9 points | by rubenfiszel 4 hours ago ago
4 comments
Yes, email has proven ridiculously challenging to self host.
Agreed, and the whole cloudflare stack, from CDN to infinitely scalable workers. Infra at that level is hard.
I wonder how much of that complexity was Google's doing to build a gmail moat.
I'd also argue that a lot of the complexity in web standards is also Google's doing to prevent Chrome competitors from popping up.
Its not. Email sounds like a simple thing, but its a tremendous number of puzzle pieces acting in concert:
* Web mail client
* IMAP/POP3 services
* MTA (RFC 821/822 and later) core email services
* Security services and SPAM blocker
* and there is more that I am just not thinking about right now.
Each of these things require their own reverse proxy support and they have to talk to each other like they are neighbors and on and on
Yes, email has proven ridiculously challenging to self host.
Agreed, and the whole cloudflare stack, from CDN to infinitely scalable workers. Infra at that level is hard.
I wonder how much of that complexity was Google's doing to build a gmail moat.
I'd also argue that a lot of the complexity in web standards is also Google's doing to prevent Chrome competitors from popping up.
Its not. Email sounds like a simple thing, but its a tremendous number of puzzle pieces acting in concert:
* Web mail client
* IMAP/POP3 services
* MTA (RFC 821/822 and later) core email services
* Security services and SPAM blocker
* and there is more that I am just not thinking about right now.
Each of these things require their own reverse proxy support and they have to talk to each other like they are neighbors and on and on