Comment by 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?
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.
https://jmap.io/
As far as I can see, jmap only provides means to upload email to your email provider, it doesn't actually tell how that email ends up from one email provider to another, which is what SMTP does.
Granted it's already nicer for clients not to need to configure SMTP to begin with.
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