Slashdot Mirror
Email Is Not Going Anywhere
An anonymous reader writes: It seems the latest trend sweeping the online world is the idea that email is on its way out. Kids are eschewing email for any of the hundreds of different instant messaging services, and startups are targeting email as a system they can "disrupt." Alexis C. Madrigal argues that attempts to move past email are shortsighted and faddish, as none of the alternatives give as much power to the user. "Email is actually a tremendous, decentralized, open platform on which new, innovative things can and have been built. In that way, email represents a different model from the closed ecosystems we see proliferating across our computers and devices. Email is a refugee from the open, interoperable, less-controlled 'web we lost.' It's an exciting landscape of freedom amidst the walled gardens of social networking and messaging services." Madrigal does believe that email will gradually lose some of its current uses as new technologies spring up and mature, but the core functionality is here to stay.
Email is actually a tremendous, decentralized, open platform
Right, because people understand and care about that.
So much that they've flocked by the billions to closed, centralized platforms.
Here's the thought process of most internet users: "Are all my friends doing it?" "Does it have cute pictures of kittens?" YES -> Click on it.
"Open", "decentralized", or "user controlled" don't enter into it at all.
Why not just switch to Gamemaker?
Only because "they" are idiots (both students and faculty apperently). An autoresponder that tweets back "Dear idiot student. It's called email. We use it for a reason. Use it or don't expect help." is all that they needed to "employ". Allowing students to dictate the use of inefficient mechanisms rather than teaching them the right way is pretty ironic for a school system that purports to be a University.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Email Is Not Going Anywhere
Duh. Instant messaging and email often serve different purposes and priorities. For example, at work, I don't use IM because *my* time is more important than your time. Email allows me to respond according to my schedule. Call me if something's really important.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
This is not some latest trend. People (mostly clueless tech journalists) have been saying e-mail is going away since ICQ first appeared on the scene. Heck, they may have said it before that, but I first remember the cry of "e-mail is dead" when some tech writer first stumbled upon ICQ. The idea that e-mail is dying is just as stupid now as it was then. E-mail is a standard, e-mail is universally used. How else are you going to activate your IM account or contact a business or notify a wide range of customers about your product updates? E-mail is not going anywhere.
Email is the common denominator in electronic communication. Period. Nothing else can match it when it comes to being well known, compatible with everything, and even its flexibility. Spam sucks, and there are still some issues with the way people USE Email (or incorrectly use it), but it is *the* way business communicates now. I would be crippled at work without Email.
If you want to talk about a dying communications technology, that would be facsimile. Our fax volume is a small fraction of what it once was. Still important to have around, but people go out of their way to avoid it now. We have large scan-to-PDF-EMail copiers all over, making it so much more convenient, too.
Email is only losing the people we want to lose. You know, the ones who broadcast that joke of the day email every day CCed to everybody they know, or have ever heard of. Now, please just be good and take all that to facebook. Thxbai.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
They want shiny, and no spam (a few ads are OK).
The actual divide is between public and private messaging: "They get in touch with us by social media" because you can't ignore them there, like you would do if they emailed you.
FFS, is this going to be another breathless article about how corporate email is going out to be replaced by Yammer or some other platform de jour? Because that shit is just a waste of time. When my corporation jumped on the Yammer train (no doubt after a fiery sales pitch by some consultant), I started to see - in my email inbox, ironically - the hourly Yammer feed. It was 95% comprised of threads started by upper management which had zero to do with my day's work and which accreted into long long long posts as middle and junior managers jumped in with witless 'great idea!!!!' comments. You could smell the fecal matter on their noses. The other 5% was actual information passing between business units I had no contact with or interest in. But I am sure that in the next year or so some bright MBA will be sold on the idea of abandoning email and transitioning over to whatever the kids are using that week so that instead of getting actual targeted communications in my inbox I will be deluged with useless bullshit.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
... the students are moving to Twitter. The article says that at Birmingham University it took a week or two before the administration responded to emails. That problem is not with email, it is with the University's administration.
Email is indeed based on a decentralized protocol (SMTP), similar to Network News (NNTP) in its decentralization (not strongly decentralized or secure). But how many peoples email addresses still are? The only thing that is actually free is your rights becoming privileges and your eventual worth.
With email, you can connect with anyone in the world for free. Get a gmail account, find a wifi hotspot somewhere (restaurant/cafe), connect, send mail. Everything else is proprietary, more expensive, and limited to its select user base. Email isn't as 'fast' as twitter or any of the other instant messaging services, but that is the one and only drawback (and some would put that in the plus column).
I'm in e-mail marketing.
Wait; not the spam kind, but the kind you have to double opt-in to before recieving only those mails you explicitely want.
