Posts Tagged ‘Future Of Email’

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Does Email Have A Future?

Permanent Link posted November 19th, 2007

I was reading an interesting discussion yesterday regarding email and how it is now the bastion of the old. By old in Internet Terms it seems we are talking about the over 30s.

Email does have the ability to collate messages in a format that you wish to deal with (i.e. by whatever particular desktop email client you feel suits you, or indeed webmail client) however it’s essentially poor implementation means a) it’s not a reliable communication method and b) as we all know, spam. Spam does take the sheen away from email, we regularly get comments/questions/complaints about the sheer amount of spam people get. It’s not our fault I’m afraid Sir, we just process it for you. You’re the one who’s signed up to sites of questionable nature, left your email on your site in plaintext for robots to pick up, used ‘easy’ targeted email addresses (sales@ webmaster@ info@ support@ admin@) etc.. etc..

“But my XYZ ISP blocks emails for me!”, well yes, but that’s why we and other ISPs have to do work when they randomly decide to block an outgoing mail server. This is why you may never see a legitimate email despite logs proving to the contrary. The SMTP protocol for email was never designed to have any kind of guaranteed delivery, its ability to ‘retry’ a failed sending attempt is a direct result of this. In today’s climate this has become even more unreliable with the gauntlets of spamasassin relays, greylisting, nolisting, blacklisting and of course lazy admins who block swathes of IP ranges.

Surely there must be something better than this?

Instant Messaging? Instant Messaging in the workplace could be a minefield. It demands attention now even if it is for something as unimportant as a question that you would never send an email or pick up the phone for. Even at 2am (I hope the person in question reads this!). I’ve found it personally quite distracting until my contact list evolved into simply having people who a) I wanted to talk to on a daily basis and b) didn’t feel the need to make pointless random chatter during the day. If you’re entire company was on there? I just feel it’s too distracting. Like email, it’s become so widespread and taken for granted that even when you set your status to ‘busy’ people still message you. “I know you’re busy but…”. Is it the place for formal discussions? Possibly but I think you’ll find many people retiring to the safety of their email.

Social Networking? Being a member of such a social networking site such as Facebook does allow you to add people who you wish to add thus almost in essence creating a giant whitelist allowing you to send and receive messages to those people. The only issue with this is, like instant messaging I suppose, you have different people on different networks. I’ve been invited to join Bebo or LinkedIn and just not. I’d have to log into many different sites with many different interfaces (of questionable quality anyway, their interface, not mine) to keep in touch with people I wanted to speak to. To top it off, you get an email telling you when you have a message on xyz site so in my mind it’s simply adding an extra step. Why not just send me an email in the first place? Not to mention the privacy concerns.

Email would be ideal if it was not abused by spammers. What is the solution though? Do we have to rethink email or do we need a totally different solution?

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