> it's so beautiful because it's so standard

I think it's really the opposite, every provider tends to introduce new/unique/nonstandards but they (mostly) interact at a minimum with eachother.

Re: gmail DOT and + notation, those have been in common use on that platform for over a decade.

>I like innovation, but to innovate email wouldn't be better to innovate in a slow and consensual way using RFC after RFC, at least in the case of email?

RFC to what body? To the best of my knowledge the entire thing is just a happenstance of what happens to work in every client/server combination.

Paypal still sends me someone else's email because they signed up with [email protected] whereas I signed up with [email protected]. Apparently there's some way to make an account there where the email is considered secondary and they just never verify it.

That's a problem with PayPal, not Gmail. You can't register "myemail" if someone else has already registered "my.email", so PayPal must not have verified the address (unless you accidentally clicked the verification link yourself).

There was an article posted recently that complained about how Netflix lets people create multiple accounts using dot variations of the same Gmail address, and plenty of people pointed out how it made no sense to blame Gmail for Netflix failing to verify email addresses: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16781959

Well, it's Google that behaves in non-standard way. Let's say that the user verified the email by mistake: the error and misunderstanding is created by google nonstandard particles, not PayPal.

Not at all. Imagine if "myemail" and "my.email" were different accounts: that would result in much more confusion and mis-addressed emails.

It's not as if simply making a typo and entering the wrong email address doesn't happen, either.

Also the relevant standards leave it up to the email host how to handle dots, so it's not even non-standard.

email was killed by spam, current email is sadly a walking zombie that's getting eaten by maggots

I have very little problem with spam; server-side filtering and client-side filtering make it nearly a non-issue for me. Email was no more killed by spam than online discussion threads were.

Spam is still an issue. When you set up a new mail server, you are likely to be filtered by big providers because they will consider you as spam. I've personally had issues with Microsoft and a local provider. This makes self hosting or running a small email provider hazardous, which is problematic. I never had issues with Google and Yahoo though.

I guess spam and spam filters also have an ecological impact even if spams don't end up in our inbox.

And there are false positives too. Because of spam, we are likely to miss a legitimate message one day or another.

And I regularly see phishing on my professional inbox.

So spam is still an issue even if it is hidden, for several reasons.

Tell that to my coworkers! ;-) When our mail server goes down, people start calling within a minute.