• matmarspace@programming.dev
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    3 days ago

    I actually love email. It’s great that we have a standard and open protocol for sending and receving virtual mail. Without email we would be now probably using some closed-source proprierary and not interoperable solution witch locks you in. I’m glad it didn’t happen.

    • cmt@lemmy.today
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      3 days ago

      I will fight anyone who disagrees with the fact that email is the best protocol ever invented. It is perfect. Arbitrary text, file attachments, e2ee with gpg. It has zero downsides for most things. It’s just been destroyed by corpos :/

    • ameancow@lemmy.world
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      3 days ago

      This memey post isn’t about Email as a concept, it’s about the state of commercial communication companies and the way we access having email.

    • LifeInMultipleChoice@lemmy.world
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      3 days ago

      I as well like email, it just has to be managed. Then you threw in the alternative involved a solution with a witch locking me in, and I’m intrigued to know more.

  • Subverb@lemmy.world
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    4 days ago

    BONTO! sucked anyhow. BONMO~ is the FOSS replacement that does everything better.

    They’re looking for devs btw, which is why it’s been so long without an update or bug fixes.

    Donate HERE.

    • quant@leminal.space
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      3 days ago

      And if for some godforsaken reason you’re looking for help:

      JOIN OUR DISCORD™ (whaddya mean you don’t wanna?)

      • Subverb@lemmy.world
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        2 days ago

        *joins discord*

        You say “Hey guys, I’m new to bonmo and was wondering why it doesn’t use traditional control-c and control-v for cut and paste? I think BRONTO! used the standard keys?”

        *38 minutes later*

        BONMASTER_420 says “first its called BONMO~ not bonmo and the answer is in the sauce we really dont have time to answer the questions of ever fukwit that joins the discord plus its not are job to explain why bronto did shit different tard fork it if you don’t like it shitbeqd”

        *1hr 12 minutes later*

        BleachAnime2009 says “Again with the ctrl-c/ctrl-v thing? Jesus christ learn how to use the search function would you guys? This has been discussed to death.”

        You say “Sorry, I tried searching but don’t see an answer. I’m not a programmer either so if you could just tell me I’d appreciate it.”

        *You have been kicked*

    • ameancow@lemmy.world
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      3 days ago

      BONMO~'s Kickstarter campaign turned out to be a scam, no refunds for existing investors, sowwy.

      Anyway, now that the only alternative to BONTO! is dead, BONTO! merged with [weirdly popular social media company that you never paid attention to] and BONTO! is offering new subscription plans that give great deals if you pay for three years ahead of time for the low, low price of $450. Also, where will BONTO! be in 3 years? ¯\__(ツ)_/¯

  • gex@lemmy.world
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    5 days ago

    Then 3 years later

    Brooks, Herman and Anderson Law firm - Bonto data privacy class action lawsuit

      • ameancow@lemmy.world
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        3 days ago

        I love how almost every societal complaint or struggle can be traced back to the idea that there are a small number of people trying to take the money from a large number of other people for as unfair of an exchange as physically possible.

  • phantomwise@lemmy.ml
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    4 days ago

    Actually no, I don’t remember when email was ever useful and I do remember dial-up internet 😂

    It used to be chain emails “Send this to 10 other people or YOU’LL DIE” and people forwarding other people’s bad picture slideshows and even worse uplifting inspiring cards without looking at them, and now it’s automated slop.

    • tiramichu@sh.itjust.works
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      4 days ago

      Those meme email chains were annoying at the time, but kinda endearing to look back on in retrospect.

      I kept getting added onto ones my mum and dad were getting from a bunch of their friends that had people’s random corporate/work email addresses included and stuff…

      It was a simpler time, when boomers hadn’t discovered social media yet, and were making their own fun without Facebook and without the algorithm.

      If someone offered me a chance to magic social media away like it never happened, and the price I had to pay was unfunny memes spamming my inbox, it’s a price I’d pay gladly.

      • mad_lentil@lemmy.ca
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        4 days ago

        Those meme email chains were annoying at the time, but kinda endearing to look back on in retrospect.

