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

It's getting there.

[antizeus]

Just before the release of Slackware 10, I installed Slackware 9.1 on a new hard drive (heh) and didn't bother installing any email-related software. My friends are mostly using IM, and my family seems to have stopped using email altogether except for that one relative everyone seems to have that insists on forwarding every piece of crap that he comes across (e.g. let's protest the price of gas by boycotting one particular company, and always seems to be the same one every time). My Yahoo account mostly gets used for web site registration (and as a target for spam and scams).

I have one email account that gets a significant amount of use, and that's at work, for communications within the company.

Re:Gave up a long time ago

[bcrowell]

Like you, I need to e-mail with clients, which means a lot of the solutions that would work for a purely personal e-mail address don't work. I think a lot of the people who say there's no big problem also have the luxury of never needing to receive an e-mail from someone they don't already know. I also agree with you that it's a lot of work to check that what's in the spam box really is spam, at least cursorily. I get about 300 spams a day, and what happens when it becomes 3000, or 30000? -- it'll be an impossible task.

But I don't agree that there's no hope. SPF/Sender ID is rapidly being adopted by ISPs; once it becomes universal, spammers won't be able to forge headers, and blacklisting will really start to work. Hashcash postage may also help. It would also be cool if we could finally get a worldwide public-key infrastructure going that would be used by enough individuals to make it worthwhile.

Yeah, I agree.

[torpor]

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 ...

Re:Yeah, I agree.

[Anonymous Coward]

Um, who are you that's been using it for 20 yrs? Your average person certainly won't have. I would say the majority on slashdot hasn't used it for more than around 11 yrs.

Someone exaggerating things. SMTP (RFC 821) was described in 1982 -- 22 years ago. And probably a couple years went by before it got into widespread use (meaning: Berkeley and MIT). Hell, check the whois database while you're at it. Berkeley and MIT weren't registered domains until 1985. For comparison, IBM, Sun, Intel, AT&T and several other big corporations registered in 1986.

There were probably a few .mil domains prior to 1985, but .mil servers no longer respond to whois, so it'll take some research to find out their history.

So I'll give the guy 18-19 years, tops. :)

Re:Overhyped?

[orangesquid]

I want to know:

• why mail from my uni account is marked as spam by several free providers
  
• why lots of providers block ZIP attachments, including AOL, the "#1 national ISP"
  
• why messages, even entirely within the uni's email system, sometimes have bizarre delays of several hours
  
• why some free providers take _forever_ to get some messages through
  
• why it's so damn popular to send messages *only* as html-formatted mime attachments, leaving the actual body of the message completely blank
  

ugh!!!

Re:Is it really so bad already?

[Zardoz44]

My company blocks spam at the firewall level, which becomes tedious when emails sent to me mysteriously disappear. Sometimes they're personal emails with "Free Beer!" in the subject, but other times there's no obvious reason why a message might be eaten.

The biggest problem with all this is that we get no notification that something was blocked. I find out later when someone asks why I havent responded. That, and my never having received a single spam at this address, even in the years before the front-end filter. Others complained, but I never posted my work email to public newsgroups either.

That's what hotmail is for.

here you go:

[RMH101]

* 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.

Re:Always call if emails are important

[scrytch]

> it can still sometimes take *days* to get an email to it's recipient and there's still no "problem" as such

If it takes "days" without any notification, then something most certainly is wrong -- if not broken, at least overloaded, and will be broken soon. If you know neither side is supposed to be queueing mail out or in, then mail should arrive immediately (modulo some sort of minutes-long polling/refresh interval in the delivery agent). Email does not typically travel through a dozen hops any more than you would expect your flights to have a dozen layovers. This is not 1988 anymore.

But it sure isn't spam that's the problem here, and even if it is, it's no excuse for email to be silently lost. The article simply demonstrates incompetence in action. But hey, it's also evolution in action: the company that can manage to keep email running will be more likely to keep their clients. The circle of life continues .. or something.

Re:Leaving messages

[deque_alpha]

ICQ was able to do this in ohhh..... I dunno, sometime about the time it was released in '97 or '98. Why current IM services that require contacting a central server _anywaY_ don't do this is beyond me...