Yeah.

Sadly I think email will be with us for the foreseeable future. It’s broken, sure… but it’s just so fundamental to the web.

An alternative would need to be ubiquitous, and that seems unachievable.

I don’t think the SPF / DKIM / DMARC stuff is overly complex nor the core of the problem.

In my case it was recipients with bonkers microsoft exchange servers that just had weird ideas about who should be sending them emails.

For example, one thing that tripped me up forever ago was grey listing. Apparently the receiving server just wouldn’t acknowledge the sending server for an arbitrary period of time, say 12 hours or so. Spam senders would usually give up long before then, while a legit server would keep trying because it’s legitimately trying to deliver an actual email.

So my email-in-a-box type self hosted set up was fine really. Compliant you might say. But to send emails to this one in a thousand recipient I had to investigate what was going on and reconfigure things to ensure their server would interact with mine.

Another thing that can happen is that spammers just put your email address in the “from” field and fire off a few million emails. Obviously the DKIM signatures and SPF won’t match but it still just makes your future legitimate emails look spammy. Having the credibility of a larger organisation goes a long way in this type of instance.

I’m absolutely in the “don’t self-host email” camp. That said, I think it could be done reliably if you wanted to use someone else’s SMTP server and let them worry about deliverability. As in, have your mx records on your domain route to your MTA and dovecot, but set your DKIM and SPF records to match a third party SMTP server. You could use mxroute as an SMTP server very cheaply. There are others like the email API type services. I still can’t think of why I’d want to self host with all this drama but just an idea I’ve heard.

Indeed.

The whole mess seems to have gotten so much worse.

That’s not really how global politics and diplomacy works.

If the only “peaceful solution” Russia will accept is the surrender of Ukraine, what do you expect them to do?

Having a well provisioned and trained standing army also encourages your opponents to seek peaceful solutions.

Sadly I think you’ve missed my point.

I can’t believe I have to say this but, us poor people need to elect representatives that will regulate the fuck out of billionaires. This might surprise you but plenty of poor people vote for representatives that will be mean to other poor people, rather than those who will regulate billionaires.

How can we tell billionaires about climate change? By voting. Poor people vote.

This is a well established climate-change-laggard argument. It’s the whataboutism logical fallacy.

Why should I take action, at great personal cost, when someone else is not taking action and will in fact benefit from my burden?

The Australian (and other) governments hide behind this same excuse. “Australia is just a small country, why should we take action when our CO2 production is just a small portion of that of other countries like China?”.

I mean it’s a good point, billionaires are worthy of great criticism, and Australia should be putting pressure on other countries, but at the same time we as individuals really do need to be taking action.

I do agree that polluting corporations use this narrative and I also find it infuriating. It’s particularly palpable with plastic producers, as in plastic pollution is not their fault, but the fault of consumers failing to recycle. It’s not the fault of consumers, it’s the fault of regulators, who are elected by voters who are also consumers.

In summary, the whole thing is fucked and everyone sucks, but you still have to tidy up your own shit.

Is climate change an extinction level threat? I’ve never heard that.

I think we’re firmly in “catastrophic disasters and famine that eradicates vast majority of the population” territory.

It’s a question, as you said, of how severe the disasters and famine will be.

Honestly these micro-dick edge lords renaming things has been a pleasant diversion over the last few weeks.

I quite like the name “Kraft Vegemite^TM presents New Australia”.