I actually love email. It’s great that we have a standard and open protocol for sending and receving virtual mail. Without email we would be now probably using some closed-source proprierary and not interoperable solution witch locks you in. I’m glad it didn’t happen.
This memey post isn’t about Email as a concept, it’s about the state of commercial communication companies and the way we access having email.
Don’t worry. I get it. :3 I’m just adding another perspective to the discussion.
I will fight anyone who disagrees with the fact that email is the best protocol ever invented. It is perfect. Arbitrary text, file attachments, e2ee with gpg. It has zero downsides for most things. It’s just been destroyed by corpos :/
What about ip over avian carriers? I think it’s better 😅
But yes. Email is great. :3
Eh, it suffers from higher than useful packet loss and has absurdly high latency.
BONTO! has had a security breach. Your data has been stolen. We’re sorry.
Your privacy is very important to BONTO! Please give us permission to share your data with the following 465 companies
Please log in to your account to opt out. Privacy settings in your account are unlocked between 1:00 and 1:30 GMT, and are accessed from a PS2 stored in the basement of the county office, behind the leopard.
BONTO! will be deleting your data soon
Log into BONTO! to save your data
BONTO! will be deleting your data soon
BONTO! will be deleting your data soon
BONTO! has archived your data
Then 3 years later
Brooks, Herman and Anderson Law firm - Bonto data privacy class action lawsuit
Get your .0012¢ for a $7 processing fee!
Click here to unsubscribe. Great; it will take 4-10 days. It never unsubscribes.
If in EU: make a GDPR complaint. Unsubscribing should be instant and no more difficult than signing up
Can I use a VPN to permanently pretend I’m in the EU?
As far as most websites are concerned, yeah totally
You don’ hate email; you hate capitalism.
In the late 90s there was a women’s magazine called Bust, and for some reason they’d also let you have a bust dot com email account if you wanted. You could email me at cleavage@bust.com, and those were creative fun days of the Internet.
ETA: it still exists as a quarterly internet magazine but it is NOTHING like it was, it was a great magazine.
BONTO! sucked anyhow. BONMO~ is the FOSS replacement that does everything better.
They’re looking for devs btw, which is why it’s been so long without an update or bug fixes.
Donate HERE.
And if for some godforsaken reason you’re looking for help:
JOIN OUR DISCORD™ (whaddya mean you don’t wanna?)
*joins discord*
You say “Hey guys, I’m new to bonmo and was wondering why it doesn’t use traditional control-c and control-v for cut and paste? I think BRONTO! used the standard keys?”
*38 minutes later*
BONMASTER_420 says “first its called BONMO~ not bonmo and the answer is in the sauce we really dont have time to answer the questions of ever fukwit that joins the discord plus its not are job to explain why bronto did shit different tard fork it if you don’t like it shitbeqd”
*1hr 12 minutes later*
BleachAnime2009 says “Again with the ctrl-c/ctrl-v thing? Jesus christ learn how to use the search function would you guys? This has been discussed to death.”
You say “Sorry, I tried searching but don’t see an answer. I’m not a programmer either so if you could just tell me I’d appreciate it.”
*You have been kicked*
They forgot the newsletters you get twice a day* (*thrice if you opted out of newsletters) and the deluge of spam when everyone at Bonto sold your email address while they were going out of business.
I believe emails should not be used. There are or should be better alternatives. Account creation should be handled by passkeys.
Email is legacy. Insecure and content is just a webpage…
What is your alternative idea that isn’t just improved email?
In my country we have something called BankID. BankID, it’s Sweden’s leading electronic identification system, widely used for banking, e-government services, and secure logins. So I use it to login to the bank, check my taxes, hospital status, bookings etc. Basically the message itself is already on their website and never leaves them.
Subscriptions? We have RSS.
Buying something? Login to the website and see your order.
Delivery of something you bought and want to see when the packet arrives? You have an smartphone app for that. Like login to company app and view. You even get push notifications.
And for those people who actually get a message from a person instead of a company. You have chat, like Microsoft Teams, Slack, Discord etc. You even can have voice and video conference with the other person. Chat is instant messaging and is not slow compared to email.
Account registration? Make use of OpenID. Or even better passkeys.
Bonus: In my country we have Kivra - government post. Any company can get it and send the normal letter in a digital format - basically the none printed version of the letter so a PDF.
You really want emails replaced by a thousand applications OR emails controlled by the government?
Emails controlled by the government? No, never. Emails are a decentralized protocol and there is no point what so ever to have the government controlling it. Look, emails are not safe, not encrypted. See all emails as public knowledge. If I go to their website and login to view sensitive information about me, then it is safer. Apps are optional.
