Slashdot Mirror
Yes, You've Still Got Mail (recode.net)
Veteran technology columnist Walt Mossberg, writes: Like radio, email isn't dying, it's just changing. Over the past decade or so it's become much more like postal mail. It's not the place you expect to find a greeting from a friend or even a timely update from a professional colleague. Instead, it's a mix of junk mail you hate and discard, plus bills and missives from businesses you also hate but can't discard. [...] Still, despite all signs to the contrary -- and many predictions -- email is not dead. In fact, some analyses suggest that it's growing. Few people can afford to be without it. It hasn't expired; it has morphed. There are lots of reasons email persists, even as faster and simpler forms of communication proliferate and your personal communications likely have mostly migrated elsewhere. But one big one is that new types of media channels rarely totally kill off old ones, even though everyone predicts they will. The old ones just adapt and change. Back in the day, television was supposed to kill off radio, but radio gradually saved itself by dropping the programming TV did better (like dramas and variety shows) and starting to focus on playing hit songs and hosting political and sports talk shows. I think something similar is going on with email. Once the king of digital discourse, email has surely been dethroned by an army of alternatives: Vast and numerous messaging services; photo- and video-oriented sharing on social networks or the photo apps of Apple and Google; business tools like Slack. I get the latest pictures of my granddaughter through iCloud photo sharing. I get the latest discussions of how we plan to cover stories on The Verge or Recode through Slack. My editor and I collaboratively edit my stories inside Google Docs. Ten years ago, all those things would have been done via email. Back then, when a reader wanted to tell me I was an idiot (or worse) for something I wrote, I got an email. Now, they tell me on Twitter.
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The reason why email isn't dying is that it is general purpose and enduring, and does not seem to require to the latest internet fad app in order to work.
Instant anything is a distraction from getting stuff done. I don't feel the need to immediately act on an incoming email and there is no expectation for me to do so from the sender.
I work remotely and we use Skype for instant communications. This is fine - anything that shows up instantly is related to getting work done. Anyone with multiple instant messengers, logged into social networks and ignoring their email isn't getting much work done.
If there's no longer going to be any such thing as privacy then email becomes less and less attractive a communication option. The thought of Comcast inserting targeted ads into my private email messages makes my skin crawl. Not sure what can be done about it except to use the Internet as little as possible.
In order to sign up for any of those other messaging services, you need to have an email. If you get locked out of your account, password reset links will be sent to you via email.
I frankly have no use for most of these other forms of communication - for the most part they are just new and different ways of goofing off.
"There are lots of reasons email persists, even as faster and simpler forms of communication proliferate..."
Lost me at "faster".
Its basically the same thing as postal mail was, occasional correspondence from someone you don't talk to regularly and otherwise bills or junk.
Everyone has an email account, everyone uses their email account. IM will never overtake email so long as they are proprietary. No matter what service you are trying to use, the percentages of your contacts that use that service is going to be the minority. Except for email. Email is like phone numbers in that way. Phone service should be long obsolete, but it's not. Why? Because it's ubiquitous. Everyone has a phone number. If we really wanted to push email into the 21st century then we will need a real, free, non-proprietary, and fully compatible alternative.
And hate pretty much everything else.
How many Slashdotters have ever believed email was dying?
Cloudiot: A person who does not see offsite storage as a way to lose control over access to his or her own data.
Is that it's an open architecture, so you can e-mail anyone, no matter who their provider is.
Unlike every other internet messaging format which only works for people who have signed up with that specific provider.
You can replace my business emails with Slack when you pry them from my cold dead hands. Now get off my lawn!
I work in the defense industry, which inherits some of the problems of its customer, the Government (in particular, a reluctance to spend money on infrastructure, reliance on policy compliance rather than personal accountability, and older, less tech-savvy decision makers). One of the computers on my desk still runs Windows XP, ironically because the security approval to replace it with a windows 7 computer didn't come through until just recently. So it is no surprise we aren't using wikis or IMs or Slack; I don't even know what the last one is (I mean, I can google, but I don't 'get' it; I've never had access to anything like that).
