Can Email Not Suck?

It would be great if the biggest vendors and mail clients would implement things such as email verification (certificates) and the encryption (gpg or similar), and made it as easy as encrypted chat in iMessage is.

It's difficult for email not to suck. And in recent years it's been made worse by webmail which I steadfastly refuse to use. Like the author I use K9 on Android. I use Thunderbird on the PC.

I dislike both K9 and Thunderbird but they're the best of a horrible lot. Thunderbird is diabolically bad in many ways, it is slow, buggy, unintuitive and cannot be easily tailored to my needs. I use about a dozen add-ons and plugins just to get it serviceable.

(I use plugins just to add the missing bits that Mozilla forgot to include, not add fancy stuff. Moreover, the ergonomics of programs like Thunderbird are so bad that I can only conclude its programmers either never use the program thus don't know how bad it is, or they're completely disinterested - it's just a job. Thunderbird, has to be one of the quintessential examples of this. Oh, and I forgot, Thunderbird's editor also sucks big-time.)

Before Thunderbird, I used Eudora and it was by far the best of a bad lot. Trouble was Qualcomm was more interested in other things than Eudora and killed it off.

The problems with email really began when Microsoft made its Outlook Express free in Windows. This killed off the incentive of the developers of the paid-for products such as Eudora, so email never really developed past a certain point.

Similarly, email protocols are decades out of date but there seems little interest in revising them, unfortunately.

As for sending/using email, I've almost stopped using it altogether it now sucks so much. I don't use Google products because of their spyware, likewise I no longer reply to or send email to people who hold Google Gmail accounts as Google violates my privacy even in this way.

Moreover, if I send an email to party A and then to party B Google can then link A and B through me even though A or B may not want to have been linked this way. As I see it, it is not my peroggerative to violate either party's privacy without their permission.

As so many are forced to use Gmail, it narrows the options to who I can communicate with by email.

My solution is to just use other methods. A Google-free telephone for instance, so that normally means one's limited to communicating with people who've only old-fashioned POTS phone numbers.

(P.S.: It's also high time governments reclaimed our telephone services back from the interloping carpetbaggers such as Google who stole it from us. We could then get our telephone privacy back to the way that we took for granted 20 or more years ago.)