The e-mail marketing market has been watching social media (mostly facebook and twitter) with interrest, as it was promissed to be the next big thing for marketeers. As it turns out, social media has already had it's popularity peak and it wasn't very high. People still use e-mail far (talking magnitude-level "far") more than social media.
Not talking about the individuals on twitter tweeting to the whole world whenever they take a shit or eat a meal (preferably not in that order), but about the hundreds of people who don't do that but still communicate with their friends, family, collegues, etcetera. Those are the silent majority.
From a marketing point of view, if you could either spend 1,000$ on e-mail or 100,000$ on twitter, you'd have more success with e-mail.
In hindsight, social media has never even remotely been a thread to e-mail dominance.
Nobody thinks email is going away.
The only "disruption" is to /. readers looking to gain a keen glimpse into the future, not some luddite fantasy.
Students are the customer. The customer is always right.
Of course those are both marketing doublespeak bullshit, but there we are.
Welcome to the destruction of education, courtesy of naked capitalism.
Ironic captcha: advising
Everything requires an E-mail account. You need an E-mail account to make a Facebook, Google, Apple, etc. account. It's the "out of band" communications method with which someone can be reached that is universal and not tied to any specific company or provider.
If E-mail has to go away, something else needs to replace it in this manner. Phone numbers could be one way; there's already services that exclusively use phone numbers to authenticate (Telegram messenger for instance). The problem is most people, including myself, don't want to give their phone number out to everyone. E-mail, I could care less, or create a throwaway account.
E-mail is too useful. It needs to stick around.
The author is quite confused: email predates the web by decades. It predates the internet.
Originally email was decentralized in a practical way. Now, unless you arrange for your outbound email to arrive from a server operated by a large email provider, your deliverability is probably low. All of the email reputation systems, blocklists, DKIM, SPF, etc. are advertised as anti-spam measures. The reality is that they force email centralization in a way that helps the monitoring of email by the major SIGINT players.
One of my back-burner ideas is speeding up email forwarding. Most email forwarders (sendmail, etc.) accept emails, put them in a queue, and then later spool them out to the destination. This adds a minute or so of latency. It's done this way for historical reasons. In the early days, the destination mail agent might be down, or the mail transfer might be over some polled protocol like UUCP.
That's dead. Today, if the destination mail agent exists, it's probably up and immediately reachable via a fast connection. So a modern mail fowarder should accept the incoming email via SMTP, and then, while holding the incoming connection open, send the email on to the destination mail agent. Any problems are immediately reported to the sender via SMTP status code.
This not only speeds things up a bit, it eliminates "bounce messages" generated between mail agents. Problem reports come back immediately, as SMTP errors. There's a series of open TCP connections from sender to the receiver's IMAP server. From the IMAP server to the final destination, today you usually have some kind of push notification. So you get the effect of instant messaging, using existing email protocols.
This also eliminates "joe jobs", where impersonation generates vast numbers of bounce messages. The spammer just gets lots of SMTP errors, which never bother anybody else.
They jump when someone posts on Twitter or Facebook because it is visible to the public. It sits in a queue forever when it's emailed because the world is not aware of it. If the people manning the social media channels were answering the emails this wouldn't be an issue.
The lady from Birmingham Uni proves her ignorance of technology when she says, "Email is slower". Oh yeah. Those email electrons go a lot slower than the Twitter ones. Idiot!
It will happen around the time that we stop using paper...
sorry for my comments, I'm drunk
Maybe for a diploma mill.
... when email arrived on the scene.
sigo ergo sum
NSA should benefit the public by releasing the perfectly trained (not over or under) spam filter to enhance and embiggen of economy by helping the public to be more productive and safe.
Yeah, I pretty thought the same, who needs email if there's gadu-gadu. I'm not sure GG exist anymore but I have few email addresses in the daily usage
You darn kids, get off my email! Don't step there! I'll call the e-police on ya, if you don't leave that email alone!
... email is only for old people. Has been for many years now.
The main difference is that email is a (suite of) protocol(s), while all those other things are essentially web sites (with a mobile app, and a REST API if you're lucky). Which means that with email, you can deploy a complete implementation yourself, in your own organization or wherever you want, without having to rely on specific 3rd party services or software. This may ultimately make email last longer, because it is truly decentralized. It also means that email can scale up and down effortlessly. You won't send your cron job errors to Facebook or Twitter (or Asana).
That's why email has to be stopped. Corporate interests (Facebook, Twitter et al) can't have you relying on a commodity service. You've got to buy their brand and lock your identity to their product.
Back in the beginning of email, it was sort of this way as well. You were known by your Compuserve or AOL address. Or by the domain name of your ISP. Changing was a PITA if you had a lot of contacts. And then some people got smart, buying their own domain name and setting up redirection to which ever underlying physical address offered the best deal.
