# The Death of Decentralized Email - Host: [blog.lopp.net](https://links.thingelstad.xyz/hosts/blog.lopp.net/) - Saved: November 10, 2022 (2022-11-11T03:34:48Z) - Record: https://links.thingelstad.xyz/links/f946a10dc9c0/ - JSON: https://links.thingelstad.xyz/links/f946a10dc9c0.json ## What Jamie wrote Love the historical perspective that this article brings to email, going way, way back. It also very clearly shows how email has been largely captured by the big tech players and even though it was designed as an incredibly decentralized and resilient protocol, it has been centralized all in the name of content filtering and managing spam. > Today’s email servers will claim to accept incoming mail but will delete is as soon as it is received, a practice referred to as blackholing. The email servers operated by tech giants permanently blacklist wide swaths of IP addresses and delete their emails without notice. Their back end infrastructure runs algorithms across huge datasets so that most spam doesn't appear on your inbox. > > Does it work? Sure. But it comes at a great cost that few even realize is being paid. At the end the article connects this back to Bitcoin and asks the Bitcoin community to be thoughtful on how SMTP went from being this decentralized and open system to something completely centralized and managed by a few companies. There are lessons to be learned. SMTP has spam, and Crypto has rug pulls and wallet attacks. There is much to learn from the journey of email, and avoid. ## Facts - Kind: [Page](https://links.thingelstad.xyz/kinds/page/) ## Appears in - [WT233: Weekly Thing #233 / Versepad, "Just", Mastadon](https://weekly.thingelstad.com/archive/233/), Notable ## Saved the same week - [It looks like I’m moving to Mastodon](https://links.thingelstad.xyz/links/1641ae7ee6bb/) (simonwillison.net, November 10, 2022) - [The Observation Deck » Twitter, when the wall came down](https://links.thingelstad.xyz/links/87d6e0ce1103/) (dtrace.org, November 10, 2022) - [Debirdify](https://links.thingelstad.xyz/links/1c09e1e1fc79/) (pruvisto.org, November 10, 2022) - [Use RSS for privacy and efficiency](https://links.thingelstad.xyz/links/b08bbfd03490/) (rsapkf.org, November 10, 2022) - [The Apple Watch Ultra’s Impact on My Focus and Presence – The Sweet Setup](https://links.thingelstad.xyz/links/3eba3f57490d/) (thesweetsetup.com, November 10, 2022) ## Elsewhere - Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://blog.lopp.net/death-of-decentralized-email/