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Yes, You've Still Got Mail (recode.net)

Posted by msmash on from the never-die dept.

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.

33 of 140 comments (clear)

  1. Most of the alternatives he describes... by QuietLagoon · · Score: 5, Insightful
    ... are specialized, i.e., to see photos, I have to go to this site or run this app; to communicate, I have to visit this other site or run this other app, etc.

    .
    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.

    1. Re:Most of the alternatives he describes... by TWX · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Yep. Everyone has access to e-mail, and the protocol is open so everyone can send and receive e-mail. Every platform in the last twenty years supports it too, and even the old retrieval protocols like POP3 and IMAP are still widely supported in addition to all of the new Enterprise-grade stuff.

      E-mail as-implemented does have weaknesses, but those are in the specifics of how SMTP was designed back in the day, with no good way to verify identity and no good way to limit unwanted e-mail, the double-whammy that lets spam and other malevolent e-mail traverse the Internet. It would probably be better to develop a new protocol that would ultimately replace SMTP but from an end-user point of view still function largely the same as people are used to. After all, there were e-mail protocols prior to SMTP, POP3, and IMAP, even predating using the Internet as a medium (remember Fideonet anyone?) so it's not like there's something inherently special about SMTP that requires its continued use.

      One could implement dual-protocol servers, that attempt to use the new protocol first, and only fall-back to SMTP if there's no mail exchanger capable of using the new protocol on the other end. There would have to be rules prohibiting relay across protocols though, no new-protocol messages get sent via SMTP and no SMTP gets translated through the new protocol except within one's organization for last-mile send/delivery. That might be the hard part to implement.

      --
      Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
    2. Re:Most of the alternatives he describes... by Grishnakh · · Score: 4, Insightful

      The problem is getting everyone (or even a critical mass) to adopt it. Email was created back in a time when academia was running the internet, and wasn't interested in marketshare, profits, vendor lock-in, etc. It became universally adopted, and then when the internet became commercialized email was a necessity so the corporations had to adopt it or else be irrelevant. Now it's not like that. The corps won't adopt any kind of open, universal standard on anything (look at the mess that exists with IM protocols: open ones are shut down in favor of closed, proprietary ones). Google could create an open standard for email 2.0, and Microsoft and Yahoo will refuse to adopt it, for instance, and without support in MS Exchange/Outlook/OWA, it won't go far. MS could make email 2.0, but of course their version is going to be vendor-locked somehow and require license fees from others to implement.

    3. Re:Most of the alternatives he describes... by Frobnicator · · Score: 4, Insightful

      It is also telling that most of the communications alternatives can send you emails when something arrives.

      You can get an email update if new tweets are added and not checked, an email update when people post on your facebook wall, an email update when someone touches your google doc. Slack emails me if I've got messages when I wasn't logged in. iCloud sends an email notice. And for developers in particular, all kinds of monitors and services send email when there is a problem, not a tweet or wall post.

      Email is the current universal standard, the fallback when the other specialized communication fails. That suggests something more fundamental about its nature if you pause to consider it.

      --
      //TODO: Think of witty sig statement
    4. Re:Most of the alternatives he describes... by Deep+Esophagus · · Score: 5, Insightful

      The general purpose nature of email is a bit reason I still use it extensively. Also...

      • * Not limited to 140 characters
      • * Better handling of conversation threads
      • * Better at handling mixed media (audio, photos, PDFs, office documents all attached to a single message)
      • * More control over formatting
      • * Easier to organize, archive, and search for past conversations

      I'm a member of a group that works together doing voiceover and audio book projects, and the guy running the show uses not just facebook but specifically the Messenger feature within Facebook for all our discussions and planning. The result is that there's a single chat window going back three months containing every conversation we ever had without any search capability, sample clips attached with no way to save them to an external device (you can only play them back within Messenger), and don't even get me started about the animated GIFs that I have to see over and over again whenever I open that chat pane.

