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.
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.
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.
no, they say "get in touch with social media" because they want their hooks in you and they want to know who your friends are and they want you to advertise to your friends. it's all commercialism and big brotherism. although NSA saves a copy of all emails exchanged so there's big brother for you as well.
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.
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.
... when email arrived on the scene.
sigo ergo sum
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.
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.
Exactly. "Latest trend" my ass. I heard this all the time when Facebook was starting to get popular, and I bet it was being crowed in MySpace's time as well.
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.
The young ones have already quit using it to communicate with friends.
No they haven't. Facebook was a fad that was growing with young ones until they realized it sucks and its no longer the place they go. They still send email though. Moving to twitter for some things? Sure ... except when they want to keep things private.
Newer businesses use newer protocols like RSS to distribute their news feeds.
RSS has been waning for a while, no one outside the techie community watches RSS 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.
And there you've just contradicted every point you were trying to make.
Email is almost dead.
Except that every alternative you've claiming to it ... assumes you use email. Do you not realize how silly that sounds?
I know too many people who, while they have an email account, it really isn't something they check every day.
Me too, but they aren't checking Facebook or twitter every day either.
because it just isn't the best solution for anything it does
Thats about the most ignorant statement I've ever seen.
making it worthless for anything besides communicating with people who haven't yet figured that out
Which would be pretty much everyone else on the planet except fad following teenagers. Once you get out of high school you'll realize how silly you sound.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
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.