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The reason nobody uses email these days is because it gets spammed to hell and back. Imagine if every single website you made an account for spammed any other messaging app. It'd be chaotic as hell.
@beardalaxy Spam is just the tip of the iceberg. Email is hated for many other reasons:
* It's not encrypted by default - You need to learn PGP/GPG, find an email client that supports it, and have contacts that also know how to use it if you want to send an encrypted email. Most people don't want to bother going through that process. The only other option I can think of is to use DeltaChat which is really just an email client that acts like a E2EE messaging app.
* The vast majority of email providers suck - The Big-Tech providers like Gmail, MSN, and Yahoo need no explanation. ProtonMail and Tutanota claim to respect your privacy but have huge red-flags. Cock.li is run by one guy but has frequent downtimes and NSFW domains. Disroot respects your privacy and is run by volunteers, but has a somewhat restrictive TOS that doesn't allow commercial use with a few exceptions. And finally, RiseUp seems to be the most secure and private, but is invite only and is intended for far-left activists. The only other option is to self-host, but from what I am told, email is the hardest service to self-host.
* People are too stupid to use anything other than Gmail or Outlook - Not only don't businesses bother with self-hosting anymore, they don't even bother with custom domains either, despite Gmail supporting them. Maybe if you used them you wouldn't have to put numbers in your business email.
* Spam filters not only miss spam, but they also filter legitimate emails - Seriously, make sure you fill in the subject field and write more than three sentences or your email is automatically going in the trash. It's almost as if most spam filters are merely just regex filters that check for the standard letter format.
Honestly, we don't need better email services. We need an alternative TO email. But the question is what? What do we do to make it more secure than email and how do we get people to switch to it? (As time has proven multiple times, privacy and security is enough.) I think maybe we could try a Nostr like approach. Have private messages distributed through multiple nodes, but have them end to end encrypted, but that's not a perfect solution.
@PurpCat @beardalaxy I never had a problem using a non-gmail account for contacting people or signing up for websites. No joke, I used a firstname-lastname email address on cock.li (the have a few SFW domains) to apply for jobs, a few years back. Nobody saw the connection and I was never rejected for using such an email address. It only became a problem when my Dad busted me for it because he wanted to see my emails.
