There is no Email – just Gmail and a few independent servers Gmail reluctantly decided to federate with.
@lupine In my opinion Groups had only minor impact on the death of usenet.
– Usenet was more than capable of killing itself
– ISP's was not interested in maintaining usenet infrastructure
– Maintaining your own private server was impractical (I did)
– The endless September just got worse and worse.
Groups might have enhanced the last point by giving access to usenet with an interface that didn't fit usenet etiquette.
Just reading that made me shudder.
Every single government, government agency, university, major company, largish NGO, independent ISP, etc. etc. etc.
Google is big, but it's _far_ from the only game in town.
@pmakholm We will know when the endtimes are here once Google moves into the email marketing segment. Once they're both MSP and MTA, they're moving to monopoly.
@pmakholm Google definitely fucks with those of us who run our own servers.
I could probably make a case that Gmail isn’t even email, because it behaves in ways that disagree with the RFCs.
@pmakholm gmail will probably try to kill email in the same way groups killed usenet at some point, but we're not there yet.