The bigger problem is having mega-entities like Google, Meta, and Amazon dominate the web. Instead of crypto, there should have been a focus on allowing mid-size players to have more power.
Many thousands of admins are currently operating independent email servers with zero problem, and have been for decades. Mine is going on 15 years. In practice, you have to actually try pretty hard to misbehave enough for Google and Microsoft to notice and block you. For the vast majority of independent servers, we have no problems at all routing to gmail or outlook.
Reports of the death of decentralized email have been greatly exaggerated. Independent mail servers are alive and well to this day, just as they always have been and (probably) always will.
I've been doing it for more like 30.
> In practice, you have to actually try pretty hard to misbehave enough for Google and Microsoft to notice and block you.
As far as I can tell, the "misbehavior" that got me blocked by Microsoft was being hosted on Linode... where I'd been for around ten years at that time, all on the same IP address. Tiny server, had never emitted a single even slightly spammy message, all the demanded technical measures in place, including the stupid ones.
Because of the huge number of people stupid enough to receive their email through Microsoft, I had to spend a bunch of time "appealing". That's centralization.
On edit: Oh, and the random yahoos out there running freelance blocklists can do a lot of damage to you, too, by causing smaller operators to reject your mail.
Can you please elaborate on this? I use Outlook (@outlook.com) for my personal email management, but would definitely switch if there is a better alternative.
Microsoft will (intentionally) lose your incoming mail if, say, it comes from the wrong AS. You have no control over most of that, and you will not be told about it.
Microsoft may or may not be data mining the actual content of your email. Possibly also after trying to break your encryption.
Since you not only use Microsoft to process mail, but have also inexplicably decided to use Microsoft's domain name for your address, you'll find it difficult to ever move away from Microsoft. If your account gets deleted without warning, you'll be permanently screwed. If Microsoft, say, decides to go out of the email business in 10 years, or start charging some ridiculous fee, you'll probably at least get some notice, so you'll only have to scramble to change your address before the hammer falls.
AND you're contributing to the centralization of the whole damned Internet.
The better alternative is to self-host. Even though you'll then constantly have to worry about your outgoing mail getting dropped, at least you'll be in a position to notice if that happens.
If for some reason you can't handle that, then at least register your own domain and host it with a smaller provider that gives you some guarantees. You will, of course, have to actually pay a small to moderate fee for the reliability.
I'm taking some networking courses online which will hopefully help in terms of being more tech literate and being able to do this.
Regardless, I'm definitely going to start the transition. I also use their cloud storage and have very important documents in there.
Thank you for the education and the heads up.
(A curiosity to me, as someone trained on HTTPS, which doesn't really care what port you're coming from. I wish there was just mail-over-HTTPS, since port 443 can't be blocked by a reasonable host.)
I use mailcow and did the migration over a weekend. It took a few hours after to get all the spam stuff right (SPF, DKIM etc), but now it works flawlessly since 3 years and I use maybe a few hours per year to run updates.
Oddly enough MS hosted organisational email seems to work fine.
I wouldn't be surprised if that percentage was made up by the big ones to give you the feeling that self hosting mailservers is useless.
Is it still a good example of federation though if a vast majority (99%?) of mails between such institutions or outside of orgs large enough to have a campus, tend to go through Microsoft/Google/Apple/Amazon?