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Email vs Capitalism, or, Why We Can't Have Nice Things - Dylan Beattie - NDC Porto 2023
Email's flawed design, constant evolution, and vulnerabilities make it a difficult technology to secure, with scalability issues and spam a persistent problem, requiring a complete overhaul to achieve a more secure and reliable system.
- Email is a fundamental technology that has been around since the 1960s, but its design is fundamentally flawed and it’s been hacked and abused since its inception.
- Email is a moving target, constantly evolving with new technologies and protocols, but its core design remains the same.
- SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) is the underlying protocol that allows email to be sent and received, but it has many weaknesses and has been exploited by spammers and phishers.
- MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions) was introduced in the 1990s to allow for the transfer of non-ASCII characters, but it added complexity to the email system and made it easier to send spam.
- In 2002, the author built a web application that sent emails to over 50,000 people per hour, highlighting the scalability issues with email.
- Email is not secure, and companies like Microsoft, Yahoo, and Google are constantly trying to improve security while also trying to make it difficult for hackers to exploit vulnerabilities.
- Spam has been a major issue with email since its inception, and despite efforts to combat it, it continues to be a problem.
- The author believes that the only way to solve the problem of email is to redesign the entire system from the ground up, but this is a difficult and complex problem that may not be achievable.
- The author also believes that the concept of “email” as we know it today is fundamentally flawed and needs to be replaced with a new system that is more secure, more reliable, and more user-friendly.