On Thu, Apr 29, 2021 at 01:27:07PM +0100, Eric S Fraga wrote: > And to think that email was once a simple yet effective tool. It's been > hijacked.
Spammers took control of it years ago. It's been dying off, slowly. While we're swapping anecdotes, I'll give what limited insight I have into my own workplace's handling of email. For starters, some of you may have noticed that I changed my email address on this mailing list. This is because of policy changes at work that made it effectively impossible for me to read technical emails via my previous address. So now I'm subscribed from my personal address instead. This will work for me as long as I'm working primarily from home, under Covid rules. Looking at the subject of this thread just makes me cringe inside, because whoever is asking that question still has hope. And that hope is going to be crushed. My workplace's official policy is that we are no longer allowed to have an independent email service of our own. Period. Full stop. All email at work has to go through the corporate system, which is Microsoft. No exceptions. We're not allowed to host mailboxes, we're not allowed to receive email from the outside, and we're not allowed to send email outside, unless it goes through their relays. In order to continue reading debian-user at work, I would have to allow its messages to be sent to Microsoft. I would be reading them through Outlook Web App. I cannot accept this. It's not tolerable. So, I unsubscribed from that address, and switched over to this one. Some of you may be wondering why corporations have done this. In the case of mine, it's because of incredibly powerful fears of phishing and malware. Some health care providers have been shut down by it in the last half year, and all the rest are utterly terrified. So, the official policy is that all incoming email has to go through the corporate system, which blocks and filters everything to an extreme degree, in order to try to prevent a malware intrusion via email. Access to external mail systems like gmail is also blocked, for the same reason -- they're terrified that someone will receive a malware email at an external address, view it via web mail in a browser on a Windows machine, and bring a virus/worm into the corporate network that way. (They cannot even *comprehend* that some people are not running Windows, or reading email in anything other than Outlook or a web browser. Not that it would matter to them. I'm sure there are people within that department who would outlaw all non-Windows desktops, if they could, because they don't control them. That department feels a need to control literally *everything* computer-related that any employee ever sees or touches.)
