So The Register managed to incite a lot of discussion with a headline that plain-text e-mail is a barrier to entry for kernel development. While attention grabbing, this is actually not a new debate. Like a lot of tech arguments this one seems to come up on a cyclical basis. Maybe because maintainer summit didn’t happen this year it needed to come out elsewhere. I gave a few thoughts on twitter but this topic really deserves a longer look at the problem and what e-mail being a barrier really means.