Still Faxing

Japan may be the only country where fax machines are still this common.

Around 2020. I took my car to a regional dealership for repairs. I asked to communicate by email. They told me to fax them my email address. My email address. By fax.

Sounds like a joke. But SMTP might not be so different.

A protocol born in 1982, still running in production. Its trusting design was exploited, inevitably. SPF appeared. DKIM followed. Then DMARC. Patch after patch, layer after layer, keeping the thing alive. Not replacing the protocol. Piling on top of it. The same structure that keeps fax alive.

sendmail's bugs never ended. Fix one, another surfaces. Eventually Postfix took over. BIND followed the same arc. The DNS server underpinning the entire internet, churning out CVEs on a regular schedule. Both are textbook cases of "we'd love to replace it, but it's running." The fate of infrastructure.

I received a Discord invite over LINE. The feeling was familiar. An invitation to the next platform, delivered on the old one. The ticket to the next era always arrives on the previous era's rails.

Technology doesn't replace. It accumulates. Like geological strata. SMTP, BIND, buried quietly beneath us, holding everything up. Fax machines aside, someday we too will be fossils in that rock.