There was no chance that everyone would be running their own email server, but if it wasn't for the lack of IPv6 adaptation a plug and go home email server solution would probably see a decent amount of use. I'd bet we'd already be seeing it as a feature in most mid-ranged home routers by now.
The mail server in a router is easy to host, the problem is:
1) Uptime (though this could be partially alleviated by retries)
and most of all:
2) "Trust"/"Spam score"
It's the main reason to use Sendgrid, AWS, Google, etc. Their "value" is not the email service, it's that their SMTP servers are trusted.
If tomorrow I can just send from localhost instead of going through Google it's fine for me, but in reality, my emails won't arrive due to these filters.
I use a small local provider (posteo) and have 0 problems with spam.
So a 20 pound monkey can also throw around some weight. To be fair I only use it for personal stuff its probably different if you need enterprise scale l.
I've seen plenty of Gmail accounts over the years and they pretty much look the same.
The only Gmail accounts that are "overrun by spam" are those of people subscribing to lots of spammy newsletters and then not knowing how to unsubscribe from them (or figuring they'd stay subscribed in case the next newsletter is the Magical One™). But that's 100% self inflicted and you can't save those people with any technical solution.
Email spam isn't a day to day problem for Gmail (at least) since Bayesian email filtering was first implemented.
The specific concern around uptime & reliability was baked into email systems from almost the start - undeliverable notifications (for the sender) and retries.
But yes, the “trust / spam score” is a legit challenge. If only device manufacturers were held liable for security flaws, but we sadly don’t live in that timeline.
Its not a device/MTA issue, SMTP just is not a secure protocol and there is not much you can do in order to 'secure' human communication. Things like spoofing or social engineering are near impossible to address within SMTP without external systems doing some sort of analysis on the messages or in combination with other protocols like DNS.
SMTP isn't at fault, the social ecosystem is at fault. Every system where identities are cheap has a spam problem. If you think a system has cheap identities and no spam, it probably doesn't have cheap identities — examples are HN or Reddit.
Trust / spam score is the largest one I think, second to consumer ISPs blocking the necessary ports for receiving mail.
Even if your "self hosting" is renting a $5/month VPS, some spam lists (e.g. UCEPROTECT) proactively mark any IP ranges owned by consumer ISPs and VPS hosting as potential spam. I figured paying fastmail $30/yr was worth never having to worry about it.
For "Trust", I believe patio11 described this system as the "Taxi Medallion of Email".
e.g. you spend a lot of money to show that you are a legitimate entity or you pay less money to rent something that shows you are connected to said entity.
Without some kind of federation or centralization, it seems hard to distinguish a hobbyist from a spammer if both of them are using a plug-and-go. Forcing that responsibility into the hands of Google, Zoho, and Microsoft seems like the best compromise, unfortunately.
For one, if my power goes out for an extended period of time I'd still like to be able to access my email. Communications really can't be hosted locally.
Another one for the pile. You can choose to open office documents in Teams directly, the browser, or in the native desktop app, but you can only set it to open by default in either Teams or browser. Why?
Usually when I hear about people using ChatGPT they are usually just using it as a search engine that delivers summarized results. The average person wouldn't use email if they had to pay for it, good luck making money off of all of those visitors without just becoming another ad tech company competing with the other ad tech companies.
Also manages to sustain itself on it's own weird brand of whales, a handful of disgruntled users with enough money to just keep buying accounts using random characters as a username just to get immediately banned after their first post. Some taking a dump in the middle of your living room isn't so bad if they are paying your rent and you can just kick them back out.
Even without national protectionism we are still experiencing isolationism, expect instead of it being done by nations in the interest of their citizens it is being done by corporations in the interest of their shareholders and it's leading to a dangerous amount of centralization as well.
Compatibility protocols are probably the best answer, allow individual countries to develop software they trust to interact with internationally accepted protocols and formats. As you said, good luck getting anyone to agree to anything. If email didn't already exist I don't think it would even be possible to implement today.
>>Point it a SharePoint/OneDrive location, a handful of excel spreadsheets and pdfs/word docs and tell it to make a PowerPoint presentation based on that information. It cannot do this. It will spit out nonsense. You have to hold it by the hand tell it everything to do step by step to the point that making the PowerPoint presentation yourself is significantly faster because you don’t have to type out a bunch of prompts and edit it’s garbage output.
Everyone I know who use AI day-to-day is just using Copilot to mostly do things like add a transition animation to a Powerpoint slide or format a word document to look nice. The only problem these LLM products seem to solve is giving normal people a easy way to interact with terrible software processes and GUIs. And better solution to that problem would be for developers to actually observe how the average use interacts with both a computer and their program in particular.
It isn't 'You either die a hero or live long enough to become a villain', it's 'You either die a hero or live long enough for people to realize you are a villain'. While it's ultimately meaningless to speculate on what the dead would do if they were living, Steve Jobs in life did have plenty of belief and made plenty of decisions that are perfectly inline with what we are seeing in 2026 and there is no particular reason to believe he would not just be up there with the worst of them.
People are pointing their fingers at QA, and while that is a big part of it I think the bigger issue is, like you said, them not really caring about some of their core products. Windows 11 seems to exist purely so that they can earn passive ad revenue while vacuuming up user data, Office 365 is now just a pile of mature applications that are slowly getting worse and new applications that are too unfinished to be actively useful.
Rapid prototyping has always seem to me as the most viable use for generative AI, especially in software. Being able to quickly produce something that is just functional enough to determine if its feasible or if it would properly meet the customers needs before then taking the time to build it correctly would resulted in a lot of saved time and money.
Trucks being dick compensators is also based on their association with the work they do. Easier to pretend to be a salt of the earth tough guy when you both drive the same truck but with a different trim package.
reply