Only because we haven't got email security properly sorted.
I can't remember the last time I received a real letter. All I get is junk
mail and bills. And the bills arrive because we haven't got the standards
for doing it electronically established yet.
Within a decade postal mail and the telephone will have become as
functionally obsolete as fax. It will take a lot longer for them to
disappear, the telegram only stopped last year, about a hundred years after
it was utterly obsolete.
The postal service will continue of course until Bezos works out how to get
his drones to work.
Technology does change over time. There is a very clear demand for an open
Dropbox like solution. There is a clear need for a protocol that allows
email like subscriptions to blog comments without the mailbox clog that
results.