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Comment by ChristianMarks | Hacker News Reader

"If email actually worked" then there would be some way to know whether email was sent and delivered--something like software transactional memory for email with logs that could be exchanged and mutually verified for consistency among emailing parties. (I'm supposed to be in a research position, but I have other academics nagging me about email delivery. There are constant problems with dropped email, mysterious rules that "helpful" email clients silently add that trash incoming messages, and no accountability from our local IT dept.)

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Email is just fine for me, I don't understand why people need to pretend they reinvent it every other week (social email, todo list email...).

The only thing I'm missing is on the technical side, a transaction system like you describe.

How great would it be if all the servers could reply to my mail client : I have received your email it isn't considered spam and the end user got it.

You get upvoted for agreeing with me that some sort of end-to-end verification service protocol is missing. Now there's a schlep if ever there was.

I've run into this problem when setting up email servers before, between DKIM, SPF, Various blacklists and Spam filters on the servers and clients that may catch important (non-spam) email it's hard to keep up with even when you just want a small personal server.

Email works fine, the problem is that lots of software implements it incorrectly.

Take spam filters for example: The correct way for this (and what I also do on my own private mailserver) is classifying mail during the SMTP session. Thus, if my mailserver considers a particular message as spam the sender receives an error message stating that his message could not be delivered.

And now take Gmail: Happily accepts most messages, but labels some of them as Spam. Of course, no-one ever checks the spam folder. A few misclassified mails and people will start complaining that email is broken.

Email clients have to do this because they use Bayesian filtering to get rid of Spam.

It turns out, if the sender of spam messages can find out which messages got through and which didn't, then they could build up the same bayesian filter on their computer, and figure out exactly what email they can send to not get marked as spam. Bayesian filtering only works if the spammer doesn't know which messages get through and which don't. I believe this is also one of the reasons images are disabled by default in gmail.

I'm not sure how this would work if a spammer targeted their own gmail inbox to discover which messages succeeded, but maybe spam filtering in gmail is only partially collective, so that individual inboxes build up slightly different bayes nets.

Source: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2004/09/popfile-vs-popfile....

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