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..
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 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. :-(
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.
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
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.
* 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.
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."