This is a presentation about the historic evolution of email, how implementations gradually diverged from the specification given corporate forces, the onset of spam with the prevalence of personal computing, the erosion of distributed delivery networks of mail due to fast/lazy/loose whitelists, the ossification of the protocol compounded with decades of backwards compatibility, and the modern tools used to navigate the bazaar of format compliance as it continues to evolve as a moving target. Nevertheless, the conclusion remarks about emails notably resilience to centralisation and enshittification.

I hope that protocols such as ActivityPub will fair just as well, if not better, than email. Although, I’d hazard a guess that the forces of monetization and dark patterns are now much more prevalent than they were in email’s infancy.