        I still cringe at the memory of the one time I forwarded one – it was something about Bill Gates, but I can’t remember the details. Anyway, my uncle replied back to me with something wholesome like

        Nice to hear from you [mad_lentil], although I doubt this offer is genuine, you never know! Maybe we’ll all be rich this time next year. Say hi to your mom and dad for me, thanks.

        It had never occurred to me that someone would lie on the internet rofffflllll. I was SO humiliated.

        • V4sh3r@lemmy.world
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          4 days ago

          In college one of my friends wanted to show how easy it was to get an email chain going. He was on the student council so he wrote up something about if it was forwarded enough we would get another day off for spring break, added some email headers to look like he got it through 5 other people, then sent it to everyone on the student council. This was at a school with over 10k students.

          By the end of the next day everyone I knew had gotten the email at least healf dozen times. The day after that the school paper had a story letting people know that it wasn’t true.

          Yep, nobody lies on the internet.

          • MonkeMischief@lemmy.today
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            3 days ago

            Honestly though, that sorta thing should happen more often. It sounds like a great way to demonstrate how fast misinformation spreads, without actually hurting anyone.

            Maybe some of those hit by that reality would think twice next time something sounds too good to be true.

      • phantomwise@lemmy.ml
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        4 days ago

        For me the worst was the slideshow fad… So many people were making some and constantly sending them to ALL their contacts and forwarding those of other people making them and you kept receiving some of people who knew someone who knew someone you knew because of the forwarding… Since the last step came from people you knew, you couldn’t just block them, and if you didn’t answer every once in a while it was terribly rude… Also those butt ugly sparkling greeting cards 😬

        Now spam is so common that it’s a perfect excuse, I just warn people that I don’t read email so don’t bother sending them 😂

        But I agree on principle, the annoyances used to come from people who were over-enthusiastic over new technology like email, photo editing and such, and wanted to share it with everyone (willing or no). Or people who were having fun with chain emails (I might possibly have started a few on my school local network so I do understand… but to be fair no one used that network and its email system for anything else but email chains 😂 ). Now it’s all automated slop.

    • MonkeMischief@lemmy.today
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      3 days ago

      “Send this to 10 other people or YOU’LL DIE”

      And a lot of “I’m not superstitious BUT…” LOL

      I almost miss how stupidly innocent the internet felt with that nutty stuff back then. Most chain letters were merely annoying social experiments rather than ultra nefarious like social media has become.

      (Edit: lol just noticed a very similar take a few posts above me.)

      “Flashing headlights at cars is a gang initiation to help them pick who to murder! Pass this along because it’s better safe than sorry!”

      “Opening the wrong email might give you the Life is Beautiful virus that says ‘your life is no longer beautiful’ and wipes your hard drive! Tell everyone you know!”

      (Ah, when an erased hard drive was the scariest malware one could think of…)

      “Snd ths 2 15 ppl and push Alt+F4 and teh naem of ur crush will appear. (Zomgwtfbbq it rly works!!)”

      “I’m a missionary in South Afrimericasia and I wanted to send this prayer chain around the entire world to prove something wholesome and also send money plz lol. Look, Sarah passed it on and her life turned around! The divine holy power of email!”

      I had to spend a lot of time directing people I knew to a now-defunct site called “BreakTheChain” , and also Snopes. Usually the same people. Every time.

      And sometimes they’d tell me “Well I forward it to you because you can tell me if it’s true or not.” I don’t miss that. Lmao

    • JackbyDev@programming.dev
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      4 days ago

      DO. NOT. SCROLL. A wiched curse has been placed upon you! You may only break this spell if you send it to 10 people immediately. NO SEND BACKS!

    • CuriousRefugee@discuss.tchncs.de
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      5 days ago

      <unwarranted rage No way, BONTO! sucked. You couldn’t even Slorp your entire friends list anymore, and they added all of those BONTOgrams for no reason. We disagree on a topic, so I despise you now and your entire genetic line. </rage

      But you should really try NeWSlarP, a FLOSS fork of Slorp by the original developer that brings back both SlorpTokens and Schlarpmänner!

      • OpenStars@piefed.social
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        5 days ago

        You jest but…

        img

        Enshittification never sleeps, stealing all ideas that it can possibly get away with!

    • don@lemm.ee
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      5 days ago

      As a top 1% graaaaj user, I always felt bad for you guys. You should migrate to graaaaj, we have asparagus!