    5. Re:Most of the alternatives he describes... by b0bby · · Score: 5, Informative

      That's exactly it. I don't have to care that John is using Skype for chat and Jane is using Slack; I can email them using whatever provider and client combo I like and it will get to them. There's a lot to be said for that.

    6. Re:Most of the alternatives he describes... by Casandro · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Yes, and there is no pressure to replace e-mail. E-mail has it's weaknesses, but they are not bad enough to warrant a change.

      The technochnology that would be ripe for a complete replacement would be the "web". Those standards are getting way out of hand, spiraling into their doom of evergrowing complexity, with browsers both having security problems and not fully supporting the growing array of partly useless functionality the W3M tries to cram into them.

      E-Mail was never meant to be extensible so it was easy for it to escape that doom. A 20 year old e-mail program is just as useful as a new one, while a 20 year old browser will probably crash once you try to open google.com.

    7. Re:Most of the alternatives he describes... by Austerity+Empowers · · Score: 3, Insightful

      The reason why email isn't dying is that it is general purpose and enduring

      It's exactly the app we need for the problem we want to solve. I doubt it will ever die, it's too useful.

      I don't know who comes up with this is dying thing that justifies the articles suggesting it's a well known fact. Desktops are still around and my preferred platform for 99% of computing. Laptops are foisted on me by my employer (and no doubt drive sales volumes), but I don't care about them, they're too anemic to do things I enjoy, and barely tolerable in most cases for things I am paid to do. I have yet to work for anyone where I didn't ultimately make them buy me a powerful desktop, or scrounge one out of parts IT thought it had disposed of.

      The kinds that corporations are buying rank and file employees could be replaced by a mobile phone or tablet, except that the people making them don't want them to be used that way (because margins -> 0). This all sounds desperately like marketing astroturf disguised as reporting.

    8. Re:Most of the alternatives he describes... by chrysrobyn · · Score: 3, Insightful

      A 20 year old e-mail program is just as useful as a new one, while a 20 year old browser will probably crash once you try to open google.com.

      I admit I lose track of time regularly, but a 20 year old e-mail program -- Eudora, Elm, what have you -- had no ability to parse HTML e-mail. I spend most of my time checking my e-mail with my phone and occasionally with a web browser and I use a desktop client every other month or so. I did find myself inspecting the source a few times last month, and I did have a few e-mails without the plain text equivalent. My conclusion was that there are e-mail clients or companies who send HTML only e-mails. This means old e-mail clients from 20 years ago would not be useful.

      Email is changing, but far more slowly.

    9. Re:Most of the alternatives he describes... by Grishnakh · · Score: 3

      As I pointed out before, stuff like this just won't work. It doesn't matter how good it is technically, you can't get entrenched incumbents (like Apple that you mention) to adopt it, and without a critical mass, it fails. One company won't adopt it because they can't get vendor lock-in, another because they can't easily make money on it somehow, etc. For instance, why would the carriers want to adopt this, when they're making huge profits off of SMS messages now?

      The only way stuff like this gets adopted is if it's forced on them somehow, and they really don't have a choice. Either some hugely powerful government forces them to adopt it, or it gets so much grassroots adoption that it becomes a de-facto standard. See web standards for the latter (everyone hated IE6 so much that they adopted Firefox/Chrome in such large numbers that web devs were forced to follow actual standards, and MS was then forced to follow suit. And this largely happened because of Chrome, which was made by Google, whose incentive was inserting spyware into the browser).

      At this point, I really don't see what could force the big email providers (namely Google and MS) to adopt a new standard. It also doesn't help that so many businesses use Outlook, and frequently not the very latest version, so upgrading to a new standard isn't as easy as just hitting F5 on your browser as it is with a webmail system, though a fallback to SMTP would alleviate that, plus if enough large businesses really liked what Email2.0 had to offer (built-in encryption, etc.), they might willingly adopt new email clients just to get those features, though that's pretty hard to believe considering how stuck they've been on Outlook/Exchange for so many years, but if MS supported it quickly that would probably lead to quick overall adoption. But I don't see that happening because MS has a *long* history of hating open standards unless they can "embrace and extend" them to get vendor lock-in.

