Some weeks ago, I’ve come across Delta Chat, whose main thing is “(near) instant messaging using your email”
That left me thinking, has this been attempted before? If not, why? Also, why (besides servers’ limitations as means to fight spam) isn’t this solution used more often, given that e-mail has been a decentralized solution for well over 40 years now?
Besides the other reasons here the biggest reason IM took off is the “I” part of the name. Email measures its SLAs in days. A lot of the retry intervals are set 4 hours with timeouts of 72 hours. It wasn’t designed to be “Instant”. Granted probably 90%+ of email gets delivered in under 5 minutes, but imagine having a chat and your responses are delayed 4 hours. Just send an email at that point.
but imagine having a chat and your responses are delayed 4 hours
not only that, but intermittendly delayed. Very possible that it will be instantanously 99% of the time, but randomly a message will be delayed by hours and you will probably not even know it
Plus there’s the issue of overhead. An email might be simple, but look at the raw message and there’s a lot of stuff being sent for each email.
So this is true (and increasingly so recently), but a lot of that overhead is technically unnecessary for the message to be sent and received; a lot of it is information about transmission and DKIM validation, spam protection, sender verification, etc; and then a TON of it is HTML for display. For a known receiver to send a message to a known recipient, I believe that a text-only email that’s cryptographically signed for identity validation could potentially be a tiny fraction of the size of a big huge HTML email.
I once tried to explain instant messaging to an older woman but she didn’t get the difference to email because she’d regularly use them to instantly chat with her son. That was two or three decades ago. While in theory emails can take days to be delivered the reality is that for a human it is “instant”.
Guessing here, but probably because it’s extremely difficult in the modern day to host your own email server; you’d be depending on one of the big/established players to handle the traffic.
I’ve run my own email since ~2013 or so, and if I had to set it up from scratch today, I probably wouldn’t. There’s just so many hoops to jump through to get it going, secure it properly, and get your messages accepted by the big players. Not to mention, getting a clean IPv4 address from a VPS provider that isn’t on every spam block list is damn near impossible. With some work, you can clean those up, but Microsoft has some internal block lists that are extremely difficult to get removed from (there’s a form you can fill out, but good luck finding it). I’d guess other big players have similar “internal” block lists. With those, the email doesn’t bounce or give any indication there was a delivery failure, it just silently goes into a black hole: the sending server assumes it’s accepted, and the recipient never sees it.
Also, most residential connections flat-out block outgoing SMTP on port 25, so self-hosting would not be possible for many.
If an email-based chat/IM platform were to eschew compatibility with existing email services and just used the protocols on different ports, it may be feasible, but it would have to run in parallel to other email services or rely on some kind of “bridge” setup (probably not what those projects are going for).
I think things have gotten better.
A few weeks ago I set up my own email server using https://mail-in-a-box.email and it wasn’t so bad. Above the capabilities of most internet users, yes. It has helpful status checks to let you know what parts of the config you need to address or fix in order to get it working and delivering email. It took me a few hours to get everything working well.
Congrats. Even with an “in a box” solution, getting email up and running is no small feat. I went with a classic Postfix+Dovecot+Spamd+ClamAV setup. Has worked well for me but definitely isn’t for the faint of heart lol. I spent forever trying to get DKIM working correctly only to realize that my DNS provider was accepting the DKIM TXT record in full, but was internally truncating it to 255 characters. Some DNS providers will automatically split it into multiple records transparently or if not, reject it for being too long; mine didn’t lol, and showed the full record in the control panel but only served the first 255 characters. Had to manually split it myself, and it worked after that.
The biggest issue I had was cleaning up the IP address of the VPS that was hosting it. I setup two, actually. The first one was easy since I was the first to be assigned that IP, and I only had to remove it from Microsoft’s hidden, internal block list. The second one, my backup MX, was more of a challenge as I set it up a few years later, and the assigned IP had been around the block a few times and was on every spam list imaginable.
Once it was up and running, and without it being a source of spam, it’s been pretty easy to maintain. But getting to that point was challenging.
If you’ve ever looked into email protocols you’d find it’s a nightmare of cludged together solutions piled on-top of each other over decades. It simply isn’t designed for instant messaging.
Here’s a great talk that goes into a bunch of issues with email in general.
So, e-mail’s actually literally xkcd 927. Fucking hell
Jabber/XMPP is similar, Google EEE’d though…
Then you have Matrix which is what the French security services based their internal chat system on.
I think probably because you can just email your contacts without the need for a messaging client…
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Back in the early 2000s, I was in a mailing list for a hobbyist group which was basically that. There was a central mailer client and we’d post to that central email address, and it would send it to everyone on the list. You could get a live feed, daily, or weekly mailings of everyone’s comments in mail threads.
I think these all went away with vBulletin and WordPress and all of that. That way you could search posts and didn’t have to archive it yourself, back when email storage was not unlimited.
My email provider kept blocking my DeltaChat-created messages, and indeed locking me out of my account for them. Presumably because the encrypted gobbledygook looks likes spam. The open nature of email really is its Achilles heel, unfortunately.
This reminds me of when a coworker wrote a protocol around sending encrypted messages back and forth inside of gchat to control another PC.
The reason was that: our company firewall doesn’t let stuff go in directly, but we have internet.
I thought that was a nutty tos violation.
Each system had a Google account and would login and listen for messages from the controller.
Wow! If someone at my company did that, I’m not sure if I’d be more impressed or more furious. Probably would be a resume-generating event for that person if we’re being honest.
First of all, yes, attempts have been made, but:
- E-Mail is widespread, but not simple. It’s quite complicated
- Other messengers often try to simplify the protocol.
As I used to say to customers of the ISPs I worked for, Internet e-mail was not designed to be instant, and it’s largely good fortune that it works fast enough most of the time.
It would be closer to IM if everyone in the conversation was on the same mail server, which is what often happens within a large organisation, but even then there are overheads that expect there to be a sending and receiving server if not a lot of other things along the way. And as soon as someone outside that organisation needs to be included, their mail system could introduce a bottleneck even if there’s no bottleneck at the sender’s side.
Instant messaging tends to be far more streamlined and centralised precisely so it can be quick.
The first thing comes to mind is thinking about all the spam that goes to my email and imagining all of it trying to bot IM me.
I had an issue with those spam emails somehow adding shit to my calendar for my email. I think it mostly got fixed but that stopped me from using my calendar anymore real quick.
