Why we can send emails from gmail to yahoo or outlook but cannot do the same with instant messaging apps like WhatsApp to Messenger or iMessage?
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Email was deliberately designed as an open format. It was created at a time when the ppl who controlled the internet cared more about making it work, than they cared about maintaining control over it.
Messenger apps were deliberately designed as closed formats, bc by the time it was a thing, the value that big companies saw in the internet was maintaining control over their user base, and selling that user base to advertisers.
TLDR: different end goals. Email was designed for you to use it, message apps were designed to use you.
Compatible and agreed upon protocols.
The protocol for email goes back to the very first days of the internet (so like early 70s) and networking. The email protocols (SMTP for server-server communication) originally, then POP and later IMAP – these are more for server-client interactions) are all long since standardized and well documented as open standards.
So long as your email server, or client applications adhere to the standards they’re all interchangeable. If you write your own email server software, so long as it follows the SMTP protocol, msgs can be sent to or received from any other email server.
Each of the instant messaging services have their own, proprietary protocols, which offer unique feature sets and are designed around different purposes. WhatsApp for example was built on top of the SMS text msg platform, thus is designed with the small, simple message in mind. Messenger was web based from the start and meant to augment the rich multimedia environment of Facebook. But whereas email was intended to be an OPEN standard from the start, each of these proprietary services are likely to remain so – why? because revenue lock-in. If you control the entire service platform you can mandate that either accounts have to pay to not see ads, or you get to push ads to everyone.
You could, I suppose establish means of interconnecting all these services. But while you might own the iMessage address for @ATLAN007, someone else owns ~ATLAN007 on FB messenger. So that’s an issue. Also, even if you had the account @ATLAN0007 everywhere, and I could send a message to @ATLAN0007 on some central location, now where does it end up? Everywhere? WhatsApp, Messanger and iMessage are all geared around the concept of chat groups or channels. If I send a blanket message to you on one service, and they were all somehow interconnected, where should it show up? The first WhatsApp or Messanger channel/group that we both have in common? All of them?
An email address is very specific. [email protected] is a distinct separate destination from [email protected]. You can forward from one to the other but that’s an artificial construct.
it’s the matter of protocol (the way that computers talk to each other). e-mail has been standardized something about 40 years ago (or even earlier) and it’s always the same. whereas IM have developed their own protocols which are not compatible. there is Jabber, AIM, ICQ, GG and probably a bunch of others i forgot/didn’t hear about.
in order to make different IM programs talk to each other (cross-protocol) you would have to have a translation layer (something like a middle-man) that would convert from one to another.
Gmail, Outlook etc. are just different interfaces for the same technology, so it’s like making a phone call from an iPhone to a Samsung.
WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger etc. are entirely separate technologies, so it’d be like trying to send a fax to your car stereo.
Because there is a RFC for E-Mail but not for proprietary messaging protocols.
It’s a lot of reading and a whole rabbit hole about how RFC’s work for the internet.
https://emailstuff.org/rfc
Gmail, yahoo, and outlook speak the same “language”to each other, but WhatsApp, Messenger, and iMessage decided to speak different languages.
There was a time when companies would go out of their way to adopt most Internet protocols just to have presence on the internet. AOL started out with screen names which they then extended to the @aol.com address. Apple did the same with AppleLink. Compuserve and Delphi as well. Most large tech companies also adopted protocols like FTP and pushed a presence on the early search databases like veronica and archie many even had usenet newsgroups.
When it comes to Application layer protocols with proprietary technologies, making them open is usually considered overhead with few returns. When you make your technology an open standard you cede a lot of control of it and lose the ability to maximize your profit from it.
Short answer today: because of money
All emails run on the same protocols. SMTP to send, and either IMAP or POP3 to receive. This makes them much more flexible. Specifically having SMTP as the standard for sending messages – as your web client either uses IMAP or POP3 to download the message from the web server, not both.
That COULD be possible with other message apps, if they allowed it and built their programs to do so. However, all of the messengers were developed in house behind closed doors with proprietary code. Sharing that code would be the same thing as sharing their income.
It helps that the email protocols were largely built off of the original protocols (and I think smtp may still be in its original form, save for optimization) so the newer versions of The post office protocol (POP2, then POP3) were still built off of the same tech and scaffolding that could already relay with email servers, plus IMAP was made already knowing what protocols it needs to line up with
Private business interests over the common good. That’s the answer, now for the rant:
This has always been my problem with the messaging apps. They’ve created islands/ clans in communications, dictated by those with higher social clout. Communications is a basic human right, but now I’m having to check if a person has the same app as me in order to communicate. Add to that the fact that the companies are hoovering up so much personal data under the guise of ‘value added’ services, and people are reluctant/ hesitant/ unable to change.
Better to have a common protocol, and have the companies use that, and compete on services. iMessage and RCS are the last barriers allowing that to happen. All the other stuff like encryption can sit on top of that.
To integrate all messengering apps together you’d have to have a common area that delegates what message goes to what platform to what username, this could be a daunting task, but also whose going to pay for it? These apps are already closed so they have one way of operating.
if suddenly you want Whatsapp to send a message to kik, they now have to add in another parameter for what app is sending where, to who from who, new security tokens for shooting messages across this middleware, and work together to store messages across two different databases to have a chat log, which could be another nightmare in itself. There’s probably more I’m missing but those are the glaring issues I see.
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