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Cake day: July 4th, 2023

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  • Nath@aussie.zonetoFediverse@lemmy.worldThe Death of Decentralized Email
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    3 months ago

    How you can have an article talking about the history of email and it not be about Ray Tomlinson, I just don’t know. Wait - now I know: This person looked up the Wikipedia article on the smtp protocol and decided Mr. Postal was the pioneer of email.

    The conclusion is completely incorrect, also. About the only correct thing was that reputation is important for email transmission.

    No: you can’t just set up an smtp outbound server on your home server and expect the world to trust you. For good reason: we’ve had decades of trojans and viruses taking over home PCs and sending spam. Your ISP declares its “home” IP ranges, and those are immediately not trusted.

    That doesn’t mean you need to use a big email hosting provider. If you set up on a business IP range, configure your DNS Correctly with declared mx and spf records, the world will trust you (until you demonstrate that it can’t).

    Millions of businesses around the world do this.


  • As I intentionally filter out as much US politics as I can, this has come out of nowhere for me.

    Australia has a couple of really simple things baked into its electoral system to resist something wildly unpopular like this from getting in power:

    1. Compulsory voting. These MAGA crazies are not and will never be the majority. If everyone had to vote, they’d never get in.
    2. Proportional voting. We vote for multiple candidates. If our first choice doesn’t get in, our vote goes to our second choice. Then third etc. we aren’t forced to vote for a lizard just to prevent the worse lizard getting in (it still almost always comes down to two parties, though).

    I know these are total non-starters for our American friends. “You can’t make me vote, that’s against the constitution or something”.