Email vs Capitalism, or, Why We Can't Have Nice Things
summary
Email history and a delivery deep dive: spam begins May 3, 1978 with Gary Thuerk’s 400-recipient ad; systems today send a quarter of a million emails per day and spike to ~100–115 messages/sec. Practical demos show SMTP/MX lookups via telnet, MIME limits, and DNS-based controls SPF/DKIM/DMARC; testing across Office365, Gmail, Zoho, Proton and FastMail reveals inconsistent local-part rules — only FastMail accepts spaces in envelopes — and catch-alls, blacklists and relay policies break real-world delivery. Tools and tips include Papercut, Mailtrap, Mailjet, Foundation and UTF-7 pitfalls.
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chapters (20)
- 0:00Introduction to the event
- 1:14Email experiment
- 4:13SMTP specifications
- 5:39History of email usage
- 7:32Early email systems
- 9:22The invention of email
- 12:49The first spam email
- 15:35Generation of the internet
- 17:37Valid email addresses
- 21:07Telnet experiments
- 23:16Testing email providers
- 27:09Case sensitivity and delivery
- 29:36Sending spaces in emails
- 31:33The economics of spam
- 33:28Controlling spam
- 35:33SMTP authentication
- 37:48Filtering and blacklists
- 40:26DNS and SPF records
- 41:58MIME types
- 44:23The future of email