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?)"

Comments

Is it really so bad already?

[pediddle]

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.

How does this get posted?

[np_bernstein]

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.