Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: Could E-Mail ever Replace Snail Mail?
dlc asks: "The recent USPS question got me thinking. One of the major things traditional mail has going for it that email doesn't is the fact that, for the most part, signing a letter (marking it as authentic) is easier to do, or, at least, the technology to do so is much more common, and is much more widely understood. Similarly, one of the obstacles standing in the way of universal acceptance of email as a legitimate means of reliable transmission is the fact that it is difficult to verify the sender of a message. Digital certificates and a world wide (or at least wide-spread) public key infrastructure would go a long way towards removing this obstacle. My question for the slashdot population is this: Under what circumstances do you see digital cirtificates, PKI, and encryption in general becoming part of normal email usage, to the point where people have as much confidence in the authenticity of email as they do in regular mail? "
- Too much new info coming out of your browser. Typical customers don't understand the deluge of messages they'll get about Certificate Authorities, and accepting things forever, etc... Solution: I don't know. It took a long time (and lots of bad scifi movies) for people to understand the notion of username and password. It's going to take longer to understand the notion of a digital certificate.
- You're still expected to provide a password (to protect your private keys). In many eyes, this defeats the purpose. Sure, you've reduced a bunch of username/password combinations to one password, but it's still something to remember. Solution: Some sort of biological print, such as iris, or thumbprint. The key being that you don't have to remember anything, you just have to show up. (Of course this brings up all sorts of privacy/security issues about copying that data. I've met people with about $100 in the bank who are afraid of being killed and having someone cut off their thumb. Seriously.)
- Corporate paranoia. I've seen places where they take out the normal username/password, and put in clientside certificates, and then put BACK a webserver ACL protection. They're paranoid about turning off the passwords. Then they ask, what did we gain from certificates? Well, nothing. Solution: More knowledge usually lessens paranoia. A few companies out in front demonstrating that it can be done, a few Forrester reports or something saying that certificates are ok, and here look, company X is using them without a problem, will start getting the pointy haired bosses interested.
- Non portable. Although a variety of standards exist for transporting your certificates, see earlier point about the whole process being too confusing for the average surfer. Solution: Smart cards. Put the digital certificate, along with a copy of your thumbprint, on the card. Stick the card in, put your thumb on the scanner, it's you.
Those are a few of the main problems with certs, in my experience. Of course, each of those has it's own issues and could be an entire thread. But I'm at work doing non certificate related things, so I can't really discuss it all day.www.HearMySoulSpeak.com
Email won't completely replace snailmail for one simple reason. Even after you've got email secure enough that even the most paranoid technophobe is happy to use it, you still can't use it to send someone a nice birthday card.
First of all, a major problem with email (just as with snail-mail) is that it is unreliable. You send an email out and in the general case you have no clue whether it reached its destination or some host on the way folded, spindled and mutilated it, and then discarded it. Some MUAs offer delivery receipts, but generally they require that you run the same mail client on both ends. We really need an RFC (maybe there is one?) for mail delivery receipts and have it implemented in all MUAs.
/. community will like even less is that authentication and encryption will become widespread when they will become default settings in Microsoft Outlook [ducks, quickly pulling on his asbestos long johns...]
As regards to authentication and encryption, this is a bigger issue. The general answer, I would say, would be: the general population will use authentication and encryption when it will be build into all mail tools, switched on by default, and work transparently. I am rather pessimistic about more than 1% of computer users doing something proactive to use encrypted email. And from personal experience I know that trying to communicate by encrypted email with people who don't understand either encryption or the need for it is a pain in the ass.
Authentication (i.e. digital signatures) is a complicated topic with the key problem of correlating a digital signature with a real-world or an online identity. There are two major approaches -- one uses centralized certificate authorities that vouch for the key-identity correspondence, and another (PGP) uses what it calls a web of trust. Both have significant problems and are not in widespread use.
I guess my answer is 'don't hold your breath'. Security is complicated by nature and people are generally unwilling to spend the time and effort to work it out and set it up. Another answer, which the
Kaa
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
There are two ways we can look at this.
On one level, mail as a way of passing information from a to b. Here e-mail could well win, ultimately, in terms of security, speed, and convenience. It works! You can send and receive text and graphics.
But on another level, you cannot hold an e-mail in your hand. You can't have somebody elses creation, as they had it, on your mantelpiece.
Sure, you can print it out. But you can't lift that printout up to your nose to smell your girlfriend's perfume. You can't receive an e-mail you can run your hands over because somebody has chosen special paper for you. You can't receive an e-mail that's been handpainted. Perhaps you can digitize it. But then its just not the same object.
While we're receiving information, the value of snail mail will become less, with electronic mail becoming more commonplace. While we're receiving emotion, the value of snail mail will grow, as simply something more special.
