[johtso]

I've been having a bad time with email of late. It's been the method of communication between us and another company (a pretty creaky old product). I thought they were replying strangely and ignoring my questions "did they even read what I said!?". It turns out for whatever reason they hadn't been getting some of my emails.

Now I can't trust that anything has been received unless I get an acknowledgement, so I have to keep pestering for replies. Basically lost trust in the protocol because it's dependent on the the other person's mailserver behaving they way you expect it to.

[skydhash]

> Basically lost trust in the protocol because it's dependent on the the other person's mailserver behaving they way you expect it to.

That’s the case of any protocol, digital or not. Email is pretty simple. Simpler than the current web, at least.

[johannes1234321]

> That’s the case of any protocol

Well, E-Mail is inherently async and allows a sequence of relays with no back channel to confirm delivery.

With other protocols (except snail mail) I get a confirmation that recipient was valid and the message for delivered. With some I even get a marker it was read.

With e-mail, with luck, I get a cryptic not standardized response mail, if something went wrong. Sometimes even only a lot later as delivery is retried for a few days in some cases.

[this_user]

The core technologies may be simple, but email really is an entire stack of protocols, mechanisms, and conventions. And therein lies the problem. It's not one well designed solution but one workaround layered on top of each other to make it work reasonably well.