  • BonesOfTheMoon@lemmy.world
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    4 days ago

    In the late 90s there was a women’s magazine called Bust, and for some reason they’d also let you have a bust dot com email account if you wanted. You could email me at cleavage@bust.com, and those were creative fun days of the Internet.

    ETA: it still exists as a quarterly internet magazine but it is NOTHING like it was, it was a great magazine.

  • grue@lemmy.world
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    5 days ago

    Subject: your billing statement is now available

    Body: Log on to our website because we couldn’t possibly JUST FUCKING TELL YOU HOW MUCH ELECTRICITY OR WHATEVER YOU USED THIS MONTH DIRECTLY IN THE E-MAIL; no, we’ve got to play fucking games and make you do extra work and stop you from automatically having a record of your shit without having to deliberately log on to the platform we control and download them individually with 30 seconds worth of clicking between each one.

    WTF is even the point of the email if there’s NO USEFUL INFORMATION IN IT?!

    • Raiderkev@lemmy.world
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      5 days ago

      I’m currently locked out of my electricity provider’s payment site. They kept asking me if my name was on the account when I logged in. I would click yes and then it’d ask for a bunch more information. I managed to get around it and get to bill pay. Eventually they locked me out. Now they want me to call them so they can get more data out of me to sell to data brokers, and on principle, I’m not about that, so I just pay by phone like a boomer with my paper bill now.

    • PeteWheeler@lemmy.world
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      5 days ago

      Of course not, can’t let the consumers keep an easy paper trail of their bills. That would mean we would be caught on mischarges!

    • supamanc@lemmy.world
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      4 days ago

      But the website will only show how much you used, if you want to see how much that costs, you have to use our app, which for some reason requires location access, storage access and call access…

    • outhouseperilous@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      4 days ago

      Information channels arent for communication.

      They’re for advertising, provocation, and corporate shibboleths of consent.

      Maybe get on board with the 20th century, grandma.

    • Sixty@sh.itjust.works
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      5 days ago

      Oh, not the total owed, but the actual usage graphs. Yeah I only get an annual email containing a recap pretty much at years end for a few services. Otherwise it’s off to the shitty website.

      • pinball_wizard@lemmy.zip
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        5 days ago

        Otherwise it’s off to the shitty website.

        I’ve been promised that AI will fix all the shitty websites, soon.

  • phantomwise@lemmy.ml
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    4 days ago
    • Someone has sent you a private messages on BONTO! But we won’t tell you what it says or you won’t go to the website.
    • MonkeMischief@lemmy.today
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      3 days ago

      Nextdoor. Freaking nextdoor is the absolute worst. I only have it because it’s a decent “local Intel” source because nobody talks to (or knows) each other in suburbia anymore.

      But it shows you like the first 10 words of a post, and just opening the website on a phone practically locks the whole page with a “GeT tHe ApP!” Pop-up.

      Know what? Yeah I should dump it. Save my mental health. Lol

  • piefood@feddit.online
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    4 days ago

    I actually love email. While yes, this post is accurate, email is the most filterable communication system that I have. Since I have my own email-server, and I know how procmail rules work, I can tightly control who is allowed to contact me, and what folders their messages go into. It also has great crowd-sourcing of known spammers, that I can pull from to help me filter out spammy IP addresses.

    Every other message system only has a “report spam” button, that is dependent on the service admins, and doesn’t actually stop people from sending me annoying junk-mail.

    • merc@sh.itjust.works
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      4 days ago

      Yeah, it’s also one of the few remaining interoperable ways of communicating.

      If your friend who used to use gmail is now using hotmail, you don’t have to use a new app to communicate with that friend, you just update their email address and nothing else changes. If you used to be on gmail and you now want to run your own mail server you should check into a mental health clinic, but once you get out, you just tell your friends your new email address and for them nothing else changes. In fact, you can set gmail to forward emails, so any friends who forget will still communicate with you without difficulty.

      • MonkeMischief@lemmy.today
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        3 days ago

        If you used to be on gmail and you now want to run your own mail server you should check into a mental health clinic.

        No freaking kidding. I just wanted to set up an address to like, send me server notifications and stuff. Not worth the hassle!

