Eliminate email

@gb said this morning that she's tired of receiving 300 spam messages a day --85% going to her spam folder.

I asked if it was possible to eliminate email altogether now that Secure Scuttlebutt works.

Perhaps having this conversation in public will help us figure out if it is possible to eliminate email in 2017?

@gb Woah there, isn't switching your email account off forever something you need to think through before you jump off the deep end?

One of the benefits of being on the email net is everyone has an email account. When you drop off that grid, you'll be unable to email anyone. Right?

@gb Yah, I've heard from people that ev@evbogue.com emails go to spam in gmail unless I'm in their contact list. It's because gmail's spam approach seems to have devolved into authenticating only corporate email.

So you're saying that you only want to talk to people who are willing to use sufficiently advanced technologies? I remember making that argument back in 2010, but I met a lot of resistance from people who felt that I should keep using email.

Can we make it possible for people who aren't on sbot to easily contact you over sbot?

@gb An sbot form would work, but how would you reply unless they spin up an sbot identity?

I think you gotta make people aware that they're using a distributed social network to contact you and make it clear they need to keep their public/private key to be able to receive a reply from you.

I realize your pain point is your real email to fake email ratio is 500 to 1.

However I'm concerned taking an email account off your website could be viewed as 'you don't want to talk to anybody' or you don't want to answer support requests.

For example, I hate going to someone's website looking for their contact only to find a php submit form that might not even work.

How do you avoid seeming antisocial with the rest of the world while eliminating email?

@gb Yah, it's a hard problem. It's also your choice. Perhaps you could try a one-month email elimination experiment and see how it goes?

Does anyone on the network have thoughts on this topic? Feel free to weigh in. The thread is up on my website: https://evbogue.com/eliminatingemail/ so your response will go to the public web.

There are still a few things stuck in my craw about this topic that I want to discuss.

A few people I've known personally have tried to eliminate email.

Leo Babouta claimed to have minimalized his email account in 2010, but when pushed always had a secret email account that he'd give people (I know because he gave me it). I'm not sure why you'd want to lie about this (cred?), but he did. I'm not sure if he still operates this way.

Ross Hill's autoresponder says he doesn't check email anymore -- instead claiming to rely 100% on Facebook Messenger. But whenever I email him he gets back to me, so he obviously still uses his email. I think it's kind of stupid that he's relying on Facebook, because he's a Bitcoin advocate so it's not as if public/private key cryptography is a mystery to him.

Eliminating email is so weird because it ends up being not just a technology problem, but a human interface problem. You gotta keep in mind that almost everyone has an email account, and even people who've claimed to delete their email are most of the time just making stuff up. Meanwhile email, the technology, just gets older and more fragile every year.

Maybe set an auto-responder telling people how to contact you instead of by email? Or reject at the SMTP level with such a message (e.g. example with postfix). That way you can tell people who might try to contact you by email how better to reach you.

If you still want to receive email, I recommend greylisting, I have found that to greatly reduce spam I receive. Also using some blocklists helps (I use dnsbl.sorbs.net, bl.spamcop.net and cbl.abuseat.org)

the good news is that generations younger than us don't email, or they at least think it's dumb. I guess the bad news is closed platforms are going to be capturing them.

I like the idea of having fake emails generated for verification / packages - extending that, make them non-human so people can't accidentally memorize and conveniently use them.
e.g. jxhljh34uxb3as7fxuh@scuttlebot.io
you could go further and have a message scuttle-side that you can send to tell the server to deprecate that door into the network once you have the message you need.

I think smart-phone accessabillity is probably one of the main barriers here (remembering that us nerds on laptops are probably a weird minority)

@mixmix I buy that kids don't think email is cool. It was invented in the 60s! I'm old, but that was a long time before I was born.

But I don't buy that kids will never use cool technologies. It's similar to the idea that grandmas will never use iPhones, and now look at Apple's target market! (At least from what I see by looking around me on the streets of MX.)

We old people remember when technology was cool, so I think about how we can make technology cool enough that kids will use it.

Make the Internet Decentralized Again! or Something. (#MIDAS)

@keks Perhaps one of the issues here is when you opt-out of email completely, it ends up being an ultimatum for other people who use different services. While I don't use iFaceboozlezon Messenger (I haven't had a Faceboozle account since 2010), many other people use Faceboozle as their primary communication platform.

By maintaining my email, I make it possible to interface with those folks -- if I opted out of email, I'm forcing those people to use sbot. While this network is growing, it's still mostly early adopters with a high level of technical expertise.

@btrask I used Bitmessage too a few years ago. I think it was a good first stab at 100% private encrypted messages. I even got a few people to use it with me too. Then, as far as I could tell, the project failed. That's another risk with switching off email -- what if we look back in three years and sbot ends up being a failed project?

@gb How are you feeling about your email this morning?

@keks I think when @btrask says "utopian paradise" he may mean "unrealistic fantasy"

I just found the import key feature.

@rosshill1123 Thanks! I ended up coding an import/export feature because of exactly what you said in the previous message: it's very easy to lose your keys in the lite client.

I think the last time you jumped on it was very early days for both Bay and I think the lite client might have just been invented that week. Things have come a long way since then, but we still have a long way to go before everything is perfect in sbot land.

@rosshill

the autoresponder says I'll check occasionally but fb messenger is a better way to reach me.

Ok, I think I mis-remembered. I should have emailed you first before trusting my memory.

The fb messenger link can't work for me, because I'm not on fb. I haven't been since the end of 2010! But that's part of the discussion we've been having here -- the challenge with eliminating email is you gotta offer people another way to get in touch. Though I encourage people to try sbot, and I think the lite client is pretty easy to get set up, I simultaneously don't think that it'd be fair to force people to communicate with me over sbot.

One thing that's missing from the sbot lite client is push notifications on a phone. I don't have a phone, so it'd be hard for me to test that.

I also wish OpenWhisper did federation

We had a conversation here early last year about Signal and their decision to not federate as the justification for auto-updates. I think we were talking about trying to find a way to sign and distribute sbot over the network in an automated way, while also avoiding centralization. It might be possible, but we haven't done that yet.

If your email server has 1 email address and especially if you keep changing that 1 email address you never build a history that other email services can trust. That's why you're in spam unless they add you to the contact list.

I've been using the same email address for a long time. But yah, I run my own email server which I'm not sure at least Google loves all that much. Someone told me to try DKIMs, but I haven't got around to that yet.

Maybe 2017 will bring a more international decentralised option?

I hope so.