Few modern technologies can survive in this environment. By the time a 'new' technology is vetted by security, approved by the customer, and authorized by finance, everyone will have moved on to something else. But email remains. It works everywhere. It doesn't require 'special' software that the person you are communicating with may not have the IT permissions to install even if they knew how. Even the most out of touch customer representative knows what it is; you don't have to make slides about why you need this thing on your program. It can work over public networks and private networks; you don't need to trust a cloud or a young company. There are well-developed practices for using it. Lawyers and compliance staff thoroughly understand the legal issues (this is no small concern in a large company).
...there were only grunts and gestures
Then there were single syllable words naming things
Then came a real language allowing the exchanging of information.
Then came pictures, symbolizing information
Then came the written word
Then came Paper, allowing anyone to write.
Then came Printing, spreading written material all over the world.
Then came Computers, digitizing pictures and words and making vast sums of knowledge searchable.
Then came email, allow the communication of that knowledge in a timely and logical manner
Then came social media with crude editors and un-intuitive interfaces
Then came Twitter with a 140 character limit.
Then came emojiis, replacing the written word with pictures.
Next will be digitized grunts and gestures.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Still, despite all signs to the contrary -- and many predictions -- email is not dead.
Anybody predicting email is or will be dead is either an imbecile or has something to sell you. Practically everybody has email and except for specific purposes nothing has come along that will substantially replace it any time soon.
I used to use email and USENET (and before that, echomail, yes, fidonet) for years and mostly loved it. These days, nothing but hateful crap in the inbox. The problem generally isn't just the spam (I have several unfiltered accounts and rarely get any spam at all, and that gets promptly reported) but that the quality of the material coming in is painfully low. In other words, email sucks so much because y'all are so poor at writing proper email.
Most everyone treats email, and by extension every alternative, like a convenient bitbucket, not a way to achieve contact with a human. That includes the humans "writing" top-posted replies and generally failing to write coherently. Which is most every pretend-human writing these days.
Elitist, me? Sure, but the bar to entrance is pretty low. LERNE 2 RITE RITE LOL U LOSARZ LOLKTHX and you too can be "elite".
isn't it amazing? you can send me an advertisement or worse a bill anytime:)
The pictures of your granddaughter someone leaked after hacking your iCloud account are so cute.
"It's not the place you expect to find a greeting from a friend or even a timely update from a professional colleague."
Yes, for me it is, and I don't use anything else. I don't use free a.k.a ad supported email either, so there is hardly any spam. I've even met people who started arguing with me, coming up with bullshit arguments on how much email sucks compared to whatever they use, until they realized that they don't know shit about email and its capabilities.
Who is going to make an app that ingests all old emails. AOL, gmail, thunderbird, mail, whatever and make it future proof, archived and searchable? We need you. Now.
People still write letter. I sent one last Christmas as part of my last Christmas Reddit Secret Santa package.
I would support extending the legal protection afforded USPS mail to email services provided commercially.
If you can't do it to an envelope with a letter, then you couldn't do it to an email.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Congratulations, you old Korean person!
It's not the place you expect to find a greeting from a friend or even a timely update from a professional colleague.
The author of the article apparently has different social experiences than me. For me, email certainly is the "place" where I expect to find a greeting from a friend or correspondence from a colleague. Although the article might explain why I seem to have a hard time convincing 20-somethings to contact me via email...
Seriously? Ok, for personal communication there are other channels, but professionally? Email seems to be the medium of choice. Announcements for the company, or the department? Email. A colleague who wants something or needs something? Email. A customer? Email. It's a established, reliable means of communication. You can expect a reasonably quick response, but you aren't ripping someone's attention away from whatever they're doing. Business phone calls? Almost none. Everything is by email.
That said, the suits paid some ridiculous amount of money to set up a SharePoint installation where people can create projects and share documents. What an amazingly horrible interface - is SharePoint always this bad? Anyway, the result is that we send documents around by email too...
