← Back to context

Comment by laumars

5 years ago

FTP is an absolutely bonkers protocol. I’ve written lengthy posts in here in the past detailing why that protocol needs to die.

Email is another clusterfuck of a protocol (well, several protocols) that barely functions despite dozens of modern pseudo-standards plastered over it. I’ve written extensively about that too.

DNS is frequently the source of amplification DDoS attacks. It’s another protocol that made sense once upon a time but has struggled to keep pace with modern advancements in technology

IRC is probably the best of the bunch here but even that has struggled to keep pace and can be subject to undocumented behaviours (like line length).

…and these are the protocols still in use. The ones replaced by HTTP were either crazier or over simplistic that they offered nothing over HTTP.

I’ve written my own clients for every one of those examples and had to deal with the pains of their protocols. I’ve also written my own web browser. And while HTTP has some warts too, I’d take that over FTP and SMTP any day of the week.

17 comments

laumars

Reply
hericium  5 years ago

> Email is another clusterfuck of a protocol (well, several protocols) that barely functions despite dozens of modern pseudo-standards plastered over it. I’ve written extensively about that too.

SMTP is one of last of decentralized open communication protocols that is still widely used by business. It evolved over time, gained some additions and stayed alive. The biggest issue I have with e-mail nowadays is companies like Microsoft and Google acting like they go out of their way to break protocols and deliver less and less messages from perfectly well working but decentralized sources.

Microsoft is especially bad of the two, with years-long tradition of acting against standards (Outlook Express connecting to recipients' MX, cloud offering accepting messages for delivery and never delivering them [1] etc). Google, I believe, as soon as they find a better way to get hold on user's invoices and receipts, will teach their users that they should use something else instead.

Stating that standard barely functions just because anti-privacy corporations only pretend to use standards in way there were intended, but concentrate on breaking them, is not how I would describe current state of e-mail-related stuff.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27980192

  • tptacek  5 years ago

    The "decentralization" of SMTP comes from the high level architecture of store-and-forward. It has very little to do with the protocol, which could be expressed more effectively and cleanly on HTTP2 or HTTP3 (it won't be, but should) without risking any of its "openness".

    • hericium  5 years ago

      Decentralization was not a quest when those protocols were created. It pretty much became "a thing" with blockchains. It previously... just "was".

      It started "not being anymore" with corporations - and once again I bow before Microsoft and Google - using less and less lube over time when telling their own clients what their role is at the ecosystem.

      I will absolutely fight any attempt at calling e-mail protocols broken just because a corporations can't figure out their revenue around it.

      5 replies →

guerrilla  5 years ago

I've done POP3 and SMTP and they didn't seem TOO bad but those were just toy implementations which didn't have to work in the real world and I gather things have gotten pretty complex and ugly since then. What would you suggest to replace e-mail while retaining its flexibility?

  • laumars  5 years ago

    SMTP doesn’t really have a universally agreed way of handling authentication, error handling nor even encryption. There are several standards floating about, many of which are little more than pseudo-standards.

    > What would you suggest to replace e-mail while retaining its flexibility?

    There’s no reason why we cannot redesign the email paradigm around a totally new protocol. The problem isn’t that’s it’s technically difficult, it’s that SMTP is too prevalent now. It would take someone like Google abusing their market share so bring in a successor.

    Also any replacement would need to be at a protocol level. A lot of the attempts I’ve seen have also tried to modernise the experience as well (like Google Wave) but the reason email is successful is because it is familiar.