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- Hacker News
- Old version:
* DNS lookup for MX record
New version
* DNS lookup for A record
* HTTP request for .wellknown/htmp/known_hosts
Not sure why this is being considered as an improvement?
> each mailbox of a domain on a different provider
Why is this useful/necessary or even 'good'?
by philipwhiuk - It's not a good idea, I'd call it terrible in fact. We have MX Records, might as well use those. If not, use SRV records. Requiring mail server to involved in root of the domain is terrible idea.by stackskipton
- Email currently uses an HTTP request to https://mta-sts.<domain>/.well-known/mta-sts.txt, per RFC 8461. Depending on HTTPS/TLS instead of DNSSEC is one major reason you see this approach gaining popularity.by 8organicbits
- Id think its for enduser flexibility and convenience. Its more involved to alter DNS records vs just adding a text line to a webpage and hitting that default endpoint as standard. Same way LetsEncrypt allows the easiest setup with the .wellknown endpoint , where a user may not have DNS access beyond the initial A record setup.by rzerowan
- Self-ejecting panels on three sides of the website are a horrible user experience.
Other than that...
The most important thing is not the protocol, it's the gui.
At the moment email's gui is horrible on all platforms without exception.
If/when a decent gui appears, protocols will follow.
Also, JMAP did reading can probably be just WebDAV?
by aboardRat4 - Why do you find the panel experience so bad?by andros
- > At the moment email's gui is horrible on all platforms without exception.
How can you say that when it's one of the benefits of email that it's an open protocol and there's thousands of different apps built on top of it. Terminal UIs, web interfaces, chat interfaces etc. - that should be one of the cases where there's a GUI for anyone.
by dewey - Can you provide more feedback? What do you hate so much about current GUIs? (Working in this exact space)by isaachinman
- > At the moment email's gui is horrible on all platforms without exception.
This is obviously a matter of opinion. Of course there are endless different email GUIs, on all the platforms; if you don't like one, there are many alternatives.
I cannot imagine that a "decent GUI" by modern web-development standards could be anything I'd prefer to what already exists. Email works and generally doesn't let designer ego get in the way.
by marssaxman - GUIs cannot be built either before or during the specification of a protocol. In fact, this is the part that should have the least weight. There are important steps, such as system auditing or making design decisions (like certificate rotation), that are not addressed. However, the goal is not to replace SMTP/IMAP, but rather to show how modern tools, when properly assembled, can replace older protocols with serious design flaws. JMAP is flexible, mature, and easy to connect with current technologies. It's a better option.by andros
- Content-addressed email breaks mailing lists, as those need to be able to add headers for subscribe/unsubscribe/list id, etc. There is a reason DKIM allows you to pick which headers to sign.
- Do we need mailing lists at all?by kamma4434
- I don't want to replicate email. I want to fix it.
Sending email should not be free. It should be really, really cheap to send an email to one person (like a fraction of a fraction of a cent), but get exponentially more expensive the more you send.
People shouldn't be able to send emails to you without your prior approval (which you can revoke at an instant).
The recipient should be able to charge a tack-on fee for having email sent to him. I should be able to charge annoying people a lot to send to me, and charge my friends almost nothing. People who send annoying stuff to me should pay more to get my attention.
All of a sudden, forwarding that stupid article without thinking about the content (or even reading the article they're sending) will be second guessed. Save the money (and time), by sending only worthwhile stuff that you penned.
by BeetleB - Honestly we should just do this. Maddy and Stalwart have cheap enough concurrency and good enough scalability they could easily delay SMTP accepts server side for a time delay based on a combination of a local and global heuristic. We could easily start to produce an auditable global heuristic as well and start prototyping the solution today. Over time the community will have to decide how to work with the Cabal, or more specifically the Cabal will have to learn to start to re-engage with the community.
Just start.
by raggi - This is impractical because micropayments are impractical.
I have a better idea; split the problem into two. First, require all messages to include an `Automated: 0|1` header; eventually downranking / banning providers that don't include it, like we now do with DKIM, SPF, DMARC and such.
For messages with `Automated: 1`, require informed consent, mediated and verified through the recipient's provider.
It's impractical to require pre-approvals on every message, because many people genuinely want human-to-human contact from semi-strangers. On the other hand, requiring consent without verification is ineffective, because it is too easy to pretend consent. This design splits the spam problem into two much more tractable su-problems, detecting lying senders that mark automated messages as non-automated (easy with modern AI + basic statistical analysis), and verifying consent for honest automated senders (just requires a protocol).
by miki123211 - Sending email is already cheap, not free. Just so happens the cost is subsidized/hidden for most regular people and its so cheap that they give it away for free. For those of us that run transactional email, the cost is ~ $0.0001 per email for AWS SES, already at the fraction of a fraction of a cent you suggest.by choilive
- > It should be really, really cheap to send an email to one person (like a fraction of a fraction of a cent), but get exponentially more expensive the more you send.
The problem is the cost of creating fake identities. As long as creating fake identities has a fixed cost (increasing linearly with the number of identities you create), there's no way to charge the "same person" exponentially more for sending more email. They'll just create new identities to send new emails.
Some people realize this and then start imagining how to forbid fake identities (forbidding truly anonymous email), but that requires a centralized identification authority, which many participants in the system are actively trying to avoid.
If you want a centralized authority for sending messages without spam, then you should just use a popular centralized messaging app. Each messaging app is controlled by a centralized authority, for better and for worse; the general consensus is that spam is a much smaller problem on centralized messaging apps than on email. But centralizing authority is a very high price to fight spam.
