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Comment by yowmamasita | Hacker News Reader

Email is still the most robust communication medium. But I have also observed that it has also prevented emoji-only replies which is great.

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Standard but not robust. In fact it can silently fail.

Email is very robust and does not fail silently -- unless you ignore the "undelivered returned to sender" emails you get. Mail servers are very fault tolerant, with essentially all implementations supporting an exponential backoff on failure. What's more, even if SourceHut is down, everyone in the Cc will still receive your emails, because they're routed around lists.sr.ht anyway. In the event of a lists.sr.ht outage, you might not even notice that we're down.

Unfortunately some of the larger mail providers will "accept" mail they don't like, but then blackhole it.

Yes, you can say "well, your intended recipients shouldn't use mail providers that do that", but in reality that's not our choice.

That's unfortunately just not true. It does, and has, failed silently.

I've had Google silently swallow emails before, both sending and receiving. It's not fun.

You may be right generally, but for your specific example that's not email being rubbish it's Google being rubbish. Why not switch to a professional provider?

Yes. Google's implementation of email. One of the most highly used email implementations on the planet.

That was just one example, I've seen corporate Exchange systems do the same. Are they not professional?

If one of the biggest email providers on the planet can silently swallow and not deliver emails, then blanket statements saying emails never fail are just wrong. It's important to understand practical failure modes of the systems we use, and not pretend they're more perfect than they are in reality.

It's funny that always when email fails, the next word is gmail, maybe go away from that wannabe email service? And no dont tell me a private server is impossible, i manage more then 150 (from different customers) of them and have zero problems with delivery to gmail ms etc, but yes you need to veryfi your domain @ google and microsoft.

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