Comments? Anybody disagree?
The camels are coming. I'm in love.
...I agree completely.
For me, email is a "standard" means of communication now. Letters are "special". If I get a letter from a friend who has access to email, it means that the friend took the time to write the letter and post it. I would say that handwritten letters are nicer than printed ones, but my handwriting could never be described as "nice" :-)
Like I said in an article above, you can't send someone a birthday card using email. You can sent them a "greeting card" from some Web page. Your friend will get it in their email, and could print it out and put it on his or her mantelpiece. But it simply isn't the same. It's not a physical object that you took the trouble to buy, sign and post.
Well, for me, anyhow. It can't replace either one entirely.
Since my parents and most of my friends from college now have an e-mail address, I send e-mail when I need to get something responded to reasonably quickly but not THIS SECOND.
There are certain situations that I don't think call for e-mail or for telephone calls -- good old-fashioned snail mail is the only polite option. Wedding invitations and sympathy cards come immediately to mind.
Likewise, if there is an emergency and next of kin need to be notified, you better believe I'm using the telephone, at least as a first attempt. If that proves ineffective, THEN I might send an e-mail saying "please call" or something similar.
E-mail is the best option if you need to send out the same news to a lot of people that live in a wide geographic area. Individual phone calls are time-consuming and expensive, and for some reason form snail mail is much more irritating than multiple "TO" e-mail. That could just be a personal quirk, though.
For average, ordinary, mundane communication with friends and family, I tend to use e-mail because it's convenient and cheap and I don't have to remember where I put my stamps.
And don't forget, the computer was supposed to bring us the "paperless office." Yeah right, like THAT will ever happen.
"Somebody exploded a letter-bomb today
Disclaimer: This answer is not definitive, and I know that the innocent word 'trust' has been turned into a buzzword, or at least it's close to it now ... but FWIW;)
... suspicious. If my mom wrote to say that my sister will be home for a certain week next month, I would probably not be.
In discussing the concept of "trust" / "authenticity," etc. context changes everything, and when people talk about trusting email vs. trusting snail mail, I think there's sometimes the impression that people ever (or often, say) rely on either of these methods in complete isolation.
In my job, I sometimes request and receive publication permissions for logos and quotes via email; it's usually the most reliable way to reach people in my industry (I work in advertising for personal computers that rhyme with "Smell").
Now, since the email originates with me for the most part, and there is usually some level of phone contact, the occasional fax, etc, I have no real problem with presenting the resulting replies as permission to our client, though usually we also get paper copies in the mail as well.
If someone with the email address "EdMcMahon@whitehouse.gov" wrote email to say that I'd won a million dollars and simply needed to mail him $10 to cover the shipping on the winnings, I would be
Point is, spoofing someone into thinking that *any* communication (phone, fax, email, snail mail, smoke signals, whatever) is legitimate when it is not requires that it be innocuous seeming and have enough clues indicating authenticity that they would never question its legitimacy. It's not just putting on a Halloween mask and saying "I'm Papa Smurf!" -- you actually have to at least make the other person think that you are only 3 apples tall, blue, etc.
And another thing to point out is that people seem to have a lower threshold of trust for paper mail (because everyone knows you can't trust that dang in-ter-net), so perhaps it's easier to actually fool someone with it. In fact, that's my opinion, at least in business contexts.
Just thoughts,
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
While snail mail will obviouly never go away completely, I think package shipping has pretty much got it made.
Snail mail is typically a delivery of INFORMATION, which can now be better done in other ways. With packages, you are sending a THING, and until some star-trekkish system goes into widespread use, more and more packages will be shipped through FedEx, UPS, etc.
I used to almost never have things shipped to me - I'd go buy them. But since I can now easily do price comparison shopping and find good deals online, I have ordered things shipped to me every week or so.
So THAT service is definately on the increase.
Vidi, Vici, Veni
Instead of nitpicking over the details of the current email system, look at the fundamental way computers can move - and authenticate - information.
You can be sure email was delivered and unread if you encrypt it, digitally sign it, and send it, and then get back an encrypted, digitally signed confirmation from the reciever that they got it.
This level of security and authentication could never be claimed by snail mail.
Vidi, Vici, Veni
In the case of "a nice birthday card," why not send the data portion electronically and use local physical printing and local delivery services?
If I were to send a card like that, it would certainly be a tangible object that the recipient could hold and put on his or her mantelpiece. There's still one problem though - I'd be unable to sign the card. The recipient would get a nice, freshly-printed card with my greeting on; but, without my illegibly-scrawled signature, it's missing the personal touch. Well, I think it is, anyway. Maybe I'm overly-sentimental about such things.