Slashdot Mirror
Email (As We Know It) Doomed?
Mephie writes "A pretty interesting article at Slate.com takes a look at how spam may be killing email as we know it. With the increase of spam, the argument is made that more users will switch from blacklisting spammers to 'whitelisting' specific, trusted addresses, making email more like instant messaging: if you're not on someone's 'buddy list,' you have to prove you're an actual person (e.g. identify a word in an image) to send a message." May be?
Another doomsayer, give me a break, the Internet is going to fall apart in $random years, we'll be swimming in spam and popup ads, hackers will wage "cyberwar" on our "infostructure" unless we do something about it. Whatever. Use the proper tools. By now if you're still swamped in spam/popups/adware, then you're an idiot.
The moron who cut me off on the road this morning is a danger to motorists, highways are doomed to failure!
Then, I should ofcourse plug this Openchallenge submission about Learning e-mail classifier:The use of a naive bayesian algorithm in automatically filtering spam and classifying e-mail has been discussed and also implemented in the past. Implement an automatic e-mail classifier system which works together with an IMAP server. The system should: a) constantly refine the database used to classify messages either by periodically re-analyzing the IMAP folders or by tracking each incoming message and periodically checking to which folder the user actually moves each message. b) assign each incoming message an extra header item which contains the path of the IMAP folder where the message belongs according to the classification algorithm.
Also, you could also mine your site for smammers like this.
So, my point is that just during last two years the spam problem has exceeded so much that there is enough interest in fighting it seriously. Spam will die.
If you have a mail box that where you don't recieve any legitimate mail, then, of course, you will have a very high percentange of junk. It's not rocket science. The more people use it, the less of an annoyance that small percentage of junk is.
I'm afraid not. E-Mail allows me to send a message, or respond when I want to. Much better flexibility than IM.
Spam will catch up. There are already a small number of spamers working IM effectively, and it could get as bad as e-mail at any time.
Yeah, e-mail is going to be outdated, just like postal-mail has long been outdated, and telephones have been outdated. You heard it here first... According to 'JeffSh', IM is going to replace them all...
</sarcasm>
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
I just can't really see email going away, especially not in favor of IM. Emails true usefulness, the thing that makes it a 'killer app' is that it is asynchronous. Unlike IM, when I send someone an email, it is unnecessary for them to be online, or have their IM client running in order to receive my message. Their email server is more than happy to hold their email for them until they can get it, and allows them to respond when they can.
Additionally, it's not like IM is spam-free. A quick google search reveals a growing business in providing anti-spam tools to IM users, so I doubt that making email more IM-like will help, though I do see some limited use of whitelists to be beneficial.
Businesses however, can never get away with using whitelists, or even most blacklists to reduce the amount of spam they have to deal with. I know that at our company, we cannot block nearly the number of netblocks that we would like to, as we need communicate with customers almost exclusively by email, and cannot afford to lock out potential buyers for any reason.
The solution to the spam problem is not an easy one, especially not for businesses, but small steps forward are made all the time, in better pattern matching, address lookup, etc that one day will (hopefully) allow for spam to be stopped, or at least to stem the tide...
The reason I like e-mail is that it is asynchronous. If I want synchronous communication, I use the telephone.
The telephone gets bombarded with equally determined spammers and yet that hasn't changed. Certainly, you might not pick up the phone if it's not a number you recognise, but you're still going to look. It's the same for email.
The only reason email will go away is when mobile (cell) phones become as convenient and cheap a way to communicate as email currently is.
Look, it is not hard to understand. Spammers send out their garbage because someone is responding with cash or a legitimate email address that can be sold to other spammers. If you are posting your email address to a public area (e.g., Usenet), then you might as well get a new email address.
Here's a tip: use a throwaway account (Hotmail/Yahoo) for all your on-line purchases, and use your ISP email address for personal communications. Never, ever post your ISP address anywhere and never use it for on-line purchases. Once your throwaway account starts getting spam, get another one. Never, ever respond to any spam with "remove," "take me off your list," or "you #$(&*#@$!!!!"
