The SMTP email protocol is 42 years old. In 1982, the SMTP protocol was defined (and implemented on ARPANET a year later), and in the decades since, it's lit the way for what the Internet *could* be - was originally supposed to be - where we rely on open standards and massively scalable and robust distributed protocols instead of proprietary centralised platforms.

In recent years, we've had an object lesson in why we need to go back to that original vision.