Email vs Capitalism, or, Why We Can't Have Nice Things
summary
Email protocols date from the 1980s yet real systems behave differently: SMTP retries can wait 30 minutes then days before hard bounce, SPF/DKIM/DMARC live in DNS, and providers vary wildly in address validation. A live demo injects addresses with spaces and punctuation; only FastMail accepts delivery, many UIs reject valid RFC names, and Google/Outlook add practical limits. HTML email still uses table-heavy fallbacks; recommended tools include Mailtrap, Mailjet, Foundation for Email, Papercut for testing and rendering.
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chapters (12)
- 0:00Introduction to email
- 4:40Email's origins in 1969
- 11:01Millennial Falcons and email evolution
- 15:16Validating email addresses
- 22:38Case sensitivity in email
- 27:20Email delivery analogy
- 30:51Spam and the internet's shift
- 33:01SMTP authentication limits
- 36:49Fighting spam with DNS
- 40:00Email headers and MIME
- 42:06Challenges of HTML email
- 45:19Email's open protocol value