If everyone did that, then most spam would dry up and blow away. (And if my 89-yr old Grandmaw can do it, so can you!)
Yeah, right.
``Yeah, e-mail is going to be outdated, just like postal-mail has long been outdated, and telephones have been outdated. You heard it here first... According to 'JeffSh', IM is going to replace them all...
''
Call me a net junkie, but this is indeed the case for me. I hardly receive or send any snail mail, and I only occasionally get phone calls. About half of the conversation I partake in is face to face, the rest is electronic (email, IRC, IM).
With the advent of VoIP, we can voice chat with others around the world at lower rates than would be possible over the phone (Speak Freely rules), largely obsoleting the telephone for personal communication between people with suitably equipped computers.
The Internet _is_ revolutionarizing society even now. I know that many people and organizations prefer doing things the old way, but I also know that many people prefer the comfort of doing everything in one place. Since especially the younger generations tend to fall in the latter category, it is likely that computerized communication and business will dominate in the future. Computers haven't taken over the whole world yet, but they're getting there. That's why we need Open systems, so that whose who want can shape their world, instead of being fully dependent on giant multinationals.
---
"There is hopeful symbolism in the fact that flags do not wave in a
vacuum."
-- Arthur C. Clarke
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
OK i thought of a way to stop spam. It is very simple. Charge people to send e-mail. Yep, let's say you charge .0001 per e-mail that is sent out. That would be 100 e-mails for a penny. Spamming would then be unprofitable, and people would gladly pay a few cents a month to stop spam.
Now this may be a situation like the mouse putting a bell on the cat, great idea impossible implementation, but I don't understand enough about e-mail to know.
Comments as to why it wouldn't work?
Would your ISP have terminated their spammer if SPEWS hadn't escalated their listing to the whole /16?
The ISP in question leases servers one by one to individuals and companies. They hand over the root password, and off you go. So what exactly does slashdot think they should do?
The best they can do is to close the accounts of spammers once they are reported. But since their entry level machines cost under $100 up front, one spam campaign per machine is still viable. So maybe slashdot thinks that hosting should become more expensive? I'm sorry, but the SPEW thing just isn't going to work unless we want far more intrusion by ISPs.
If it took a /16 block to force them to terminate him, then certainly no number of polite mails to abuse@ would have worked.
The /16 block thing didn't work either, the support guy basically said 'the people refusing your mail are cretins, they'll probably get over it'. Which they did.
Virtually serving coffee
The only thing that anti-spam laws will do is have unintended consequences, perhaps of restricting legit email.
Bullshit.
Look at Washington state, or California, or any of the other sites that have anti-spam laws... I don't see anyone complaining about legitimate email being restricted, but I do hear about spammers being sued, and people collecting money.. and it is doing something, because 1/2 of the spam I get now has a disclaimer of "this isn't intended for people in Washington, California, etc.. if you are in one of these states, please don't sue me" at the bottom.
The laws are working.
If you are posting your email address to a public area (e.g., Usenet), then you might as well get a new email address.
Ahh what wonderful logic - "if you want your email address to be useful to you, then you better not tell anyone about it" - which, of course, makes it useless.
It's harder to understand than you know then. Spammers send out their garbage because they think someone will buy their product. But have you noticed how many products you get pitched to you exactly once? The spammer isn't successful, he gives up, he curses the spam-enabler who sold him the Millions of Addresses CD for US $295.00. And the spam-enabler finds another sucker.
It doesn't matter if nobody buys the product. What matters is that the spamware peddlers keep going and going and going...
I have had several serious misunderstandings with people when communicating over IM.
Instant messaging is a difficult medium. It as immediate as conversation, but without being as clear and concise as email or other forms of writing. With most writing you read back what you wrote to make sure that you didn't accidently write something that can be misunderstood. Since IMs happen in (almost) real time this sort of care is not generally used. Also people do not type at the same rate so the thread of the converstation is often lost.
If the subject is important I always use another medium.