Mastodon

Basically we had to send the low level commands of an email for it to go through. After doing this I realized something weird. The email gets to say who it is from.

I remember realizing this and thinking it was weird too when I was reading about SMTP. Specifically, the MAIL FROM command.

Also related.

I almost got kicked out of school for this! I sent an email to my girlfriend from some girl that we didn't like, saying something like "you're a huge bitch, haha just kidding this is actually jballs not the chick we don't like."

Problem is that I wrote my girlfriend's email address wrong, so it bounced back to the sender (the girl we didn't like).

So I had to explain to a university dean exactly what I did and how I didn't actually "hack into" the girl's email account. That was fun.

I sent my gmail address an email from [email protected] and it worked.

Most orgs have an internal SMTP server that will accept and send mail to other internal addresses without any special authentication or validation. It's almost essential for automatic monitoring software and that sort of thing.

Where the barriers go up is at the border to the Internet. And thank goodness, just a couple decades ago it was sheer chaos.

When I was in schoola classmate set up an instance that is designed for hacking. But another classmate took it in another direction. Instead of following the clues to the answer (it's a game) they instead hacked the instance and created a folder bomb but named the folders with the Mongolian space separator character. So removing them because a task. No body got upset because well... Hacking can be fun!

Second: hacking is the term used when you break into something to make it better.

Cracking is the term used when you break into things for malicious intent

GPG let's you choose a email too. I always use [email protected] as my email when generating GPG keys for dark net markets

Yeah I agree email kinda sucks. But everyone still uses it, and (as far as I'm aware) people aren't writing articles about how confusing email is for people and why that makes it a failure. Mastodon and Lemmy are, in comparison, much better and way less confusing but you see that said all the time about them.

Yea I'm with you here. I've done a good amount of things with computers and setting up email with clients and setting up printers are probably the two "what the fuck why is this so hard!" things I've had to do with a computer.

I used my isp email address for a brief period and it was always super annoying in some way or another. Not to mention I lost it when I had to switch providers because I moved out of their area. It was a long time ago but they wanted to charge me to keep it when gmail/Hotmail etc already existed lmao bye

This is what mastodon.social is doing now. Making it so people don’t have to think about the instance at sign up.

TBH, I don't find that all too bad. As long as users can easily move at any time, getting them set up on a popular one first where everything "just works", they can learn the concepts and get used to the federation stuff. Then after some time, they may realize that a smaller server might fit them better and can then move there. Choosing a server without ever being registered somewhere (in the fediverse) was even hard for me.

Still is if you’re not using a product like gmail or outlook that auto enters all of the incoming and outgoing servers.

How many of us have spent time on our ISP’s help page trying to find the damn STMP server domain?

For a small period of time I was a god that would bless people with gmail invites lol. That brings me back. I remember compuserve and Hotmail but I don't remember them being especially complicated at all. Maybe that was before my time...? Which would be nice for once