If you are talking about Kivra then there are private companies alternatives as well. You as a user pick and choose. Personally I dont use it as I get like one letter per year and would forget to login to it. There are better alternatives for normal letters as well.
Email is quite a bit safer than people think, especially if you host your own. Typically it is encrypted from point to point, so if a company emails me it goes through their internal system to their gateway, is encrypted using SSL and transmitted directly to my server where it’s stored until I connect over an SSL encrypted link to download my mail
Even an ISP will have almost everything encrypted as it really is the default now
There’s practically no chance for a man in the middle attack
I do accept unencrypted mail but nothing arrives on port 25 (unencrypted email) except scam attempts to get spam forwarded (which are denied)
Many do not run their own email server. It is just too hard. Companies choose Microsoft or Gmail to host email as it is cheap for them or included in something like office 365. Google have admitted that they read users’ email in search for custom advertisement. I would assume the same is true for Microsoft. On the inside we just have to trust them that they don’t make too many copies to foreign power or abuse it in any other way.
On the private side(not companies), Gmail really dominate. Very many don’t even know what selfhosting is and even fewer have the know-how and actually do it for email. People just don’t want that burden of selfhosting, maintenance, work. I would love the world to get more decentralized, use peer to peer, but today everything is more centralized than ever before.
Email should be E2EE, but that is never going to happen without the big players on that train - they just have too huge market share and that would go against their profitability.
BONTO! was sooo good. Like it really improved the Slorpiness.
<unwarranted rage No way, BONTO! sucked. You couldn’t even Slorp your entire friends list anymore, and they added all of those BONTOgrams for no reason. We disagree on a topic, so I despise you now and your entire genetic line. </rage
But you should really try NeWSlarP, a FLOSS fork of Slorp by the original developer that brings back both SlorpTokens and Schlarpmänner!
<unwarranted rage No way…
… </rage
This is the wildest syntax I’ve ever seen! At first, I thought it was unparsable nonsense. Then I realized that your tags are capital-letter-terminated. Is this from a language I don’t know or have you unwittingly cooked up a piece of a cursed programming language? If the latter, I propose Slorp as its name.
Closing
for the tag is left as an exercise for the reader.
unwarrantedis a property of theragetag (the properties are declared before the tag name)This… This isn’t something you can actually do in HTML is it? I’ve been doing web development for years and I feel like I’m about to learn some horrifically cursed knowledge…
Nope, it’s a CHTML extension. C for cursed, although that’s redundant.
HTML goes <br>
HTML goes <br>
I’m not sure if that’s a “machine goes brrrrrr” joke or not. If it is, it’s brilliant. XD
I actually love email. While yes, this post is accurate, email is the most filterable communication system that I have. Since I have my own email-server, and I know how procmail rules work, I can tightly control who is allowed to contact me, and what folders their messages go into. It also has great crowd-sourcing of known spammers, that I can pull from to help me filter out spammy IP addresses.
Every other message system only has a “report spam” button, that is dependent on the service admins, and doesn’t actually stop people from sending me annoying junk-mail.
Mail is made so much better when using an alias system like SImpleLogin from Proton. Just create a new mail for everything (except Atlassian the idiots) and when they start doing bullshit you can terminate the email.
Enabling OTP code 2FA will also reduce the verification emails
I love email, recently started subscribing to artists’ and illustrators’ (non-substack) newsletters and it’s a great way to stay informed if they otherwise only have fascist social media accounts. The newsletters somehow also feel more personal than meny social media posts.
I understand the struggle. I do. I still have an “Under construction” page on the domain I bought like a decade ago because I want a decent artist portfolio site and Wordpress is not the super easy dream they all claimed so I’ve nuked it like a dozen times. (And tried Grav, and Hugo, and…)
But seriously WHY do so many great artists like, even ones who could afford hosting a dedicated page, ONLY have an Instagram?! (And now a TikTok ugh). One AI-decided account ban or rebrand or algorithm change or whatever and their entire portfolio and audience are just gone.
It’s really sad that there aren’t more non-developer targeted FOSS projects for just getting a halfway decent page going. All those sites like Wix or Square charge a ridiculous amount and still give you a bloated mess that doesn’t function unless people allow tons of chonky JavaScript.
/rant lol…
Ooof, so much this. Artists only having Insta is only topped by antifascist (and similar: eco, anti-racism etc.) groups only posting on Insta and FB but nowhere else +___+
I also loathe that even if artists have a website chances are above 90% that they’re Squarespace so they don’t have RSS feeds meaning I’ll never see new cool stuff that they might post since I’ll never remember going to their site again, but if it would just pop up in my feed reader that would be just too cool, I guess.
Not sure if it would really be an alternative to Insta/Squarespace for creative people but I loooove https://neocities.org/browse (do they have RSS feeds? I need to check).
