The Time Has Come to Ditch Email?

Krishna Dagli writes to mention an article at The Register claiming that it's time we stop using email to communicate. From the article: "The problem is, email is now integral to the lives of perhaps a billion people, businesses, and critical applications around the world. It's a victim of its own success. It's a giant ship on a dangerous collision course. All sorts of brilliant, talented people today put far more work into fixing SMTP in various ways (with anti-virus, anti-phishing technologies, anti-spam, anti-spoofing cumbersome encryption technologies, and much more) than could have ever been foreseen in 1981. But it's all for naught."

Comments

e-mail needs to get better

[yagu]

Short version of story:

E-mail shouldn't really go away, we need to recreate it from scratch with builtin security, authentication, encryption, etc, and those mechanisms need to be as transparent as today's e-mail.

EOF

E-mail will probably go that way, but I don't see it being recreated from scratch. Postfix evolved out of perceived difficulties with sendmail (still one of my favorite packages... obtuse, obtuse, obtuse, but lots of fun.) while in-flight.

The fixes for e-mail likely will also occur in-flight... there's too much momentum, and too many transactions dependent on e-mail for it to stop, then go.

The single most important step for me would be transparent authentication, via certs, whatever. As phishing becomes more insidious and the stakes go up, someday someone (or a bunch of someones) will be phished severely, escalating the urgency of authentication. It may start out clunky (ever tried to get friends and family to do PGP handshakes?), but as with other technology I think it can be done with transparency.

E-mail stays... (btw, if you want to send e-mail feedback to the author, this is the link.

Re:e-mail needs to get better

[onion2k]

someday someone (or a bunch of someones) will be phished severely, escalating the urgency of authentication

This is the key issue .. the victims. These are the people who need to be targeted if we're ever going to stop spam. No technological solution will ever fix the problem so long as it remains profitable .. people will go to extraordinary lengths to make a fast buck .. The debacle with Blue Frog demonstrated just how much power spammers wield over the internet. I really doubt that even a fundamental change to the underlying protocols of email would stop them.

Instead we need to educate the victims. Stop people clicking on links in emails *ever*, stop people buying "cheap prescription meds online", stop people sending thousands of dollars to the Nigerian interior minister.

Only when spam stops working will spammers stop working.

Re:e-mail needs to get better

[B'Trey]

Bad analogies. Email will get replaced. I certainly can't tell you with what, but it will get replaced. And the reason it can be replaced and the others can't is because it doesn't need to be an instant and complete replacement. Email will get replaced the same way that land lines are being replaced by cell phones.

If you'd tried to instantly replace the phone system with a different, portable system, you'd have been doomed to failure. There's no way you would have ever gotten everyone to just give up their telephone and buy a new, different device for voice communications. But cell phones are replacing land lines because they're compatible. Even though a cell phone and a land line phone work very differently at the hand set level, they both go back to the same place and you can call one from the other. All of the differences are handled transparently to the user. He doesn't care if his voice is going out over copper pairs or over RF to a cell tower. He doesn't care if it's switched through mechanical switches or digitized and sent through a IP network. He dials and a number and he talks.

To replace email, we need to come up with a new system which provides security and authentication when communicating with other addresses on the new system but degrades gracefully when sending to a legacy email address. As more and more people switch to the new system, the old system can be abandoned. It's a piecemeal replacement, not a wholesale changeout.

The article talks about all of this, all though I've tried to clarify a few things. It even gives a possible mechanism for graceful degradation.

Re:e-mail needs to get better

[Ulven]

In some parts of the world, landlines aren't only being replaced, they are being totally bypassed. I was in Tanzania a few years ago, and far far more people had mobiles than a landline. Running wires everywhere is an expensive operation.

Acronym soup.

[khasim]

From TFA:

Build an electronic identity. Encode, hash, encrypt, compress, sign, and provide a novel way to share keys when needed, for example. I don't know how this will all turn out, but perhaps yEnc, MD5, AES, H.264, and GPG are some potential technologies that could be used together.

So, he doesn't know how to fix email, but here is a list of acronyms to get you excited about it.

Sorry, but to be taken seriously, you'd at least have to have a basic framework already thought out. Just claiming that it's broken and maybe one of these TLA's that you've heard of might be used to fix it ... that's just junk.

Go back, think about it and then write a real article.

headline

[gEvil (beta)]

I realize basic language skills are a difficult thing for a slashdot editor to grasp, but come on! Rather than taking the title of the Register article and slapping a question mark on it, it makes a whole lot more sense to actually rearrange the words into the form of a question: "Has the Time Come to Ditch Email?" or even "Is it Time to Ditch Email?"

Use new technology?

[dissolved]

From TFA: "Use existing, proven technologies and a few new and novel ideas - starting with the latest encoding mechanisms, a reliable hashing algorithm, fast compression, strong encryption and signatures. "

So in 25 years time today's technology will stop 90% of communication being spam? Spam exists in the spite of the best efforts to stamp it out. Whatever we do it'll be the same. Writing an article full of buzzwords and hypothesis doesn't really help a lot.

If it ain't broke...

