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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."
"ever tried to get friends and family to do PGP handshakes?"
Yes, I've tried... and I've been and am quite successfull with it. Using GPG to send/receive encrypted mail and check signatures with a good plugin isn't rocket science.
Agreed, setting up keys and such is hard, but with friends and familiy we geeks can help. We do that with E-Mail, Games, Wordprocessors, why not with PGP?
My experiences with PGP with friends and family: Do You Use PGP? - Encryption is not just for techies any more.
Agreed, setting up keys and such is hard, but with friends and familiy we geeks can help. We do that with E-Mail, Games, Wordprocessors, why not with PGP?
Because we're looking for a long term, widespread, permanent solution. There aren't enough of us geeks to hold the hand of every user in the world.
"The legitimate powers of government extend only to such acts as are injurious to others." Thomas Jefferson.
If I'm to apply the same logic to regular mail, well, regular mail is doomed too; it's full of phishing, spam, and spoofing. I guess I'm not sending anything by mail from now on!! Duh!
If you get a letter from a car dealer stating that you won $3000 in credit if you buy one of his cars, do you automatically go and buy one? NO. Same thing goes for email, you don't open all emails and follow all links blindly.
The problem is with educating people how to use email and the Internet as a whole. When enough people stop being click-happy... spamers will lose interest as no one will be paying for such a service, and phishers/spoofers won't find enough people to fall for their tricks.
Simply, educate people about this powerful tool before you through them in! this is not only for email, it goes for anything to do with the internet and any form of communication as a whole.
Just my $0.02.
As a systems administrator working on a few large scale mail servers the 'investment' required to cut spam and virus emails is very low if the system has been designed properly. I use open source tools on a system with in excess of 150,000 active users and it costs nothing in licenses and its on four servers and a central NetAPP filer for the mailstore. Realistically if we distribute the total cost over the user count and support issues are very low. its simple design the system. Our email service uses the following
-Qmail, vpopmail, simscan, spamassassin and clamav. On a userbase with the amount of users we have its very easy to distribute, its easy to scale and the performance is great.
I did and it doesn't. I routinely need to send out 50,000 copies of a customer newsletter. Right now, SMTP allows me to start the process now and gradually spool out the copies at my network's own convenience until I'm finished. Under Dan's crackpot idea, I send a broadcast to 50,000 customers letting them know that there's a newsletter waiting for them. When they all come to work at 9AM and simultaneously attempt to download a 1MB PDF, my router cries tears of pain and my customers hate my slow-loading message.
Dan's idea sounds fine under certain very limited circumstances, but can't possibly work in the real world.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?