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Is this an example of simplicity winning over features, or an example of features that are advertised but don't exist failing to win over the competition?

Some examples from the article:

> You could have messaged an entire organization or department

This is a mailing list.

> So it was possible, say, for one implementation of X.400 to offer X.400 features like recalling a message, in theory at least, when such guarantees would fail as soon as messages left their walled garden. But “they couldn't buck the rules of physics,” Borenstein concluded. Once a message reached another server, the X.400 implementations could say that an email was recalled or permanently deleted, but there was no way to prove that it hadn’t been backed up surreptitiously.

This is a feature that (1) is in the spec, and also (2) is impossible to implement. That's not a real feature. It's a bug in the spec.

> You don’t email with X.400 today. That is, unless you work in aviation, where AMHS communications for sharing flight plans and more are still based on X.400 standards (which enables, among other things, prioritizing messages and sending them to the tower at an airport instead of a specific individual).

This is... also a mailing list. There's nothing difficult about having an email address for the tower. That email could go to one person, or many people. What's the difference supposed to be? What "feature" are we saying X.400 has that email didn't start with?

by jech15 hours ago|

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>> You could have messaged an entire organization or department

> This is a mailing list.

The way I understand it, the layering is different. In X.400, multicasting was a feature of the protocol. An SMTP mailing list, on the other hand, is an endpoint that terminates a protocol transaction, and then initiates one transaction for each final recipient.

I guess it boils down to where it is preferable to have the extra complexity: the ITU-T protocols invariably prefer to put it inside the network, while the Internet protocols prefer to put it at the endpoints. The SMTP protocol is simple, and therefore the mailing list software needs to be complex.

by rjsw2 days ago|

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You were not supposed to type it out, you looked it up using your X.500 directory.

by bombcar2 days ago|

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All we need is an x.500 directory of all addresses in the world, which won't be abused by anyone at anytime!

by slackfan2 days ago|

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However did we live during the era of the White Pages phone directory.

by toast02 days ago|

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Sure, but then you have the problem of figuring out which Sarah Connor in Los Angeles.

To say nothing of popular names.

by aworks1 days ago|

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My name is not particularly common although I was the first to claim firstname.lastname@gmail.com. I've been getting email intended for other people with the same name for decades.

I've seen estimates that there are only 10,000 people with my last name in the US. Back in the days of local telephone directories, I was always the only one with that last name.

Internet scaling is an interesting thing. I don't know if I feel less unique or that I'm in an exclusive club.

by kstrauser15 hours ago|

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I registered [my HN username]@yahoo.com many, many years ago. Once a year I log into that mail account and I'm always amazed at how many other people have decided to give out that email, at Yahoo! of all places, as their own. Why? Just, why?

by bombcar2 days ago|

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Spam and scam had to work on a human scale, via locals paid something resembling a living wage, not automated machines sending millions a second or people working for pennies a day.

I want a phone that can only ring if the source of the call is within artillery range.