{"id":52,"date":"2007-07-30T00:43:02","date_gmt":"2007-07-30T07:43:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/axel\/2007\/07\/30\/mail-matters\/"},"modified":"2007-08-20T10:12:22","modified_gmt":"2007-08-20T17:12:22","slug":"mail-matters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/axel\/2007\/07\/30\/mail-matters\/","title":{"rendered":"Mail matters"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>As everybody else, I&#8217;d like to give my 2 cts on the current mail\/thunderbird discussion, and I&#8217;ll do it cent-wise. I&#8217;ll start off with mail.<\/p>\n<p>Mail matters. As of today, your email address is the root cert for vast majority of your online identities.<\/p>\n<p>POP\/IMAP matters. Your emails are a valuable asset, and open and interoperable protocols (read, APIs) guarantee users power and choice over what to do with that data.<\/p>\n<p>Email accounts matter. ISPs used to lock in their customers via their browser\/connection software. Today, ISPs lock in their customers via email accounts. This is a real competitive advantage by raising the barrier to switch ISPs and thus leading to less competition between ISPs.<\/p>\n<p>Sadly, email software matters. Todays email traffic has a malicious-content problem, so your email software has to be &#8220;safe&#8221;, no matter where it runs.<\/p>\n<p>Webmail does not matter. But webmail is vendor lock-in par excellence, and it does not give the user power of her or his data. It&#8217;s nifty that you can access your mail through a browser, but in terms of empowerement, it doesn&#8217;t matter.<\/p>\n<p>Email is a unique high-value asset of human being on the internet, with a particular impact on security and choice, and thus, IMHO, has an outstanding role with respect to the Mozilla mission and the manifesto. It&#8217;s not outweighing the web, but one without the other is vastly less valuable. Something that I wouldn&#8217;t say about calendaring or VOIP.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ll do a Thunderbird-specific piece shortly.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>As everybody else, I&#8217;d like to give my 2 cts on the current mail\/thunderbird discussion, and I&#8217;ll do it cent-wise. I&#8217;ll start off with mail. Mail matters. As of today, your email address is the root cert for vast majority of your online identities. POP\/IMAP matters. Your emails are a valuable asset, and open and [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":17,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/axel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/axel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/axel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/axel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/17"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/axel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=52"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/axel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/axel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=52"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/axel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=52"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/axel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=52"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}