> companies no longer send confidential info through it.
It depends, B2B absolutely still do.
What I meant was that Email as a whole should be overhauled, though SMTP is by far the weakest link there. All the kludges and workarounds like DMARC, SPF etc don't fix the issues, and this is why so many companies are inventing the wheel. For example, Microsoft won't let your server deliver mail to them if you don't have enough 'reputation', meaning you must send a certain number of emails that are not spam. Otherwise you will find yourself in the doghouse (I've commented on this more detailed before). Even if you never sent spam in your entire life and your server isn't on any blocklist!
SMTP is decentralised yes and that is a great thing. But such measures like MS are doing totally undermine this decentralisation. And it will continue to do so, it's already super hard to run your own small-time server for the issues mentioned below. This decentralisation is already disappearing. It's time for a new protocol that is ready for the future.
> It depends, B2B absolutely still do.
They do for now because people involved in sales are usually hungry for business and don't care about the risks. They want to have low barriers for the customers, which is understandable. However there are significant risks depending on how the customer does their mail. We're on O365 and comms with other companies that are also on that are obviously pretty secure because they never go unencrypted through the public internet. Again a point that Microsoft (and Google) make into a selling point for their services, further undermining decentralisation.
We in the cybersecurity realm are imposing rules, e.g. any confidential info must be shared through secure filesharing. But it's hard to avoid this happening.
The the world wide web, ipv4, IRC, the US constitution, the telephone system, email, were all developed in older times, and as times change, they develop flaws which need (ugly) patches. That's a sign that they're successful, that no one company has come and replaced it and then killed it when things got inconvenient.
Think about the opposite situations: Google Groups replaced Usenet, and now it's completely dead; Google Reader took a lot of marketshare from RSS and almost killed it when they shut it down.
So let's not hastily destroy the only online communication system we have left, that's not controlled by a mega tech company.
Personally I think google groups was not a replacement as such, more an extension of usenet. Usenet also had some very serious problems that made it hard to maintain and more specialised discussion fora took over. I don't think it was google groups as such, that was more one of the many ways to interface with usenet.
I'm absolutely not advocating replacing it with something a mega tech company has their hands in though! Any replacement should be decentalised. I would love to see an email replacement tech along the lines of what Matrix is doing for the chat world.
People have been saying that for 30 years (maybe more?)
The reason it doesn't happen is that every bright idea to create a new email is built on removing vital functionality from what email is. So you end up with something which solves some of the headaches of email, but is crippled to the point it is either not interesting, or becomes simply yet another walled garden so what's the point.
Email is what it is because it is completely open. I don't need to rely on any particular entity or be approved by anyone to allow me to create an account or log in (under threat of being locked out). It is 100% decentralized, nobody owns it. It can be forwarded (try that with most walled gardens), piped to a shell for unlimited possibilities, it supports creating ad-hoc mailing lists, automation in any way you can imagine, archiving, unlimited searching, there are no possible restrictions on which client you use to read or send or process, or different ones for each. It works on everything under the sun.
Any replacement is either crippled by removing some of the important characteristics, or simply becomes the same thing but nonstandard.
That's why email has been around since the 70s. While imperfect, it's far better than anything else.