Email vs Capitalism, or, Why We Can't Have Nice Things
summary
Live demos show signup emails sometimes arrive, often land in junk, and SMTP formally retries for up to four to five days; a historical system sent ~250,000 personalized messages/day and hit 10–12 msg/sec spikes. Tests of providers reveal inconsistent address validation (Google supports plus-tagging, FastMail accepts addresses with spaces, Microsoft and many clouds block Port 25). Practical tooling includes MX/SPF/DKIM checks, raw SMTP telnet, MIME encoding, and testing with Papercut and Mailtrap to diagnose real-world deliverability.
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chapters (15)
- 0:00Email's critical role
- 3:39Email delivery slowness
- 8:54Ancient origins of email
- 14:08Millennial Falcon email
- 21:06Modern email providers' quirks
- 26:23Email address case sensitivity
- 33:32Why spam exists
- 37:00SMTP security failure
- 42:46SPF DNS records
- 45:12SMTP ASCII limitation
- 47:57HTML email rendering
- 51:06Email deliverability tools
- 53:54Dark mode email challenges
- 55:19Email as open protocol
- 56:00Email's decentralized system
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