The Mirage of Decentralisation
Almost everyone has a Gmail account. That is a bad thing. Most of the world’s emails are stored on servers owned by the same company, which has proven that it can’t be trusted by reading your (private!) messages. With the USA antitrust case, it seems they may be forced to break up the company (edit: they have since sitting on this post for a month), but I don’t know to what extent it will help its users. Perhaps not owning an advertising industry will help, though. Not to mention the fact that nobody would have initally rejected Gmail on the basis that it might have gotten too popular.
Side Note
the programmer and the entrepreneur have two different mindsets. Imagine if one company had proprietary standards for all web traffic, or if Facebook was a protocol for collecting messages other people posted from their own instances? I think platforms like Facebook just happen to be centralised out of a different way of thinking, but what’s more important is that people will choose to accept the shortcomings of services - Hence companies can get away with gouging them out of their data.
The surge in the use of Bluesky over Mastodon can probably be attributed to the fact most people can’t wrap their heads around the difference between a protocol and a platform. I don’t blame them, and I’d take Bluesky over Twitter any day, but the fact people need to download “an” app instead of “the” app will seem confusing.
Ownership
I use a company called IONOS for my domain and VPS hosting. That is different to running my own server, which isn’t possible for email because you can’t set up reverse DNS and everything. My website is available to the public, so I don’t have a problem hosting that on someone else’s server, though it is a small compromise for the privacy of my messages.
Even though this is a step in the right direction, nobody is going to set up their own email server overnight. The best option for people who don’t know the difference between IMAP and SMTP (as in, almost everyone) would be to use a more private provider like Tuta or ProtonMail. Even though none of the three options are perfect, they are considerably better than everyone relying on an advertising company keep their data private.
Encryption
With the current state of email, its encryption is fundamentally useless. But it doesn’t have to be this way, they just don’t want to implement the better option out of greed. Currently, emails use TLS encryption, so eavesdroppers can only see that an email is going between two places, which is adequate, but since emails are stored in plain text in your mailbox, your provider can (and will) read them. Don’t believe me? Consider how the “AI” tools in Gmail work.
The alternative would be to end to end encrypt all emails by default. Think that’s too much for the average user to handle, or too “dangerous”? Check how many people are using WhatsApp. Messages can still be stored on servers forever this way (ie like IMAP), but the decryption keys should remain on the user’s devices. Times have simply changed and people need to expect better when it comes to keeping their data safe, not from hackers but also from surveillance done by corporations.
I have already set up end to end encryption for my own Email. It’s a shame that more “common” providers don’t offer the same, probably because they have an irrational “fear” of encryption in the name of data collection. You might think it’s logical to tell people to do this as well, but literally everyone else isn’t technically minded and doesn’t even care about this in the first place. But if you do, it’s worth setting it up. That way their “AI"s can’t read through your private messages.
Do you email anyone?
I don’t very much, but that’s not my point exactly. Specifically, the ratio of messages you recieve to the ones you send. On my main personal email I only have a few subscriptions I specifically want to read. Anything else that isn’t worth reading will be told to send it to Outlook or Gmail.
Most email subscriptions can be replaced by RSS feeds, at least in the case of blogs, etc. For anything more personal or with a two way conversation, keep using email. Will this realistically happen? Probably not. I love RSS because it’s simple, even though most users of social media have probably never heard of it. They’re missing out!
Email Clients Suck Anyway
Gmail is fine apart from the “AI” nonsense. Outlook through a browser is fine provided you are paying for Office, but it has ads otherwise (though blocking them is what I recommend). I use the old Outlook on my Windows desktop and it’s my favourite email client of all time, probably because it hasn’t been wrecked like the others. But don’t get me started on the new one, I can’t find a source but it has a Cookie notice and has a bunch of features missing anyway. It’s funny that one of them is that it can’t open your .eml files aka emails. I mean, I’m not on the PWA hype train, nor am I against them, but this is quite low.
I use Thunderbird on my Linux laptop, which I use for all my work and anything non-windows. Initially it did feel a bit weird, especially with the way it seemed to handle RSS feeds as folders, but I have since gotten quite used to it. I don’t need any sort of “advanced” functionality for my workflow but I haven’t had any significant issues with it.
In the free world there are other email clients, such as Geary or KMail, but I haven’t used them day to day. I have tried to setup KMail before but it hasn’t worked well for me. I’m not in the mood for any CLI clients either such as mutt. I just want to see my emails, why should it be so hard to set up a client? I’m a fan of the terminal, but personally it’s not worth spending time configuring things and text files and solving a bunch of inevitable issues for some productivity points.
Conclusion
Email is a powerful tool that once shaped the Internet, but it has since been neglected as there has been a shift to other forms of messaging which are objectively more convenient for their users (ie social media). But I still think that most of us can get by with it in its current state and use the best tools at our disposal.