I saw a robin last Tuesday morning. In North American folklore the robin is a harbinger of spring. On Good Friday we reached the mid 20s celcius. When I saw the robin that Tuesday it was snowing. The robin looked incredulous.

With the up and down weather and the inevitable post-March Break illnesses I’ve been reclused into two comfort games: Final Fantasy VII Remake and Pokemon Pokopia. Two games I entered as an antithesis to the world at large and then I get to the FFVII story beat where a techno-fascist corporation drops an entire plate on a large slum population. Oh well, alas.

At least Pokopia is a chill game where you hang with some pokemon, build and decorate houses, and what’s this? A journal entry? Oh. Ohhhhh. This game that is presented as a cozy Animal Crossing-like has lore that’s like this. But I got a new sofa for a talking, flapping fish. Bro was pumped.

June 12, 2004. Twenty two years ago I sent my first email out of a gmail account. It was a thank you note for the invite when the service was still early access and invite only.

“Gmail is different.” the invite started, “By now you probably know the key ways in which Gmail differs from traditional webmail services. Searching instead of filing. A free gigabyte of storage. Messages displayed in context as conversations.” 

1 gigabyte? It was astronomical in 2004. My account now has over 11, filled with a lot of junk meant for other people with similar names. I checked the original invite and it came from davezilla, who is still active online. The invites I sent out days later went to people that are also still active online. There’s something about early adopters of that era of the internet that foments persistence. 

It was impossible to imagine having the same email for twenty two years in 2004. Back then, especially with newly online younger folk, they were ephemeral. They changed often. Services went down, passwords were forgotten, or you wanted a change and a different username. One of my emails was at a hockeymail dot com domain. Another hotmail. I can’t remember what else. Nothing was portable. Everything was forgotten. “This is my new email”, you’d tell people, and that was that.

After twenty plus years of using Gmail it’s easy to forget how simple¹ the underlying protocols of email are. Email is the original decentralized social network! You send a message to an address, it gets routed, you get a response if the address wasn’t found, otherwise the recipient gets an email. Done. At least, in theory.

The centralization of email, and its new long term persistence, has made it more susceptible to spam, phishing, advertising, harassment, from authorities and otherwise, doxxing, and so on. And all that meta data is now digital gold for the email providers and chum for their AI investments. With everything that you now have tied to that email address, and worse if you use single sign-on using that account, it’s even harder to cut loose.

The cascade from all this is that all email is less reliable. The policies of the central gatekeepers, to keep spam under control (which, again, benefitted from centralization), have created a network of anti-spam lists, validation providers, DNS checks, and all kinds of other microservices which often block the basic email handshake. It’s no longer simple. If you respond to this by email I get it in my inbox at the domain never.email. If I respond back to you, reader, I have no way of knowing if you received it, if it was blocked by your mail provider, or if it ended up in your spam folder. The trust is gone. 

Yes, part of that is my fault for having an email at the domain never dot email². Even if my DNS is set up properly and my email provider is reputable, it does set some flags! But this is a problem that happens with many non-standard domains. Serious ones too. The best way to send an email reliably to someone with gmail is to do it with gmail. This sucks.

There are multiple cases where I saw albums delisted and I sent an email to the artist and they just sent me a copy of the album. Email is still the best way to reach someone. It’s private, direct, has space for conversation, and can be sent to anyone (provided you can find their address.) I think it’s neat. We need to send more personal emails. Communicate. From multiple, disposable email addresses. 

1. It’s literally in the name: Simple Mail Transfer Protocol.

2. My primary bank’s internal systems fail entirely on this. Their consumer-facing app works fine, but any application that goes through an agent at the bank using their terminal fails on this perfectly valid email address.

Related Links

Texting a Random Stranger Better for Loneliness Than Talking to a Chatbot, Study Shows

participants who were paired with a human partner reported significantly lower loneliness after the study, and those paired with the chatbot did not.

Who Is Satoshi Nakamoto? My Quest to Unmask Bitcoin’s Creator - The New York Times (https://archive.ph/Qe8k9)

A dubious investigative piece from NYT but I just wanted to highlight one particular excerpt that makes me feel 3000 years old:

Cypherpunks interacted mostly through something called an internet mailing list. Ancestors of today’s message boards, mailing lists were large group emails in old typewriter font that subscribers received in their inbox. To communicate, respondents replied-all.

One of the primary use cases for Gmail in 2004 was mailing lists. It was the first thing I did with that account. Previous free email providers would only give you so much storage which didn’t jive well with some of the more voluminous mailing lists. Google’s no-delete, 1 gigabyte policy meant you can have mailing list membership with archived history. 

Blackholing My Email

Creator of de_dust on the downside of having a very discoverable email address in the early 2000s:

Before long those few hundred emails a day I was receiving became thousands of emails a day, which easily occupied the entirety of the at-the-time generous 15MB (megabytes!) of mailbox space so gracefully bestowed to me by BT, our ISP.

Do not apologize for replying late to my email

Except if explicitly stated, don’t feel any pressure to reply to one of my emails. Feel free to read and discard the email. Feel free to think about it. Feel free to reply to it, even years later, if it makes sense for you. But, most importantly, feel free not to care!

Listen to this

In 2004 I sent an email to my gmail account, from a work email, with no body text and the subject “grendel - zombie nation”. This was the tail end of my industrial phase, before I got deep into minimal and ambient. This, uh, this makes sense. There’s a path of progression.

Anyway, forgot about this classic video:

Dancing in the graveyard,

sometimes.