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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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
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!