Email is like those creaking old Terminators from the ’70s which continue to function without complaining. Designed for a world that doesn’t exist anymore, it has optional encryption, no built-in auth, three⁺ retrofitted security layers bolted on top, an unstandardized filtering layer and many more quirks. Yet billions of emails arrive correctly every single day.
Email is not elegant but nonetheless it is Lindy. In the new age of agentic AI, we can only expect it to metamorphose into another dimension.
↫ Saurabh “Sam” Khawase
The fact that email is as complicated as it is bad enough, but having it be so dominantly controlled by only a few large gatekeepers like Google and Microsoft surely isn’t helping either. I feel like email is no longer really a technology individuals can actively partake in at every level; it feels much more like WhatsApp or iMessage or whatever in that we just get to send messages, and that’s it. Running your own mail sever isn’t only a complex endeavour, it’s also a continuous cat-and-mouse game with companies like Google and Microsoft to ensure you don’t end up on some shitlist and your emails stop arriving.
I settled on Fastmail as my email service, and it works quite well. Still, I would love to be able to just run my own email server, or have some of my far more capable friends run one for a small group of us, but it’s such a daunting and unpleasant effort few people seem to have the stomach and perseverance for it.
I pay $10 a month for a mail server host. I can add up to about 300 aliases. If I ever get spam on one of them, I just destroy it and create a new one.
Still, about the only thing I use email for these days is to receive electronic bills and such.
First of all, I am really happy the email still works. Sure it has limitations and complexity, but when I try to figure out alternatives I just see the landscape horrible.
The last few years a lot of ‘independent’ providers are producing email options that work very good, at least to me. Self-hosting is a real drama, but being far from large gatekeepers is not complicate.
To be honest, I am much more concerned about about Whatsapp everywhere for everything.
I’ve been with Fastmail for probably two decades now and they have been fantastic. I feel like email is one of the few means of communication that works everywhere and is not completely under control of a single corporation. I completely depend on it, and it is my primary means of (important) online communication. I can do without Whatsapp and the likes, but I would feel crippled without email.