1767700080 english rants

Email is hopeless

Let's start with one of my pet peeve. E-mail. In particular the ability to send e-mail from your mail server to someone's inbox.

SMTP used to be a nice protocol. But people are not nice and therefore we cannot have nice things. At first open SMTP relays were abused for sending spam. So open relays are frowned upon and blocked. Then ISPs started blocking port 25 (to stop spam) so you cannot run an SMTP server at home. But ISPs used to provide SMTP service along with the internet access. It worked fine while it lasted. Then about 5 years ago the ISP discontinued the SMTP service. VPS services also block outbound port 25 and you need to beg to a human to give access, which they can take away any time. Then I tried to use various free e-mail senders as SMTP smart hosts. But e-mails from those often went into spam or promotions or didn't went through at all. I could beg to get off blocklists but I after a few tries I've just gave it up. Now my calmarius.net domain is a receive-only domain. Whoever sends email to one of the aliases hosted there I cannot reply from it, instead I reply from my Gmail.

The ability of or running e-mail server that can deliver to inboxes is now a privilege of businesses basically. Everyone else is blocked or blocklisted.

For this reason I didn't even set up MX record for jxzqj.com. There will be no e-mail to or from this domain.

So we need to find a new way to communicate somehow. For example a simple web URL which a web service can send a POST request to can be used a way to send notifications for example. This will not solve the spamming issues. But it would solve the blocking. The thing is you cannot simply block HTTPS or TLS in general! So normally where a webapp would send an e-mail instead it would send a HTTP POST request to an URL to send a notification to me.

Email is hopeless

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