NOTE: As usual, this blog expresses my opinions and not those of my employer
As an “old” I really love email. It was one of the first ways I was able to reach other people distant from me. Even before I had access to computers on the internet, I would send messages using a Bulletin Board System (BBS) called WWIV.
WWIV had the ability to connect to other WWIV instances using WWIVnet, and I had a friend in Reno I where I could send notes from the instance I used to the instance he used.
It could be slower than the USPS.
This was before “always on” network access, so I would use a modem to connect to my BBS, write the note, then hang up. Early the next morning, that BBS would call another node on the network and dump all pending messages. That node, in turn, would pass it along to the next node in the system.
It could take days. It was so much fun.
This would have been in the late 1980s/early 1990s. Now we take instantaneous communication for granted. When IMAP came along and emails could be stored on a server, I was able to keep email basically forever, copying my mail from one system to another as my accounts changed.
I just looked, and the oldest email I have was sent to my work address from my friend Barry Campbell on January 10th, 1998. His first question was “Do you have a non-work email address?”.
Crazy talk.
Anyway, I digress. I wanted to bring up a couple of email related things.
In my last post I talked about the end of open source, and that one of the risks would be that major providers would just start blocking traffic from open systems. While that hasn’t happened, I came across a couple of stories where providers like Gmail are marking legitimate traffic as spam.
Dave Gandy, the founder of Font Awesome, writes about how his organization’s email is being marked as spam by Gmail. This isn’t blocking per se, but it has the same effect.
Then I saw on Mastodon a post by Paul Taylor about something similar happening to him.
The money quote from that post:
Let’s be blunt about this. They are a mafia that is enforcing an oligopoly. It’s got nothing to do with reducing spam — I have no doubt that they let through emails from “trusted partners”, ie companies that bribe them enough to send their spam.
It can be frustrating, which is why I think so many people are moving away from email. Unfortunately, that means to proprietary systems like social media and Slack.
One thing I loved about email was that it made it easy to find things. Now I have to wonder if I got that piece of information from email, Slack, iMessage, Signal, WhatsApp, LinkedIn or Mastodon.
(sigh)
Another thing I wanted to share was a project called Lefos. It is an AI agent built to interact through email.
It is created by Earendil, a company that now includes Mario Zechner.
If you are in tech and haven’t been in a coma for the last month, you’ve heard of OpenClaw. Well, OpenClaw is based on an open source coding agent called pi that Mario wrote.
I really, really like this company. The first sentence on its “Purpose” page reads:
Earendil is a public benefit corporation founded by Armin Ronacher and Colin Daymond Hanna
A public benefit corporation is a for-profit company, but with a stated goal to make a positive impact on society. Now, it all could be just window dressing as there isn’t a firm standard for being a benefit corporation, but they weren’t forced to do it so I assume they are sincere.
It was nice to see, especially in the generative AI space.
This is the kind of company I would consider working for, but then I read one of Mario’s posts and it went so far over my head I’m not sure what I could bring to the table. (grin)
Anyway, just wanted to put down a few thoughts about email. If any of my three readers made it to the bottom of this post, thank you for your attention.