        An ever-present torrential maelstrom of email bot spam has spawned so many hoops and regulatory checks it made this process not worth it. And that’s aside from just getting and keeping it running!

        • merc@sh.itjust.works
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          Yeah, I’ve run one for decades. I keep thinking it will get easier but it never does. I get better at the old stuff, then new stuff comes up which makes it difficult again. I always had the intention to offer it to friends and family, but I’ve never felt confident that I could guarantee that it would work. These days I know what I’m doing, but I can never guarantee that emails sent from my domain will arrive. Google or Yahoo or Microsoft will sometimes just automatically mark things from my domain as SPAM even if I’m following all the SPF, DMARC, DKIM, whatever rules.

          And that’s all aside from the constant, unending stream of SPAM I’m dealing with, in addition to the constant, unending attempts to hack my server.

  • Aeri@lemmy.world
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    5 days ago

    My current personal hell is

    Log in to use Splurp™️!

    USERNAME: Bongo Password: Schleeb209-!AA12

    An E-Mail has been sent to Bongo@bingus.gov with a link to sign in [click link] Please confirm with 2FA!

    Now do this again every fucking hour on this service you use all day you fucking cow.

  • sturger@sh.itjust.works
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    5 days ago

    I legit got an e-mail from Facebook telling me that I should join Facebook because “no one uses e-mail anymore”. Ummmm……well someone must be still using e-mail and No.

  • KoboldCoterie@pawb.social
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    5 days ago

    The same could be said for any form of communication, really.

    I remember when phones used to be good. Now it’s all

    • We have important information about your car’s warranty.
    • Here’s information on new solar panel installation that doesn’t work with your home / location.
    • You’ve been selected to answer a quick 15 question survey.

    I remember when mail used to be good. Now it’s all

    • I’m a disgraced Nigerian prince and I need your help to protect my multi-million dollar fortune.
    • Here’s all the important sales WalMart is having this week! Don’t miss out!
    • Here’s your electricity bill that you’re enrolled in auto-pay for. No action is needed on your part, but we’re sending you this 12-page summary anyway.
      • jjjalljs@ttrpg.network
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        5 days ago

        I think a lot about a post I saw that said “you hate every piece of capitalism but refuse to connect the dots to see that picture”

        • riquisimo@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          4 days ago

          It’s still good. It’s great even. The best part is you can’t “leak” an RSS address so when you subscribe to something you won’t be added to spam without you knowing. It’s a great medium.

          • MonkeMischief@lemmy.today
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            3 days ago

            you can’t “leak” an RSS address so when you subscribe to something you won’t be added to spam without you knowing

            Ah, so now we definitely know why it was quietly swept under the rug!

            Thank goodness we have the amazing future now:

            ALLOW THIS WEB PAGE TO SEND YOU NOTIFICATIONS!!???

            –Every stupid webpage ever

            Unrestricted, glorious, arbitrary code at the accidental flick of an “allow” button. Normies everywhere getting inundated with random loud full-page video ads from chrome notifications that recursively cascade-subscribed them to a million other chrome notifications.

    • qjkxbmwvz@startrek.website
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      5 days ago

      I remember when phones used to be good.

      Telemarketers have been around for a long, long time (Wikipedia claim “…the practice of contacting potential customers by telephone originated in the late 19th century.”).

      I personally recall a lot more telemarketing in the 90s, though I was a kid and just passed the phone to mom or dad. But that was also a time when caller ID was a luxury, and not everyone had answering machines.

      • The_v@lemmy.world
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        5 days ago

        The last time I had a landline was 16 years ago when my wife briefly had a home office. Her employer required the landline as part of the home office setup (they paid for it).

        We got spammed by robocallers every 5-10 minutes all day long and half the night. It was so bad that my wife never knew when a work call was coming in and had to let every call go to voicemail.

        We didn’t unplug the phone just turned the answering machine to silent. We still got calls on a supposedly disconnected number.

  • phantomwise@lemmy.ml
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    4 days ago

    What the hell is BONTO! I don’t remember making an account on BONTO! Why do I have a BONTO! account is someone impersonating me WAS MY EMAIL HACKED??? Oh wait it’s just a rebrand of that one website that forced me to create an account 10 years ago.