Slashdot Mirror
The End of Email Cometh?
RebRachman asks: "Has the inevitable finally happened? After years of dismissing as alarmist all the commentary about how spam and security concerns will eventually render email useless, is it actually happening to us? I don't know about you, but for the past three days, all of our staff (we are a virtual company of 20 telecommuters) and clients have been unable to get email to one another reliably. Attachments disappear or become garbled, mail disappears into the great beyond, or arrives hours after it has been sent, even within the same ISP. We've resorted to sending one another an IM every time we send an email to confirm that the messages are arriving alright. In extreme cases we have even reverted to using a telephone handset to ensure that clients have received everything that was sent. Is it only a matter of time before we all resort to file transfer by P2P? (And if so, what are we going to do with these firewall boxes?)"
It would certainly put spammers out of a job if that's the case.
Funny that, out of a job because they were too good at it...
Dark Nexus
"Sanity is calming, but madness is more interesting."
I dunno about you, but I still use my e-mail fine. E-mail mailing lists, to personal correspondence, to professional correspondence. E-mail isn't going to die any time soon.
I touch computers in naughty places
for a lot of people, sending email is just a way of leaving a message. When more IM clients can leave messages for people who aren't online at the moment, email will die out more and more. Although, spammers will certainly turn to IM.
I hadn't noticed. Who are you paying money to lose your mail for you? They don't deserve it, because there are better services available without such problems. I know there must be, because I've never experienced them.
About the only problem I've ever had with email -- that wasn't my fault, anyway -- is overzealous spam filters. The simple solution to this is to install your own filters, set the threshhold relatively high, and check your junk mail folders periodically. Never should you blackhole email if you value its timely delivery. Anyway, the latest spam filters are good enough that this isn't much of a problem anymore.
Solution: switch to gmail. Ok, theoretically any webmail system could work, but google appears to be the least evil of the available choices.
p2p is not going to solve your messaging problems. *SPRITZ* bad use of buzzword, no. *SPRITZ* what did I just tell you?! Your post provides close to zero information other than "email suxx0rz omg p2p". It's as bad as the llamas who come here seeking legal advice.
Who is in charge of administrating your email server? (servers?) What email clients are you using? Can you send & receive email normally from your personal accounts? Who is providing your other "virtual" (wtf) services? Which IM client are you using? Have you looked at Jabber for your messaging, including setting up your own private Jabber servers?
[o]_O
"See any serious problems with this story? Email our on-duty editor."
meh, email is over as we know it anyway..
Sounds like you need better spam filtering. Spam is a problem, but not an unworkable problem.
I don't think that 'email' as a method of communication is as flawed as your implementation is.
Do your run your own servers? If so, perhaps you should look into a rebuild of the whole mail/anti-spam system.
If you pay someone to run this system, then i'd be looking for another ISP or other provider.
The only thing killing email is this kind of thinking.
Since April, the number of Spam I get has gone up enormously.
o m
I have two obscure domains. A particular problem is the huge number of spam messages being sent to the domains to lists of nonexistant users:
mary@domain.com
mike@domain.com
nick@domain.c
etc etc
About 1600 of these a day and growing....
I have one email account that gets a significant amount of use, and that's at work, for communications within the company.
-- $SIGNATURE
I gave up on email two years ago. Yeah, I still have an account that I almost never check. SpamAssassin does a fine job of keeping most things at bay but I'm tired of dealing with it. All SA does it sort it. I still have to double check it and delete it. What a waste of time. I've tried getting my own domain, setting up email accounts for different companies, etc. I tried hiding my email address from web sites. I even tried switching addresses. It's worse than ever now. With all the viruses and spyware, I know that some of them are harvesting email addresses from users Outlook mailboxes and sending them to spammers. I have clients or acquaintances that get infected and even though I've created email addresses just for them to email to, I start getting spammed within a few weeks of their box getting infected.
People say it's an arms race, and they are right. It's definitely a race and I'm fucking exhausted. My hat is off to those of you who can keep up with it all.
