Slashdot Mirror
Is Email 'Bankrupt'?
Gary W. Longsine writes "The Washington Post writes about a Venture Capitalist and blogger, Fred Wilson, who recently declared 'e-mail bankruptcy', wiping out his inbox and starting over because he couldn't keep up. Spam is cited as one reason. There have been several public incidents, some cited in the article, where the flow of email is just too much to keep up. 'If there is a downside to completely turning a back on e-mail, it's not one many former users notice. Stanford computer science professor Donald E. Knuth started using e-mail in 1975 and stopped using it 15 years later. Knuth said he prefers to concentrate on writing books rather than be distracted by the steady stream of communication.' Is email just too hectic a communication form for some people? Is email dead?"
Apparently, Fred doesn't know that this has been an issue for years. It's only now that he's gotten tired of it and decided to vent his frustrations this way. This is a typical overreaction from someone who does not understand the nature of the problem.
No doubt he's one of those people who feels that he can't afford to filter his mail properly. God forbid that an important message from his mother may one day end up among the false positives! On the other hand, he's just as likely to be among the legions who daily send email messages from badly configured mail clients and servers -- the very thing that makes it possible for spam to look like ham.
The truth is that it doesn't matter what kind of messaging system we use: as long as it's decentralized, we will all have to configure our servers properly, or else we'll all end up with exactly the same problems again. The alternative would be to use a centralized authentication mechanism instead, but then the question would be: who would we trust with that? Microsoft? VeriSign? Yuk! I think everyone will agree (even Fred) that it's always better to have a decentralized system. In which case email (SMTP) is fine, but just needs to be configured properly.
Actually, even if Fred's mail server is properly configured (for sending mail), it's people like him who are actually to blame for keeping things such as mess. Yes, Fred is his own worst enemy. How so? Because his system keeps accepting all the crap along with the good stuff. Look at it this way: if everybody decided today to configure their mail servers properly, always filtering out and rejecting anything that looks fishy, that would force everybody else to configure their mail servers properly as well. In that case, the spammers would no longer have any place to hide, in which case we'd all be able to choose whether we accept their mail or not. End of problem.