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
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.
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...
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.
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.