A Look Back at 50 Years of Email - SparkPost
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October 29, 2021 is a day to commemorate 50 years of email. Take a look back at how far email has come and where we're headed next.

Think about it, you can pick an e-mail domain anywhere and use any e-mail client on any platform, to send an e-mail to someone anywhere else… We just take that for granted, but if e-mail were newly invented today by a company like say Meta, all the billions of people in the world would have to belong to that same single company in order to send and receive mail to anyone else…

E-mail’s greatest success lies in it’s open standards and decentralisation. It will no doubt me replaced at some point in the future, as all technologies will, but let us hope that instant messaging and social networks go back to being open and decentralised (like they too were once).

See https://www.sparkpost.com/blog/a-look-back-at-50-years-of-email/

#technology #email #decentralisation #openstandards #deletemeta

  • GadgeteerZA@lemmy.mlOP
    2·
    3 years ago

    True but it is more about the concept of interoperability and lack of lock in. There are plenty of social media protocols that can support decentralization with encryption. The post is not about suggesting e-mail a replacement for social media or instant messaging.