But the service providers didn't like this, as it made their branding invisible*. And gave customers an easy way to switch. Lately, a few ISPs have atempted to categorize such redirection services as security/spam risks and block email sent through them. A few people I know have caved in and reverted to the ISP's domain. Others have gotten the ISPs to remove the block after some strongly worded correspondence.
*A decade or so ago, the game was for big ISPs to buy domain names from services that registered but did not turn over ownership/administration to the user. A friend of mine lost her business domain when MSN did this and switched everyone from an XYZ.com name to XYZ.MSN.com.
Have gnu, will travel.
It's the people who ought to know better that have been declaring email dead for years. But then these same people demonstrate their leetness by outsourcing everything to Google. Truth is there aren't more people in tech than ever, we've just watered down what it means to be "tech" to the point of being meaningless.
Where exactly is this a trend sweeping the online world? Or did you just need a FUD sentence to start off your bullshit submission?
Why would emails go away?
What would replace it? SMS/Texting? Facebook?
No... an email is still required to access/register for 99% of the web content and until EVERY. SINGLE. PERSON. on earth has a smarthphone with their own unique number, including young kids and older people, it will not go away. Not to mention, emails are free, smartphones are not. And not everybody wants a social account just to send messages to people, so that rules out facebook.
Exactly. While "kids" may "flock" to whatever is "cool" today, eventually you do have to deal with other adults in structured environments.
With email, usernames can be assigned in a structured fashion. And potentially offensive combinations can be weeded out.
With closed systems, it is usually first-come-first-served from around the world (and that's not counting multiple accounts per person). So you might not be able to get johnsmith. And "sukmahp3n1s" does not work so well when dealing with other companies.
How else are you going to activate your IM account or contact a business or notify a wide range of customers about your product updates?
So we're stuck with email because people refuse to move on? Yeah, I'll agree with that.
Email will eventually die though. The young ones have already quit using it to communicate with friends. Newer businesses use newer protocols like RSS to distribute their news feeds. I'd have already ditched email entirely, except that too many people assume that an email address is something everyone has, and so without one you're a second-class citizen on the internet, barred from participating in online forums and from making online purchases.
Email is almost dead. I know too many people who, while they have an email account, it really isn't something they check every day. They just check it when they sign up for a web site account, or when they order something online, but otherwise ignore it as if it doesn't exist because it just isn't the best solution for anything it does, making it worthless for anything besides communicating with people who haven't yet figured that out.
Reports I've read say it may be correlated with where you connect from. Some IP addresses are more likely to make the Gmail sign-up form treat "mobile number" as required, especially for someone who doesn't already have a secondary email address. Conjecture, but public places that send a whole bunch of account registrations from one IP, such as a restaurant or a public library, may be more likely to make mobile number required. Or it might be based on spam reports from an ISP. I'm only guessing, but here's an anecdote. I know Yahoo is strict about requiring a mobile number, and people report having to "pay their dues" to a cellular carrier to create an account.
Email is like a turned based strategy game. Messaging is like a real time strategy game. Video chat is like a first person shooter.
None is better than another, they are different genres of communication for different situations.
(Which incidentally explains the dearth of turned based strategy games in recent years)
If you think parents still control where kids go to college (or that faculty control university policies) you are so out of touch with the overall higher education situation as to make your comments uninformed and pointless.
No, students will not switch based on ONE thing they don't like. But they do make noise about everything they don't like (grades - heard of grade inflation?, plagiarism charges, required homework, required writing, high standards, required courses, required software, required tools and websites etc. etc. etc. And yes, they complain about having to use email. Loudly. Repeatedly. Effectively.
Because the administrations listen, and bit-by-bit the students' pressure is in fact damaging and devaluing higher education. This email thing is just one small, but telling, example.
One post dismiss these points as "maybe for a diploma mill." Newsflash: diploma mills are by far the fastest growing sector in higher education (University name rhymes with Kleenex. Coincidence?).
Welcome to the race to the bottom.
ironic captcha: transfer
My cellular carrier charges 20 cents per sent SMS and 20 cents per received SMS. It gets even more expensive when a message longer than 160 characters has to be broken into multiple SMS messages in order to be delivered. I don't know of any ISPs that charge that much per byte of email.
How many people actually check the Received headers on every message in their inbox from a new domain?
No. You're right. These days the kids are all independently wealthy, and I stated or implied that the faculty controlled University policies. Oh wait. No I didn't.
You're right. That would be an ironic CAPTCHA, which shows that you agree with me; nobody's transfering over this.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
What an odd corner of the internet you must live in that you think email is almost dead.
If a student is already "always right" there is no need for them to go to school now is there.
As an avid user of IRC, I have to agree that email is on its way out.
Now, unless you arrange for your outbound email to arrive from a server operated by a large email provider, your deliverability is probably low.
