But it was again re-centralized in late 90s with the advent of hotmail and all. What I wanted to say was, we need to re-decentralize it.

Gmail and Yahoo Mail and Facebook Mail and my personal mail server all stand in contradiction to your claim.

Stop making things up just because you want to complain about the Google. Nobody will fault you for a simple "Fuck Google, they're demonstrably evil and have access to way too much data now," which is what it seems to me you're driving toward.

What are you even talking about! How are Gmail, Yahoo Mail and Facebook email decentralized?

And what part of my comment prompted you to believe that it was a "Fuck Google" statement?

Email is decentralized because Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Hotmail and whatever server you can setup can talk together. You don't have to use Gmail to send an email to a Gmail user.

The only thing that's threatening email decentralization is the war on spam. It's becoming more and more difficult to send messages that don't go directly to spam boxes if you're not one of the big player.

No, it wasn't. Extra layers were added to it for people that didn't value being a peer, and didn't mind being a client.

You should be a peer.

Or simply people who didn't have the skills to be a peer?!

And what about closed gardens like social networks and services that wall our data behind proprietary walls? Google data liberation front is a step forward but its still not enough.

People with such great skills and knowledge of the stakes of IT like the HN audience shouldn't put the blame on common people right?!

I genuinely believe that technology and the open source community have reached a maturity that makes the development of simple and solid alternatives are possible, even for the least knowledgeable of us.

Take a look at what this startup is trying to achieve: https://www.cozycloud.cc/ It gives everyone an easy to administrate server, you can assign your own domain name, self host it or have it hosted elsewhere. The server is a plat-form on which you have total control and ownership of your data and can install and develop apps that serves YOUR needs. It still young but with the support of talented people that could become BIG!

One of the problems that's recentralized mail is spam.

Because of spam senders, especially spam originating from residential and dial-up IPs (well, mostly residential now), many large email providers use blacklists (literally: DUL -- dial-up lists) to block SMTP access from IPs within a known residential range. Many also work to whitelist specific lists of known legitimate email providers.

May enterprise IT organizations require explicit whitelisting of domains from which email is sent. I kid you not. And many of these organizations apparently have never heard of SPF/DKIM.

A third level of resource are reputation-based services. Cisco's Ironport / Senderbase is among one of the better of these (it indicates both good and bad reputations, as opposed to simple blacklisting or whitelisting, as well as volume variations from a given IP and "neighborhood" reputations of nearby IP addresses.

The result is that it can be painful to try getting your mail delivered through to large email service providers. I've had the most significant issues with Yahoo and Aol, though others are at times problematic. This affects both individuals trying to configure small residential servers and businesses / enterprises.

Ideally tools such as SPF and DKIM help, but at best these indicate that a given IP address is included in a policy framework or that header integrity is assured -- there's still no basis for assuming that a given email message is or isn't spam. Getting SPF and DKIM properly configured can also involve hoop-jumping, especially for non-technical users.