[geeks] Email: Dead as we knew it

[Mouse]

> It's the usual story of the marketing folks ruining the Internet for
> the geeks, but what's happening with email makes me particularly sad.

> [...]

Right with you, all the way down the line, except that my email
experience isn't nearly as bad, probably largely because I don't invite
such email into my mailbox to begin with, and have automated defenses
that keep out almost all of the worst of it anyway.

> The plain-text portion of email is entirely neglected anymore.

Not quite, though if you use designed-for-mainstream email I can
understand the feeling.  My SMTP server won't even accept mail - or at
least isn't supposed to, though it may have bugs - that's text/html
without a text/plain part, and I routinely get plenty of email that's
got the content in text/plain.  But this may be an artifact of what I
don't use email for, which I can summarize as "anything mainstream".
I've had various people and organizations - doctor, credit union - ask
for email for me.  I always tell them I don't give it out because it's
not reliable enough, and most entities, once they have an email address
for me, immediately assume it works immediately and reliably every time
regardless of sender or content, which mine does not.

I recently heard it said that the local police would not take a
phoned-in report for various minor things, instead telling callers to
submit it online.  If they tried that with me I'd tell them if they
want me to do it online they will have to bring me a machine capable of
doing so and then administer it themselves, and I would then contact my
city councillor about it.

> The web normalized rude interactions between individuals and between
> developers and visitors.  If any of us walked into a shop only to
> have some clerk cover our eyes and prevent us from walking further
> before giving contact details, we'd gut-punch the jerk and storm out.

Yup.  Well, I probably wouldn't gut-punch anyone.  I would however
storm out, after telling them exactly why.

> Yet, this is the normal sort of interaction between a visitor and
> most blogs, most medium-scale commercial sites, and even a few large
> ones.

Yes.  I was looking for something (mattresses, I think) recently - on
my work "smart"phone, to be sure - and EVERY LAST ONE of the vendor
pages I looked at would let me look at it for maybe fifteen seconds
before putting up a modal thing over the whole screen.

My reaction to that is to "storm out" - I kill the tab, and, if I had
some way to tell them I did so and why, I would.  I relatively recently
placed an electronics parts order through Digikey and was surprised -
delighted, but surprised - that they still took phone orders.  (I would
not have placed the order through them otherwise.  I think I even told
them so.)

> I have no solutions, no noble action to improve things.  Just needed
> to whine a bit.  I can't feel like we (the geeks) built this thing,
> invited the rest of the world into "our house," and then got shoved
> out the back door so that we can watch them wreck the place.

Well put.  (Well, after s/can't feel/can't help feeling/.)  See
ftp.rodents-montreal.org:/mouse/blah/2012-10-31-1.html (my blah post of
2012-10-31, also available over HTTP - my HTTP server and my FTP server
are backed by the same piece of filesystem), for how I put it back in
2012.  In my perception, things haven't improved in those respects in
the ten and a half years since then, except possibly in that my own
attitude has shifted somewhat.

I'm not sure whether I'd go back to, say, the '80s.  There certainly
are huge drawbacks to these days, but there _are_ benefits, such as
connectivity being far cheaper and more available (while it is, in some
places, difficult to get non-broken connectivity, back in the day it
would have bordered on impossible to get _any_ connectivity in those
places).

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