You have to make sure your mail is delivered from something that looks like a server (e.g. not on lists of known dynamic IP blocks, has proper reverse dns) but you don't have to use a "large email provider".
Been running my own email for years with few problems.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Considering DKIM and SPF are controlled by the domain admin, how do they force centralization?
Theres always S/MIME for actual authentication of a user.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Tell me again how I sign up for Facebook?
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
I know of at least one other company (Echoworx EMG) that released encrypted mail (Server and Client) that is not Lotus Notes. I don't get paid to advertise for them but do have some experience with the product and it works very well.
I'd guess there are more such companies, but you can search them out on your own if you are interested.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
I agree it would be that easy, but look how much money gets dumped into lobbying and pushing these services to keep the masses using them. When it comes down from the top that these things need to be pushed by all spheres of influence, that means everyone. Schools and Universities are extremely influential, and people know this. Until there is another social control mechanism handy, these will continue to be pushed.
Being pushed does not imply that everyone will use it,
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
The store and forward nature of e-mail means I can talk to you when I'm available, regardless of when you are available.
IM is OK and I use it at times. However it is susceptible to the old "telephone tag" problem of years ago. Remember telephone tag? I hated that. And we fixed that, mostly, by voice messaging. Which is a store and forward system.
E-mail allows me as much time and space as I need to collect my thoughts and get them down on "paper".
The one thing, which is an unspoken but universally recognized constraint of e-mail. No one ever e-mails you to tell you your house is burning down. Not unless there is absolutely, definitively, literally no other way to reach you!
Someone else here said they would be crippled at work without e-mail, and I agree 100% with that. E-mail is my most important communications tool. I'd rather give up my phone first, if it came to that.
"Only because "they" are idiots (both students and faculty apperently)."
Then it gets saved on only a single hard drive the crashes and is recycled right before that email is needed...
Nah, Many sites have Facebook / Google / etc. log-ins. E-mail is required for those services I just mentioned, but it's only kept around because it's currently the most convenient option.
5) Cops knocking down the door - Quick, hide the stash!
In capitalist USA corporations control the government.
Try getting your subscriotions on twitter or facebook. Want privacy in your communications? On facebook? Hah.. There's always some idiot saying that "this or that" is on it's way out.But when something's really on it's way out you don't have people write that because everybody already knows.
Posted the below to: http://ibiblio.org/pjones/blog...
---
For all that, here is a recent Atlantic article and related slashdot discussion on why email is not going anywhere, which makes much the same points as I have here previously (email is decentralized, standards-based, non-proprietary, interoperable, ubiquitous, extensible, mobile-friendly, etc.):
http://www.theatlantic.com/tec...
http://tech.slashdot.org/story...
I'd agree it would be good to have something even better than email (a social semantic desktop?), but closed-source proprietary centralized walled garden solutions like you repeatedly profer don't seem like a general improvement. And what do you do if these platforms close up shop? Why notfigure out how to build something better for knowledge exchange on email or other open web standards? Still, WordPress with Akismet is an excellent platform for exchanging knowledge -- but it still relies usually in practice on email for push notifications.
Ultimately, what are your "requirements" for a better platform?
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
I have been slamming the blog as a degraded medium for communication. This is very much why I have been opposed to the beta format of Slashdot; because of its tendency to the Social Media model of Google and Facebook that rely on the blog and the textarea as the main unit of comm.
Email, has many of the features needed for effective communication that blog posts lack entirely. It is no wonder that marketing and business people wish for e-mail to go away, if they do. It would be because of the amount of control they would get over the conversation they way blog owners get to control content and where conversations tend to go on their sites, which is more often nowhere. Fortunately, MTAs are easy to build and any effort to suppress e-mail could be easily circumvented. The people who are entertaining the possibility will quickly find that it is more effective than any Social Media type of alternative. It is the blog which should go and it should be replaced with something more like the discussion forum idea with contextual reply and with users' ability to set the topic. The is more like what we have on Slashdot and the opposite of Facebook and Google+. which are evil, therefore.
In particular, the vote promoted and editorial promoted topics of Social Media should also go and be replaced with a more neutral topic hierarchy. So, there is much about Social Media I would like to see done away with in the interest of less biased information and free speech. Many of the abuses of Social Media would be answered by a return to discussions in which abuses could find there way into subthreads that can be dealt with separately and ignored. Most of the problems with Social Media are simply due to the lack of structure in a blog. People haven't changed, nor are they going to. It is just that Social Media is a poor model to deal with what people tend to do. What drives the misplaced priorities of Social Media is business and profit, not what people need to communicate effectively. I ignore Social Media more and more as time goes on for that reason.
Oh, for mod points.
That's the last time I run code posted in somebody's sig...