Podcasting “Dead Letters”

Email could be the last federated internet technology — but it isn’t.

This week on my podcast, I read last week’s Medium column, “Dead Letters,” about how consolidation in mailhosting and the spam-wars have made it all but impossible to host your own newsletter or mailing list.

https://doctorow.medium.com/dead-letters-73924aa19f9d

During last year’s Substack bubble, there was a lot of enthusiastic talk about email as the last decentralized online protocol, and how that meant that creators and audiences could use it to connect without having to stay on the right side of giant corporate gatekeepers.

But the reality is that commercial mailhosting is gathered into a small number of large firms, as is free webmail — and email that originates from a server that isn’t run by one of those giants is apt to be mis-flagged as spam and blocked.

That’s been my experience. I’ve had my own mailserver (courtesy of Ken Snider) for a quarter-century, and my email routinely disappears — algorithmically moved to a Gmail or Outlook spam, folder, or worse — blocked from delivery altogether.

There was a three year period when I couldn’t send mail to anyone using an email address hosted by AT&T (who had bought up hundreds of small ISPs and…