Thinking out loud about 2nd-gen email

Re:Thinking out loud about 2nd-gen email by riffic on Friday May 17, 2024 @02:36PM (#40392945)

email is a good example of something that won't so easily be "2nd-gen'd" because everything it's built on is here to stay thanks to Lindy Law

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect

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Re:Thinking out loud about 2nd-gen email by jasode on Friday May 17, 2024 @03:13PM (#40393278)

>email is a good example of something that won't so easily be "2nd-gen'd" because everything it's built on is here to stay

The key argument is that email is already getting "2nd-gen'd" -- but it's happening in bite-sized and incoherent steps that don't fully work.

Example of new 2024 DMARC/DKIM/SPF requirements from Google & Yahoo: https://www.google.com/search?q=yahoo+gmail+new+senders+dkim...

The above situation is acting like a pseudo-2nd-gen email standard that's evolving in slow motion (without us officially calling it "gen v2.0"). Those email policy changes will be adopted because big cloud email providers like Gmail and Yahoo have a massive influence on the entire email landscape.

Therefore, a new hypothetical "MX2" standard that was more coherent with better authentication, anti-spam, and anti-phishing features could be promoted by a consortium of Google/Microsoft/Yahoo/Apple. The smaller players like Fastmail, ProtonMail, Mailchimp, Sendgrid, etc and most everyone else would all have to follow the cloud email providers' lead because everybody wants to be able to send email to them.

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Re:Thinking out loud about 2nd-gen email by nine_k on Friday May 17, 2024 @02:48PM (#40393062)

A solution that is 100% interoperable with the existing widely deployed solution but also offers substantial advantages can have good chances to coexist with the old solution for years if not decades, supplanting it only slowly.

Examples of success: monochrome TV -> color TV, landline phones -> mobile phones, the Windows 3.x -> Windows 9x -> Windows NT/2k/XP transition.

Email has a really well-working transport layer. The UX layer can see some innovation while staying compatible.

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Re:Thinking out loud about 2nd-gen email by sneed_chucker on Friday May 17, 2024 @02:54PM (#40393118)

Yeah, backwards compatibility that you slowly frog boil people out of is definitely the most effective solution for something like this.

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Re:Thinking out loud about 2nd-gen email by striking on Friday May 17, 2024 @02:46PM (#40393037)

I found your link interesting and informative. I'm curious if you have any specific comments on this quote from the story:

> From there, the email services which implement MX2 would publish a public date, on which all messages sent to them by the old MX record, will be automatically sent to Junk. If just Microsoft and Google alone agreed on such a date, that would be 40% of global email traffic.

Do you think this change wouldn't be enough? If so, why not?

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Re:Thinking out loud about 2nd-gen email by smeehee on Friday May 17, 2024 @03:44PM (#40393552)

MX records don't send messages. Assuming that “sent to them via SMTP” is meant… well, moving all messages to ‘junk’ isn't a good idea: it needs to be restricted to messages sent on or after that time. But why not just respond with “554 No SMTP service here” on opening the connection?

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Re:Thinking out loud about 2nd-gen email by riffic on Friday May 17, 2024 @02:54PM (#40393116)

all I can say is IPv6 (and to qualify, IPv6 is great everyone should be using it).

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Re:Thinking out loud about 2nd-gen email by chuckadams on Friday May 17, 2024 @03:41PM (#40393523)

Lindy’s closed six years ago.

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Re:Thinking out loud about 2nd-gen email by riffic on Friday May 17, 2024 @07:29PM (#40395129)

it actually closed in 1969 (or 1957).

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