    10. Re:Most of the alternatives he describes... by xevioso · · Score: 3

      This. It's actually very difficult to write an email that will work and look the same (mostly) across a wide variety of devices/browsers. You end up having to use things like inline css and deprecated tags and you are very limited on what you can do without screwing up how your email looks on a platform many people use. It sucks.

      But it's better than text only.

  2. Email still required... by toonces33 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  3. Postal Mail by Luthair · · Score: 2

    Its basically the same thing as postal mail was, occasional correspondence from someone you don't talk to regularly and otherwise bills or junk.

  4. Email isn't dead because it's universal by DalM · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Email isn't dead because it's universal by demonlapin · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Why should phone service be obsolete? I despise long text conversations. If you want to have a back-and-forth, call me. When we're done, one of us can write it up and email the other so there's a record of what conclusions were reached - or we can just not, and nobody but the NSA can prove what we discussed.

  5. Re:Lack of privacy by MightyYar · · Score: 3, Informative

    Email was never a secure communications medium, and opting out of Comcast's contextual ads is as simple as not using their web client.

    --
    W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
  6. Show of hands by uCallHimDrJ0NES · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.
    1. Re:Show of hands by thegarbz · · Score: 4, Funny

      How many Slashdotters have ever believed email was dying?

      All those with UIDs > 3000000.

      #onlyforneckbeards #twitter4ever #slashdotneedsunicodesoicanusesmilies

    2. Re:Show of hands by GuB-42 · · Score: 2

      Hearing "hashtag include" for "#include" directives in C code is particularly cringeworthy.

  7. Re:Lack of privacy by Grishnakh · · Score: 4, Informative

    Comcast can't insert ads into email you read on a webmail platform like GMail, thanks to it being https protected. Of course, the webmail provider (like Google) could insert their own ads, but at least there you have a choice of provider and can change if you want. You can even set up your own webmail system with squirrelmail on your own server.

  8. Technological Stability by quintessentialk · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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).

  9. In The Beginning... by sycodon · · Score: 5, Funny

    ...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.
  10. Email will never die by sjbe · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Email will never die by argStyopa · · Score: 2

      I note that the only people living in the sort of 'we don't need email' bubble are college students, high schoolers, some academics, and marketers trying to sell you the next messaging app.

      Ie nobody with an actual job.

      --
      -Styopa
  11. Re:Lack of privacy by demonlapin · · Score: 2

    The most security-paranoid person I know uses ProtonMail and is sufficiently impressed by it to discuss business issues on it.

  12. Re:First Post! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

    Congratulations, you old Korean person!

  13. Re:Lack of privacy by JaredOfEuropa · · Score: 5, Interesting

    That's another huge advantage of email: businesses can run their own email servers, ensure that their internal communication never leaves the premises and isn't harvested by the likes of Google, be in control of account creation and naming, apply any other policies they deem necessary, while still ensuring that anyone in the world can contact them using their choice of email client or service.

    That's how email was designed, as opposed to all those others that are proprietary and locked down cloud services. And any smart company using those will ask themselves: "what do we do when this service goes tits up?". If the service is proprietary and is your primary internal and external communication channel, then there are no pretty answers to that.

    --
    If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
  14. What world are they in? by bradley13 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.
  15. Obligatory XKCD by pscottdv · · Score: 3, Funny

    https://xkcd.com/1810/

    --

    this signature has been removed due to a DMCA takedown notice

  16. I prefer email by OrangeTide · · Score: 2

    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
  17. The reasons it won't die by Alioth · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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
  18. Obligatory Joy of Tech by TeknoHog · · Score: 3, Informative

    http://www.joyoftech.com/joyof...

    --
    Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
  19. Won't work... by sjbe · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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!