[Just Some Guy]

SMTP still works exceedingly well for its purpose. Understand this: spam and viruses will propigate through any message transfer protocol that will ever be invented. We already have effective technologies for filtering that stuff out of SMTP traffic, but if admins can't be bothered to implement them for their customers, I don't know why they'd implement similar measures on other protocols.

Put another way, if you run your own mailserver and still get spam and viruses, it's because you haven't chosen to address the problem. If you use someone else's mailserver and still get spam and viruses, it's because they haven't chosen to address the problem. Nothing stands between you and a clean inbox but motivation, whether your own or your ISP's.

And no, broken hacks like DJB's "Internet Mail 2000" will never get real-world acceptance as they make it as difficult for legitimate bulk senders to broadcast as for spammers. SMTP is here to stay as the standard method for (somewhat) reliably routing messages between people on unaffiliated networks. Replacing it with a similar system with new pitfalls isn't the answer we're looking for.

no, the time has come for anti-spam treaties.

[plasmacutter]

As much as I hate to admit it, copyright treaties have been extremely successful in perpetuating the DMCA.

why not use it for something beneficial for a change, and introduce treaties to the UN for the harsh enforcement of anti-spam measures.

Once the international safe havens are removed or severely curtailed, there will be less of it, and everyone but the ad nazis and the "big data" industry which has arisen to serve them will be better off.

Right......

[Puls4r]

And of course, the NEW system won't be vulnerable to ANYTHING - right?

No, wait, let's think that through. Let's take video games as the paradigm. Every year companies spend upwards of 20 million per video game. Every year, they come out with the newest, latest, greatest in copy protection. This copy protection is only limited by their imaginations (and the hardware). And yet days after release, and sometimes prior to release, their code is hacked, cracked, and distributed.

This author somehow thinks that going back and redoing everything will fix it. The author is naive.

Call my analogy a bad one if you will, but the SECOND you put ANY type of system into the hands of the criminals / spammers, they will find ways to exploit it. This is proven time and again.

How exactly does this new email system stop phishing? Oh, right, it can't. Have a link, go to a malicious website, etc. How exactly does this new email system stop users from clicking executables thinking that they are going to see nudie pictures of Katie Holmes? They don't. How does this new email stop virii? It won't.

Encrypt your email if you want security. Password protect your account. Use filtering to dump spam before you read it.

OH, and I forgot to mention - I'll be sending you a snail mail letter that looks completely official. It's about a man I met in Nigeria, who has some money he'd like to give you.

The problem is spam, not e-mail

[rueger]

I find that the people who gripe loudest about the problems with e-mail are the ones who have poor or no spam filtering.

I guess I'm lucky that I have an ISP who takes spam blocking seriously, using a combination of Brightmail and a user configuarable Spam-Assassin install that seems to block 98% of spam and which has virtually no false positives. On the weeks when I monitor it, they may mis-label one in several tens of thousands of messages, usually from mailing list or other source that just barely triggers the filter.

Most people assume that the lousy, error prone spam blocking offered by many ISPs is the best than can be acomplished. That's simply not true.

Unlike the article author, I still find e-mail a reliable and essential tool, and can't see a need to make significant changes at this time.

Good sized system?

[fm2503]

A peak of ~75 messages a minute?

Me thinks you need several zeros on the end of that to get to a medium to large installation....

Curb Spammers

[Robber Baron]

What somebody needs to do is curb the fucking spammers!

And I don't mean "curb" as in curtail their activity, I mean "curb" as in stick their fucking heads on a curb and stomp on them!

There are some interesting email alternatives

[WebCowboy]

Each of the items I listed are too large and complex, and are beyond repair, but in the same respect could NEVER be recreated in a reasonable time frame.

Two questions:

1) By suggesting email "could NEVER be recreated in a reasonable timeframe" you are inferring that a reinvented email system must be complex. Why would that be? We don't have to re-invent security, authentication, encryption from scratch for use especially for email--we already have the technology and use it extensively (HTTP(S), LDAP, Kerberos, SSH, etc). What is missing in email is an elegant integration of these technologies.

2) Even if architecting a next-generation email system would take a long time, why would that be a problem? What would be a "reasonable" timeframe? Personally I don't think that a W3C-like standards body would take more than 5 years to craft a usable standard, and by the time it hit 1.0 there would already be a lot of early implementations. Sure it would take a long time to adopt, but there could be email gateways like there was between the internet and old-school nets like Fidonet, and those gateways can handle the spam and other crap before they hit any "new and improved" email servers.

When something gets as broken as email people are more motivated to fix it. There are already some interesting ideas out there that could catch on...

The Problem is Vulnerable PCs

[jrifkin]

What makes Spam and Malware unmanagable is the sheer number of vulnerable and hacked systems.

When vulnerable boxes disappear, the bad guys would have little ammunition. My guess is that over
time, as computing matures and our OSes stabilize, security holes will be plugged faster than they
are created. When that happens, vulnerable boxen will become rare, and the bad guys will find it
harder and harder to send Spam and Malware with impunity.

And then the rainbows will soar and unicorns will return.