</rant>
On the other hand, instant messaging has become an email replacement for me. It's quick, and I can usually send files with it. Either that or I use my cell phone for communication (ringer set to vibrate, thank you). Phone plans are inexpensive now and most include long distance as part of the package. It's much easier, and more pleasant, to talk to my friends and family that are on the other side of the country. I stay in touch with a lot more people these days than I used to just four years ago, thanks in part to my cell phone.
Prevent email address forgery. Publish SPF records for y
my company can't do email reliably!
we can't get attachments!
our isp or servers suck!
oops, we were at fault!
can i recind my slashdot article?
where do i get modded as troll?
give me a break, people have been saying it's the end of the email/BSD/MAC/intarweb for ages now and it's getting old. rehire some new tech staff that know what the heck to do or learn to do it yourself properly.
good god WTF is wrong with people.
Reason: there is no *open* replacement that would fix the flaws.
By open I mean something that can receive a message from a person you haven't had a contact with before.
Any system that would eliminate the spam requires some sort of "web of trust". To establish a web of trust, you need to close the system and limit it only to trusted users. Apart from all possible problems related to the web of trust, the system will be always either too restrictive, if it's effective, or too ineffective, if it's not so restrictive.
IM is already taken over by spammers in some degree - it's just a matter of time and the number of users for that process to accelerate. Anything else will suffer from the same problems - you let unknown people call/message/email you - you get spam. You restrict yourself only to known people, you filter spam out, but lock out everyone who might potentially need to contact you but doesn't belong to your personal web of trust.
So, the bottom line is that every new application will suffer from either spam or restriction, and because of that it doesn't pay off to switch to a different system.
PS: Viruses are not anything that started with email. Email just happens to be a convenient medium of the time, but they were proliferating quite fine with floppy disks, as they are now with email. P2P will (already has in many cases) the exact same problem - people sending around unchecked files, viruses taking over control of P2P programs and multiplying themselves, and so on and so forth.
iThink iHate iMod
In my opinion, the only real solution is a strict policy on unsolicited commercial messaging followed by actual enforcement of it, and charging spammers real costs of distribution of their emails. The reason why it is so popular is that it's so cheap. If spammers had to pay for all resources used by particular email, most likely the problem would be gone in a minute - unfortunately that can hardly be done in the way the Internet operates at the moment, and any sort of solution of the kind would basically be very crude. Detailed billing would require almost totally different network architecture.
iThink iHate iMod
Quit using your ISP's antispam features, if you cannot turn them off yourself, demand that your ISP turn them off for you.
Then install POPFile and take ownership of your own email.
Have your customers/others do the same.
It's the job of ICANN & IANA to get a grip on the SPAM issue,
they are issuing numbers and access to authorities that do not deserve it,
and have not fulfilled thier roles as governing bodies.
Everyone has e-mail troubles, but to assume that it's because of the evil spammers and "security concerns" inherent in e-mail is ridiculous, and borders on negligent. If your server is internal, you need to find a new sysadmin. If it's external, you need to find a new host. If the person running your server knows what he/she's doing, this sort of thing rarely (if ever) happens.
No offense intended, but what you've said is the rough equivalent of saying "The car that I drive too fast, too often, don't change the oil in, and paid my neighbor's 16-year-old kid who takes autoshop to fix has finally stopped working. That must mean that internal-combustion engines are at the end of their life!"
If you aren't just talking about environmental impact, what's the solution? Give up on cars, or find someone who actually knows how to maintain them?
I'm a little disappointed in the editors for allowing this story. :-(
just my 2cents .. but it is possible.. its also a lot better than p2p.. but if I had to do p2p, I'd have to do it with a central server and have the connections made to the central server and then fork them off away .. if thats possible to do..
Only 'flamers' flame!
Does slashdot hate my posts?
so your mail service is no good, can't you get an email account that works somewhere else?
the end of of email? come on people... our phone service was screwed up all day but it's not exactly the end of it.
Gmail has a few nice features that no other email service offers (that I'm aware of anyway), my favourite being the threaded messenger which make a great pseudo instant messanger service and quite a few people have been using it as such, myself included. I suspect the majority of email addresses out there are web based and thanks to gmail storage space is becoming less of an issue so it may once again become practical to send email attachments for something other than spreading viruses.
