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Comment by talkingtab | Hacker News Reader

Email has been turned into a by-the-corporation, for-the-corporation service. Corporations need DMARC so they can control email and the ability to spam. The spam I cannot block is spam from Google.

If you decide to think about this, you will quickly realize that email is f*ked and needs to be forked. Perhaps we need a Community Email Initiative that blocks corporations and only allows Community members.

Trust is the one thing you can't buy on the Corporate Internet.

I am sure many people will be offended and down vote this comment because they cannot conceptualize an internet without Corporations.

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You can do this right now, and you don't even need to fork anything. E-mail is an internet scale protocol that's not owned or ownable, except by convention. Since you specifically want to cut out Google, and their attempts to capture E-mail are what makes rolling your own E-mail hard anyway, just go for it.

Depending on how hard you want to make it, you can slap all the parts together yourself or use something like Zimbra, Mailcow, iRedMail, mail-in-a-box.

The advantage over a fork, whatever specifically that means, is any service that needs E-mail as an identity verification, still works.

What I am proposing is that community email servers can talk to each other. I have email servers setup - all the hoops - for my community. I want others to set up community servers and be able to interoperate. My server can send and receive from other communities. No corporations, no tracking. If your sever spams it gets dropped from the federation. Yes it is more complex, and there will be problems and issues. But hey, if we can have crypto currency why can't we get emails?

let's say this federation has three communities, a, b, and c. you run a, I run b, and my spammy friend runs c. C is my friend, and I'm going to keep allowing him to send me email, but you drop him, because he spammed you.

that's literally how email works today, unless the federation can supersede my authority as an operator to choose who may send/receive with me, at which point it'd stop being a federation anyway.

We have this, it's called email. Until someone involved is using Google or Microsoft.

myserver.com can talk to yourserver.com just fine and since neither of us have insane spam filters set up, it just works and no megacorpo is involved.

The protocol is okay, it just needs more smaller operators including smaller spam blocklists.

You are thinking of approved domains only, and perhaps people can vote them out. But, what you are describing is an RBL (in this case a real time whitelist instead). I like the ability for existing members to be able to vote out other members, but you run into the issue of spammers creating a million domains and then being able to vote out all legitimate members.

Yes, email is just completely broken. It's not private, sender identification is mediocre at best (and nonexistent without things like DMARC and SPF), and all the kludges thrown up make self-hosting harder. Spam has zero cost basically also. Nobody trusts email anymore for anything confidential, it's become a clumsy notification service "come check our portal for your real email".

It's time for a new protocol with end to end encryption and sender verification built-in. That shouldn't be as hard as it sounds, because at the time when email was invented the internet was very different. Connections were intermittent, for example I would retrieve my email once a day with UUCP (and some other people would use batched-SMTP). Which means you could not rely on the sending and receiving server being able to communicate directly. In this day and age this is possible and that direct communication opens up a lot of better crypto like key generation algorithms which require both parties to be online at the same time.

The problem is, is you don't allow corpos you will break 95% of mainstream people's usecases. So I think this is a non-starter, unfortunately, though it is a lofty goal.

You can already do this without changing anything. Just set your corporate mailserver to not accept mail from common community email providers. There's a reason nobody does this, and it's because it's a bad idea.

There is so much crossover between personal email and corporate email.

My previous employer did this, and no one seemed to miss it. If you had a use case to add an exception (the most common was to send yourself a mail from your personal Gmail, to print something on the corporate printers) that was supported and straightforward too.

One solution would be whitelist only. You must specifically whitelist a domain or email address, and everything else is blocked. If someone wants to send you an email, you must get their email address.

However, if you are using it to sign up for a service online, the domain often does not match the sender. You might sign up at the example.com website, but you get an email from noreply@auth-example.com as the email address.

No, email is the only digital communication left where I can talk to normie relatives AND businesses without having an account on normie tech service. DMARC does not impede that at all and it not a valid cause to throw away this lucky artifact of computing history.

What do you mean “fork”? Just buy a domain and install an email server.

Buy a domain? If you're going to fork email, may as well go the whole hog and fork DNS too!

Have your own gmail.com

You can't solve a social or political problem with a technical solution. Whatever you invent, Microsoft and Google will still collude to block you and not each other.

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