From: wangofett@circumlunar.space
To: everyone@world
Date: Sun, 26 Feb 2023 12:13:06 -0600
Subject: Email Everything!

I mean, technically speaking, I mean Internet Message Everything, but
it definitely doesn't have the same ring to it. So I'll just say email
when I mean an Internet Message.

I've been thinking about this for Quite A While, but basically
everything - every type of communication that you want or could do
could... well, it could have been an email.

Think about it. Maybe you use Mastodon/ActivityPub, or perhaps some
inferior and commercial form of social media. Maybe you use Forgejo, or
some other inferior Git hosting like GitHub.

Maybe you're unfortunate enough to use Jira for tracking tasks.

Potentially, even IRC could have been an email. Definitely the inferior
Slack, Discord, and friends could have been an email.

Because email supports metadata (see [RFC 2822 2.2][1]). Email supports
attachments in the form of multipart messages. You can attach programs,
alternate representations (hey here's a fancy HTML form of my email with
rich text and formatting and embedded images for sighted users, while
here's a helpful screen reader friendly format).

Honestly the only thing that email may not particuarly be good for is
fast data retrieval. But all you really have to do then is build a DB
that periodically refreshes from your emails (say when a file is created
or edited). It can also just simply harvest the metadata from the email
headers.


So really?

This could have been an email
~wangofett


[1]: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2822.txt

ETX