Today, each email client just reads the emails and tries to categorize spam, assigning each email a spam "score" and quarantining mail over a certain threshold. We track email identities only by top-level domain names, which do have a cost. Emails can be signed with DKIM/SPF, and we can penalize emails that don't sign themselves. We don't have "central authorities," but there are very popular email services, following a power law, and they're close enough. If Gmail thinks your domain reputation is too low, you're gonna have to buy a new domain name if you want to email anybody on Gmail.
Without one official centralized authority, I think that's about as good as it's ever gonna get.
by dfabulich - > People shouldn't be able to send emails to you without your prior approval (which you can revoke at an instant).
this sounds terrible... i've gotten so many useful random emails from strangers over the years.
- > Let's design the successor to email on top of HTTP
You can stop there, I've heard enough. Not everything is hypertext.
by thesuitonym - Usually, informed people only read the headline.by andros
- From the first paragraph:
>The goal is not to replace the current mail system, heaven forbid!, but to learn, have fun and discover current technologies to swap out every element: sending, receiving, gateway, keys, and so on.
It's all for fun.
by jjice - And HTTP transports many, many more things than hypertext. It seems like a sensible choice for this use case in terms of capabilities.by beej71
- I think a lot of these concepts are fun/interesting, but I like that email today functions more like a mailbox than WhatsApp or Telegram. Whilst digital (or paper) spam is obnoxious I dislike the idea of binning every sender into a "unread" box until I approve them. I miss unreads all the time across apps like X and Telegram.
As a first step I would focus on something like broad S/MIME support. Unfortunately I suspect that the biggest email providers are disincentivized from doing this as it would disrupt their business models.
- I would advise reconsidering keeping the current format exactly. Something that would allow conventional email addresses to kept in a list that disambiguates them unambiguously would probably be a good idea.
You don't want to embed the entire email in JSON. Too many parsers past, present, and future tend to want to decode the entire JSON document into memory before doing anything else, and so you'd be forcing entire email documents to be held in memory at scale, which causes you major problems. I'd recommend something more like either a JSON header that defines what parts are in the email, followed by a normal MIME document, which is perfectly normal in HTTP with other things that use the format as well, or having the top level continue to be a MIME document and specify that the first part must be a JSON document containing the headers. JSON replacing the headers is generally something that would be a good idea, though.
That improves the ability of more language environments to be able to handle the email as a stream or in chunks with "normal" libraries and practices. MIME parsers in languages that tend to favor pulling everything into RAM as a string are still more likely to have been forced to face this issue already.
by jerf - Email already has the problem of complete buffering. That's why various services limit you to 10MB or 25MB.by inigyou
- > You don't want to embed the entire email in JSON. Too many parsers past, present, and future tend to want to decode the entire JSON document into memory before doing anything else, and so you'd be forcing entire email documents to be held in memory at scale
Why? Even if your system loads emails into memory a whole email at a time, that doesn't imply that it will load large numbers of emails simultaneously. The kind of processing that can be done by stream-processing large numbers of emails in parallel seems rather limited to me.
> I'd recommend something more like either a JSON header that defines what parts are in the email, followed by a normal MIME document, which is perfectly normal in HTTP with other things that use the format as well, or having the top level continue to be a MIME document and specify that the first part must be a JSON document containing the headers. JSON replacing the headers is generally something that would be a good idea, though.
If we're specifically talking about being able to short-circuit after headers, then why not a JSON header followed by JSON representation of the body?
by zahlman - > Optional postage for strangers: the server can answer a first contact with a 402. Configurable per mailbox; the cost of cold spamming stops being zero.
Interesting take re putting a cost on spam. Perhaps another take would be functionally implementing introductions.
> First-contact consent: an unknown sender doesn't get into the mailbox; they land in a "requests" box with their first message visible (like Signal's message requests). You accept, and the thread opens forever. A stranger can knock on your door, which is the essential property of mail, but they can't fill up your living room.
Unfortunately, this will only move the problem, and only reduce it in the case when all outside communication is ignored.
by wuschel - Yeah the 'Requests' folder just becomes the new Inbox folder.
Email clients already highlight/filter people in your contacts
by philipwhiuk - The fact nobody reinvented e-mail on top of a different set of standards is a good indication that the current stack is not as broken as some people would like to think.
It reminds me of a previous life, at a previous time, when everybody reinvented the content management system based on slightly different approaches, because they thought existing CMSs were too big. It starts with serving pages, then you want multiple templates, then you want accessibility, then you want to authenticate with LDAP, then you want to use the LDAP groups as your groups, and then you need to tie groups to roles, because groups mean one thing to the org, and roles mean another just to the CMS, then you realize a relational database isn't that good a match, then you realize it would be convenient to attach some logic, and a document database is no longer a great idea, then you need multiple datastores for content, then you need new workflows on top, then...
The devil is in the corner cases. They have been solved in different ways, by different parties, for decades, not always documented ("because it was just a simple thing, that once, and we fixed it"). Unless you've been there, you are doomed to make the same mistakes, and nobody was everywhere to avoid all mistakes.
Why not dedicate an effort to migrate all the COBOL code currently running almost every banking transaction? That should be easy ;-)
by rbanffy - >> The fact nobody reinvented e-mail on top of a different set of standards is a good indication that the current stack is not as broken as some people would like to think.
email is one of those technologies that "just works" but so many people seem to think it needs to be "fixed". it's generally very reliable and so people should just accept that and be grateful. It could be worse - it could be enshittified like so much other technology.
by HumblyTossed