For me at least email is no where near dead and I think it's going to be around for a lot longer or at least until somebody comes up with a workable alternative.
Hire good part-time admin. Get better MUA. Really. Looks like e-mail works fine for everyone but your company.
...but I think that you have to look at few things. First of all, are you running a spam filter with auto-delete enabled? Are _any_ of the people in your company? Are you running your own mail server, or is someone else running it? Do you have enough bandwidth? Are you subscribed to any RBLs?
The biggest thing that's changed in the age of spam is that a lot of people now install spam and virus filters that do not have a 0% false positive rate. If your filter scores attachments higher, it may be dropping email that has attachments.
Another possibility is that you have a virus filter on your mail server, and you have a bunch of infected machines talking to it. If some significant percentage of the mail you send has viruses on it, the virus filter may be blocking otherwise legitimate mail because it's infected. To you this would appear as lost mail.
In answer to your question, no, mail is not dead. I have met other people who are having the same sort of problems you are, but I haven't been having problems like that, either at home or at work. Something about your mail setup is genuinely borken, and needs fixing.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I am quite happy with having "outsourced"
my email to yahoo mail, especially with
their recent bump to 100meg and 10meg
attachments. Their spam filter is excellent,
though I still have to check for false
positives, which are quite rare, though my
email use is rather minimal. If everyone
used yahoo or gmail or somesuch, that would
pretty much prevent spam and allow for pretty
accurate filtering.
Of course, being web-based is excellent, as
I was able to access email the exact same way
from Finland as from here in the states. Call
me lazy, but setting up POP3 or whatever has
always been a pain, anyway. If only yahoo
had an "export-to-XML" option, then I'd be
perfectly content.
Peace & Blessings,
bmac
You have email server problems.
I know of a company that had similar email problems, like 2 hour waits and other unreliabilities, and the problem was that spam to no longer existing email addresses was being bounced back and forth between their server and whatever fake server was specified in the return address. Email would pile up into the thousands and they'd have to log into the server and delete the bad messages from the queue.
Basically, the problem may be a full smtp queue, possibly either by bouncing messages or spammers using your server.
If you're losing emails entirely, that's generally supposed to be nearly impossible unless the messages are being filtered, they're being deleted manually (lazy solution to full queue problem), the server is full, or the receiving server was unreachable for every delivery attempt.
This is a technical site, right? Has been for a while? Presumabley staffed with people who are technical to moderate stories and the like? How the heck would anyone with a modicum of knowlege post an article like this? Even if this wasn't a unique situation, we can fix email. It's not that big of a deal. All you need to do is modify DNS so that is the single MX record is replaced w/ a "MS" (Mail sender) and a "MR" (Mail Receiver) record. Mail is ONLY accepted by a MR if it comes from an address listed as an "MS" for the sending domain. Done. It's just a hassle. We'd have a period of two years where there is a transition, and it just hasn't gotten that bad yet.
RandomAndInteresting.comdefending the world from stupidity since 1979
While the Gmail service is itself reliable, it does not solve his problem. What if he tries to correspond with Hotmail users? Odds are it will go in the bit bucket. What if somebody tries to send him an EXE (or a ZIP file containing an EXE)? It will bounce (Google reasons correctly that most EXEs are viruses, so it rejects all messages containing them).
As much as I love Gmail, it is not adequate for a be-all, end-all email service.
Your problem is not with email, it's with your administrator. If they can't give you an answer as to why it's happening then you need to find someone else because they don't know what they're doing. If you are outsourcing your email (ie someone not in your company is controlling the box) then the company better be able to give you a straight answer. I deal with servers that deliver mail in the tens of thousands a day, and if only 1/1000 were going through slowly (let alone not at all!) there would be major flak to be had.
I don't know about you, but for the past three days, I haven't been able to get my car to start. The engine won't turn over, and oil is leaking from somewhere under the hood.
I've resorted to taking the bus to work every morning. In extreme cases I've even had to walk! Is it only a matter of time before we all resort to telecommuting? (And if so, what are we going to do with all of those gas stations?)
Oh no, my e-mail is broken, maybe its The Beginning Of The End, fear, fear, fear!
...
...
