Abstract
Email: you see it every day. It’s on your desktop. It’s in your servers. Through the magic of modern technology, it flows invisibly through the air and into your PDA! Your cellular phone conducts silent and arcane conversations with distant servers, speaking the ancient language of SMTP and the unknowable dialects of IMAP. Surely all this technology means progress of mankind… or does it?
Now you can learn the truth: buried deep within the eldritch documents describing the slow accretion of features in the Elder Protocols lie subtle recursions and devilish ambiguities – grammars that are not grammars, strings quietly stripped of their higher bits – designed to slowly bend the mind of all who implement them.
Now you can hear of the horrors perpetrated by those who became thrall to these documents – and by those, too, who fought to oppose them for the sake of their own dwindling sanity.
Now it can be told: Email Hates the Living!
WARNING: This talk is low in career-sustaining educational content.
Notes
This is probably my most successful talk. I’ve been asked to give it a few times, it’s fun, it’s somewhat educational, and it makes me look like I know what I’m talking about, at least a little.
I’ve always wanted to do a sequel, ever since the last slide of this talk, but so far I haven’t done any work on it. Maybe it’d be about SMTP, maybe IMAP, maybe email authentication, maybe contacts… we’ll see when I get there.