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
"business tools like Slack" -- not your father's Slack, I take it. Or even Bob Dobbs's.
Because y'know email is old, so it must be bad. Sucks that it works perfectly despite downed servers, loss of connectivity. Not like these modern things that need a 10mb/s connection 24/7 just to stay sane.
Sheesh, gimme a tennis ball anyday!
I own my email server and all the messages on it.
E-mail has this one thing going for it that it is standard-compliant. So you can pick and choose which client program(s) you want to use to access your messages. Many of these clients are free. And You must have a very niche platform that doesn't have some sort of e-mail client.
Free, as in your money being freed from the confines of your account.
Email is bad because if it's the only thing you use, there are better tools for certain specific jobs.
People get paid to write this tripe?
I use email and even more old school I still pay my bills through the mail service not online. Mostly because a couple companies I paid online bill to got hacked once. So there is something to be said for old school means on communication. Email was my first experience with electronic communication as well as instant messaging. Cell phones were a novelty which not too many had them and they were basically just wireless phones. Texting is great for simple stuff but email still is used for more involved communications. Don't see it ending anytime soon.
Apps! Because only apps can... aw, forget it.
Is there where I mention that a text is just an email to phone number?
I don't see that going anywhere soon.
Everyone is simply fleeing back to e-mail after watching the shithole that social media became once it started acting on a political agenda. It wasn't enough to cause fights where no fights existed before.
Maybe *YOUR* email is like that but I assure you mine isn't.
https://xkcd.com/1810/
this signature has been removed due to a DMCA takedown notice
Despite being a long time user of IRC and instant messaging (through the years:ICQ, AIM, Jabber/XMMP, GTalk, and others), I still prefer email because I can reply at my leisure, access it offline, attach documents, archive it for a long time, and it has been very reliable.
Twitter on the other hand, I have no idea what to do with. I have no problems with other people using it, if that is what they enjoy. I am simply uncertain how to incorporate it into my life, so I have ignored it thus far.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
It's not hard to figure out why email isn't dying and won't die:
* It's not tied to a single provider. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, iMessage and all the others are.
* It's an open, federated system. Companies in particular can take charge of their own email servers if they wish.
* Installed base.
* It is available on all devices from phones to tablets to PCs without the need to install additional software.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
http://www.joyoftech.com/joyof...
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
All the problems they list are solvable with good filters. I use the Mail application on the Mac. The filters work great. My mail comes in color coded and sorted to the mailboxes so I can easily and efficiently deal with it. Often I reply using the signatures since many replies are pretty standard. Email works great.
Your post advocates a
( X) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( X) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( X) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
( X) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
( X) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( X) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
( X) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
( X) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( X) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( X) Extreme profitability of spam
( X) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( X) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
( X) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( X) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( X) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
( X) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your
house down!
The email also doesn't require the sender and receiver to be online at the same time which makes it more convenient than WhatsApp.
Heroes die once, cowards live longer.
Slightly off-topic: with email delivery times being almost instantaneous these days, wouldn't it possible to write an email client (or app) that provides, for all practical purposes, an IM system based on SMTP and IMAP?
Essentially, conventions like:
1. A set of recipients is a "group"
2. Replies are never quoted
3. The client always shows the full email thread (the "conversation")
4. The Subject line is a magic string to allow filtering on these IM emails
The specialized client would provide a very Whatsapp-like interface, while a normal email client could be used in a pinch as well.
Am I overlooking something obvious?
And anyone predicting its demise is a fool.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
...an awful lot of us can't tell you everything we know in 140 characters, the way Benito Trumpolini can. Some of us can even write in complete, grammatical sentences, with more complex thoughts than "how's that sportsball team", and "here, hold my beer".
Next up: typing is dying, it's being replaced by gestures, and the biggest app to interpret that is called charades....
In other words, email sucks so much because y'all are so poor at writing proper email.
Sounds like you might have experienced some of the email anti-patterns?