Umm... I've been using e-mail for 20 years, and I plan on using e-mail for another 20 years. Every single time I've had a problem with e-mail, I've fixed it.
IF you're getting too much spam, change your e-mail address. Its as simple as that. Yes, it really is that simple. If you "can't" do this because too many people have your 'old' address, well then its not e-mail thats broken, its your management of it
Really, I consider the reaction and subsequent 'conclusion that e-mail is going away' to be utterly ludicrous, and I truly question the motives of anyone who adopts that point of view.
Technology doesn't die; only mans desire to reliably, standardly sustain it goes away
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
...that you get a compentent network administrator.
The dangers of excessive individualism are nothing compared to the oppressiveness of excessive collectivism
If you have *any* kind of tech nounce then you should know that attachments are stupid
"hey lets convert this binary file to 7 bit ascii and send it via email"
why not say "lets convert this binary to bar code and fax it"
SMTP - Small Message Transfer Protocol
FTP - File Transfer Protocol
HTTP - Hyper Text Transfer Protocol
MIME - Multile Incompatible Message Extensions
If you don't respect the conventions, how the hell can you expect the conventions to respect you!
SMTP doesn't and never has guaranteed message delivery and if you have been assuming it does for your business then you are a fool and serve you right.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
E-mail has never pretended to be reliable. Once your mail is sent to an alien mail-server, anything can happen, so you're daft if you're using it for anything mission critical. Of course, you do get what you pay for. I've used free email services that have taken hours, even days to propagate an email.
In extreme cases we have even reverted to using a telephone handset to ensure that clients have received everything that was sent.
Ok, email basics here.
Emails are a queued store-and-forward system. Even with the advent of Pretty-Much-High-Speed-To-Everywhere Internet, it can still sometimes take *days* to get an email to it's recipient and there's still no "problem" as such - it's just overloaded queues, a slow link, or a connectivity issue. Email was designed to try, try, again, so in most cases it will get *enevtually* through. In the cases it cannot, you'll either get a fairly instant reply (eg "no such user") or you'll get "soft" warnings after a few hours and a hard error a few days later.
If your emails are important , or contain stuff that must be acted on in a certain timeframe, do not rely on it magically appearing in their inbox 3 seconds after you send that 2 meg attachment. Always contact them via some other channel and confirm delivery.
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
We find there is zero point in using email if it doesn't arrive. We have to call everyone on the phone instead.
Waste
Kdx
Jabber
* because you're on a DNSBL. your upstream probably is RFC-ignorant
* because of all those frigging trojans that zipped up attachments of infectious exes. also, it stops people mailing things in password-protected zip files.
* because it's not instant messenger. your email systems could probably do with tweaking, as well
* because they're FREE, FFS
* because people are either idiots or want to attempt to get around spam filters.
that wasn't so hard.
Aside from a single day when RR had this issue (even from one RR customer to another) I've not had a single problem getting/sending an email to anyone else in the 6 years I've had it.
Maybe its time you switched ISPs.
Religion is for people afraid of going to hell.
...are too incompetent to get a working mail setup does hardly mean it's the end of the technology itself. /. editors: Could you please do a better filtering of what gets posted? I mean, sure, I know you have a deep-running hate of actually doing your work as editors, but c'mon this kind of crap is really not useful.
...even if google does seem to be the land of chocolate.
This website does a good job summing it up:
gmail creepy.
You could set up an FTP site, or switch ISPs.
I hate sigs.
Who probably offers "advanced anti-spam techniques" for small monthly fee.
I have run my own domain since 1996, and I've never experienced the trouble you describe.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Come on. I've been online since the mid 80s. Every time someone complains about spammers or bad protocols or _______ eating up all the bandwidth they are wrong. Reality is that Spam is not fun - but it is not really costing us the gazillions of dollars people say it is. The worst part is that spam can be managed by very simple tools like server-side filters or the the built in spam filter in my email client. The server kills the V14GrA and f4st C@$H junk and my client keeps the rest of what I don't want to see off my plate. Reality check:
* 50% of the phone calls I get are from sales people.
* 80% of the snail mail I get is marketing junk. The other 20% are bills.
