Comment by thayne
1 year ago
I've though a little bit about what a good successor to email would look like, and in addition to things like native support for encryption and authentication, one of the big features I wanted was to put not allow sending a message unless the recipient had added you to their list of contacts. And maybe have a way to to send a request that someone add you to their contacts, that would be processed differently than a normal message.
That eliminates a huge class of genuinely useful use cases for email.
Part of the usefulness is that you can write and receive to addresses without prior permission.
I've had wonderful conversations with authors, academics, politicians and other strangers around the world thanks to the permissive ability of email.