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 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.
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
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. :-(
I'm sorry to say, that it seems like something is wrong with your email infrastructure. We have a large number of desktop users (400+), and we even have a shockingly horrid internal exchange setup, yet I'm yet to have any issues with "lost" emails in the 1.5 years I've been working here.
I would suspect that the problems your experiencing may be due to various poor implementations of mail servers at your customer's end. Many corporations today that have recently jumped onto the internet have minimal IT support staff, and implement something that "just works". There are usually few considerations for anti-spam controls, content security (viruses, porn), and effective backup procedures.
Man watching 6 MSCE's around a sun box, looks alot like the opening scene's of 2001:space odyssey...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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."
That's why blackholing spam is a terrible idea. Whether you use Outlook, Apple Mail, Thunderbird, or whatever other client-side client, it's always better to use the built-in filters. That way you have a junk-mail folder that you can scan periodically, not to mention that the filter can learn what you think is spam, instead of blackholing things based on poor, inflexible rulesets.