Email could have been so much better

[TenFour]

The early history of email and how things could have been better. https://buttondown.com/blog/x400-vs-smtp-email

[erturtleneck]

Originally Posted by TenFour

The early history of email and how things could have been better. https://buttondown.com/blog/x400-vs-smtp-emailphrazle

Wow, this is a fascinating read! It?s crazy to think about how different our daily digital lives would look if X.400 had won the protocol wars. Imagine a world where built-in encryption, native read-receipts, and message recall were just standard out-of-the-box features in 1984, rather than things we had to sloppily tack onto internet email decades later. It really proves the old tech adage that "worse is better"?SMTP didn't win because it was technically superior or more feature-rich; it won simply because it was lightweight, easy to understand, and actually got out of committee. It?s wild that a standard as convoluted and clunky as X.400 is still silently keeping the aviation and banking sectors running in the background while the rest of us deal with the beautiful, chaotic mess of SMTP!