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Why email startups fail

(forwardemail.net)
140 points skeptrune | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0.468s | source
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JimDabell ◴[] No.44430078[source]
This is a weird article. Email is a hodgepodge of terrible protocols that have progressively had more and more technical debt laid upon them for decades and decades. Vendor quirks are everywhere, and it’s incredibly unreliable. Its defining quality – it’s decentralisation – has been beaten out of it by IP reputation so everybody ends up sending through a handful of providers.

The article kinda acknowledges that it’s a shitheap that’s awful to implement, but somehow still champions the idea that it all works fine.

And what’s with the repeated jabs at the “terrible” exit rate that actually seems pretty good?

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1. dboreham ◴[] No.44430399[source]
> incredibly unreliable

The underly technology is very reliable. Email not getting delivered to the recipient is more about low/no-cost providers preferring to filter almost all messages rather than spend money on doing a good job of spam filtering.

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2. landl0rd ◴[] No.44430624[source]
To what lever can one apply money to get better spam filtering with even remotely constant returns to scale?