* 25-30% of TV time consists of commercials.
* 10% of the email I see is spam. The other 200 spams go directly to Thunderwhatever's junk folder where I occasionally check them, then purge them.
Brain dead system administrators, stupid users who fill in every form possible online and wanton use of internet explorer are really the cause of the spam problem. Show me someone who gets thousands of spams, and I'll show you somoene who has posted their email address to a public website or usenet or has clicked on install for some popup marketing tool for IE.
-- $G
Let us not forget that email was the original file transfer by P2P back before we all decided to rely on someone else to run our sendmail services.
The thing about things we don't know is we often don't know we don't know them.
It is no different than USENET; nobody reads newsgroups any more. There used to be some content, while people were just discovering it in the 90s, but now there is nothing but idiots and spammers.
Lately, my AM radio statio has been playing self-serving advertisements playing up the fact that, unlike cable TV, movies in theaters, etc, radio is still free.
Free, that is, and they don't mention, if you don't mind wasting your time polluting your unconscious mind with the drivel of commercial culture for close to 50% of the listening experience.
Likewise, if you get your email from a provider that locks the front gates enough with good spam protection, it's acceptable.
But "free" email accounts are typically so spam infested that the true cost becomes apparent.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
... Film at 11.
I suggest you either switch ISP, or host your own mail server with a competent sysadmin.
Personnally, I never used email as much as I do today. The volume of spam suck, and the time wasted pampering SpamAssassin and other spam counter-measure is insane, but so far the gain still outweight the effort for the vast majority of people apparently.
:wq
Unless you want to be broadcasting "very important internal document" to the rest of the P2P network. I would recommend an alternate solution. Make an automatic file uploader that sends the document(s) to a secure web site. Either IM or e-mail the intended recipient, giving them the URL and username/password. Ideally, they would have the username and password previously and you don't have to send it over the Internet at all (give it to them via phone call). Let them know the document will be deleted from the web server in X number of days (15? 30? pick something reasonable).
> In extreme cases we have even reverted to using a telephone handset...
Good God! That must have been an extreme case to warrant actually speaking to another human being!
Let's hope it doesn't happen again.
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
Delivery and routing issues happen occasionally as a result of changes in the fabric in the internet. These can be caused by router failures, line cuts, and any of a number of other causes. Usually these sort themselves out after a brief interval.
If you're having one of the rare problems where the problem isn't going away, contact your ISP. If they can't/won't fix it, then fire them! There are plenty of companies which have no problem delivering email. My best luck has been, believe it or not, with Yahoo.
It's good to use your head, but not as a battering ram.
I work for a major university, and one of the things we do here is make sure everyone has access to email. We're not on any blacklists, and everyone can send and recieve mail quite well. Before you claim "anecdotal evidence", let's look at the sheer sense of scale I'm talking about.
/. again until you've come to your senses.
Let's see where we're at today...
Hmm, 42,600 people on this campus alone (there's 2 others!), and no one's bitching very loudly. We even do pretty decent spam checking.
Don't post to
Newsgroups: alt.current-events.net-abuse
Path:
ucsbuxb.ucsb
charnel.e cst.csuchico.edu!olivea!spool.mu.edu!howland.rest
news.sprintlink. net!news.tyrell.net!ttyt1.tyrell.net!user
From: Inside@tyrell.net (Mark Eberra-Network Adm.)
Subject: An Open Letter To The Internet From Mark Eberra
X-Nntp-Posting-Host: ttyt1.tyrell.net
Message-ID:
Sender: news@tyrell.net (*)
Organization: Inside Connections(tm) Commercial Network
Date: Thu, 9 Mar 1995 00:02:54 GMT
Lines: 50
To All Internet Users:
Netiquette is a decaying concept. This is underscored by the fact that
millions of new users are joining the internet every month and have no
interest in the old ways at all. The new breed of internet users are
entrepreneurs, consumers and innovators. They are joining the internet
to create new ways of living, thinking and conducting business. While
the old timers and those that wish to emulate them are resistant to the
change, they must face the fact that they do not control the internet.
If this new majority wants commercial activity, then commercial
activity will be the order of the day
Most important is the fact that the internet is an open system. It's
very nature makes it a self renewing, self correcting system for
perpetual change.
