It could, but why change what isn't broken? Email messages are quite agnostic to how you deliver them, though. IIRC Google and Microsoft use a proprietary protocol with each other. Outlook uses a proprietary protocol with Exchange.
Email used to be transferred through a non-internet packet-switched point-to-point network of intermittently connected dial-up links. The fact that the email messages are agnostic to how they're transmitted is actually very cool, because it enables switching to future technologies without any changes to the user agents, and vice versa. You put a file in your outbox and it magically appears in someone else's inbox later. Originally mail readers had to be executed on the mail server and read directly from your inbox directory, then we created new last-mile protocols so the reader could run on a separate computer (which in my understanding is basically identical to a Fidonet "point").
You can easily imagine a mail server connected to an onion router, or to Yggdrasil or some other meshnet, or even to whatever remnant of the original UUCP net someone is still running for fun. The current design enables this sort of thing.
gjsman-1000|1 year ago
immibis|1 year ago
Email used to be transferred through a non-internet packet-switched point-to-point network of intermittently connected dial-up links. The fact that the email messages are agnostic to how they're transmitted is actually very cool, because it enables switching to future technologies without any changes to the user agents, and vice versa. You put a file in your outbox and it magically appears in someone else's inbox later. Originally mail readers had to be executed on the mail server and read directly from your inbox directory, then we created new last-mile protocols so the reader could run on a separate computer (which in my understanding is basically identical to a Fidonet "point").
You can easily imagine a mail server connected to an onion router, or to Yggdrasil or some other meshnet, or even to whatever remnant of the original UUCP net someone is still running for fun. The current design enables this sort of thing.
sangupta|1 year ago
amanda99|1 year ago
sangupta|1 year ago