>>11
When I was younger, I always thought of e-mail as this mysterious, complicated black box thing because of the commercial candy-wrapping.
But then I started reading about historical systems like FidoNet and Usenet.
Then I started playing around with fetching and sending email using cURL.
Then I was like, "What? That's it."
Implementation details aside, electronic mail (as it was meant to be) is pretty elegant and powerful.
This is part of the reason I generally distrust "gratis" network services.
I think we'd have fewer problems if people were willing to pay money for network services like email and web publishing.
( Thank you Mister Ben for providing SchemeBSS gratis. <3 )
If only it were possible to package rock-solid technology in a way that made it usable for normies but without crazy levels of additional bloat and complexity.
Normies want features and a pretty face.
Engineers want rock-solid internals and controls.