In less than a month the NSF will pull out of the internet and the
major corporations like Sprint, MCI and AT&T will take over. In a year
or so the usenet system as we know it may not even exist. This change
will take place not because of people such as myself , but mainly
because of new technology like fiber optic cable and the coming
Information Super Highway. In this new world order words like
nettique, spam, and flames will not exist. These are exciting times and
there is room for everyone on this new frontier. Who knows what awaits
us over the next horizon. We all owe it to ourselves to embrace the
challenge and explore a brave new world. To do anything less is to
deny the purpose of our own existence.
Sincerely
Mark Eberra
President
The Superior Edge Corporation
You are a virtual organisation with telecommuters, yet you don't have the infrasctucture in place to support them?
Why are you relying on an ISP for mail services? Why are you using existing IM networks? You should be running these yourself. Get a domain. Run a DNS server. Run an SMTP/IMAP server. Manage it all in-house. Install a messaging server and keep your business IM off the public networks.
E-mail isn't broken. Your e-mail configuration/setup/infrastructure is.
Don't blame the tools when the house collapses. Blame the carpenters who put up the framing.
Check this out: http://www.qnext.com/
Might do all you want...
It seems to me just recently certain cable providers have finally begun blocking port 25 to prevent all the spam/zombies/etc. bullshit.
Is your amazing telecommuting company of ~20 people or so a spam circle? Or are you just using crap residential cable to handle your 'business' email?
Email is fine, your setup/admin is hosed.
cyn, free software and *nix operating systems enthusiast.
As a mail admin I assure you that this isn't the case. More likely is that whoever administers your mail at your ISP is in over his/her head and doesn't know what to do about it. Could be messed up virus software, could be messed up spam software, or worse, it could be WORKING spam software that was set to silently delete messages it thought were spammy. In any case, the E-Mail Apocolypse is a long way off. I'd suggest taking this up with your ISP and see what results you get. It's at least worth a shot.
Whoa. FPS flashback there. Sorry.
I've never had a signifigant or regular disapearing email problem.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
By simply not signing up for every random site you see and possibly using sites like DodgeIt to prevent your normal email from being spammed, you have a high chance of staying clean. Besides, many spam filters are getting good at keeping your inbox clean; I particularly like the one on Thunderbird.
'Yes, firefox is indeed greater than women. Can women block pops up for you? No. Can Firefox show you naked women? Yes.'
Has the inevitable finally happened?
...clients have been unable to get email to one another reliably. Attachments disappear or become garbled...
Ain't nuttin happened just yet.
After years of dismissing as alarmist all the commentary about how spam and security concerns will eventually render email useless I think it will take a lot more to kill e-mail. E-mail is one of the grass-roots parts of the internet. It's the basic method of communication. Everyone connected to the net is assumed to have an e-mail address, and e-mail service is provided with every ISP.
Is it only a matter of time before we all resort to file transfer by P2P?
I don't think P2P in it's current state will ever replace HTTP and the like, I think perhaps it might be integrated more with current protocols to maximize bandwidth efficiency. I'm not sure how P2P relates to e-mail.
I'm not entirely sure what this has to do with spam. Presumably you're all using the ISP (mail provider), which indicates to me that you might have a problem with them. In which case, you should consider switching mail providers. If you haven't got a reliable service, that doesn't mean e-mail as a whole is breaking down. My mail works just fine, and is pretty reliable in fact. But, I accept that sometimes losses can and will occur. E-mail is fundamentally not 100% reliable.
And if so, what are we going to do with these firewall boxes?
?
So far I've had very little IM spam, thankfully! Mostly spammers seem to use Yahoo to harvest email addresses at the moment.
If you've an always-on connection and you leave the client running, any IM network can get messages while you're away. Otherwise offline messaging would have to be supported in the infrastructure (and not just the by the client). So that means on a central server, or using some cunning distributed point-to-point method.
As for IM killing email, I don't think so. Some things are just too complex to say in an instant message. I suppose we could get the central points from most slashdot posts in quite a short IM though :)
Paul "Say no to feeping creaturism"