But I Digress

I was just listening to a comment from Shel Holtz on the For Immediate Release podcast, show #126, where he asserted that email is on its way out, to be replaced by RSS, and similar technologies.

My gut reaction was, “I don’t think so”, but lets give it some real thought. There are so many people who simply don’t use the Internet the way that I do.

Spam, spam, spam, spam

“Spam has killed email”, is something that I hear constantly. Well, it’s certainly abused it, and made us all think of simply picking up the phone instead of wading through the spam in our inboxes. The problem with spam is twofold.

1. The SMTP protocol has no way of validating the sender, so you don’t have any valid address to complain to. With a telemarketer you can at least tell them to put you on their “do not call” list, or use far harsher language, as I’ve done myself. You can’t even find a valid person to complain to with spam unless you know what you’re doing.
2. End users are dumb. Yes, dumb. If 0% of people responded to spam or clicked-through, there would be no spam, or at least a lot less than there is now. That, and people don’t work hard enough to ensure that their mail doesn’t look like spam.

Let me elaborate on that last point. I have, currently, 1800+ email in my junkmail folder on my home system, which is automatically filtered with spamassassin. There isn’t a single false-positive in there. It’s all spam. I looked. This is primarily because I have SA trained for how I use email. Being a Unix geek, I tend to have a fairly recognizable pattern, and mail that I receive from others tends to arrive looking the same, since those are the kinds of people that I communicate with.

Typical email:

1. Plain text, no html. If it can’t be rendered in ASCII, it’s probably not worth saying. Want pictures? Send an attachment. I don’t help spammers by opening inline pics anyway. If html is truly required, link to a site, but if it’s just to mark up your .sig and make your name show up in blue, it’s not worth it.
2. Email that I receive doesn’t sound like a marketing pitch. Individuals who choose to communicate in marketingspeak deserve to have their mail filtered as junk, since that’s what it is. Half of the announcements from the company that I work for are filtered because they look like spam. Go figure. If you work in marketing, try using plain (insert your language here) instead of nonsense. You’re supposed to be communicators. Your high-school (insert your language here)-teacher would be aghast.

False-positives happen rarely, and you can train your filtering system.

Email is dead (insert technology here) is better

“My kid just uses instant-messaging, not email.” Yeah, a kid would. Kids tend to have a lot more time on their hands for synchronous communication. Kids have moved from tying up the family phoneline with “he said, she said” conversations into MSN, ICQ and a host of other incompatible IM applications. You can talk together as long as you’re on the same IM system. Jabber tried to fix that, and failed miserably, although Google talk now uses Jabber, there’s no indication that their goal will be to unify IM. I would not count on their success in any case. I’m still amazed that cellphone providers got their act together enough to even allow you to call one-another if you’re not on the same service. In North America I don’t see much sharing of cell-towers going on though.

Me, I need asychronous communication. I’m not always online, I’m on the move a lot. I need messages to accumulate, and then allow me to respond when I have time. I also need to communicate with a lot of different people regardless of the software that they choose to use. IM won’t help me there. Only email permits this currently. I’m not into vendor-lock-in, which is why I use Microsoft software as little as possible, not to mention Apple, so any one brand of kool-aid just won’t do it. I also like to archive my communications forever, which means that I need open access to said data, and I like standardized formats as I can write tools to read them, like my custom vacation program.

What’s so different about IM and Email anyway? Not so much. My wife and I have rapid-fire email conversations at times that look more like something from a chatroom. We can do that regardless of the software that we’re using, as long as they speak SMTP and can open RFC 822 email. For me, IM started as IRC, Internet Relay Chat. I’m logged into it right now, in several rooms where open-source developers tend to congregate. It’s been indispensible in my work at getting solutions to my problems, even though I had to work around my company’s restrictions on it. I still use IRC because there are a lot of people using it that I like to talk to, and IRC has decent controls to prevent abuse. Of course, they permit MSN, even though for some reason, the people that I work with think that it’s fine to communicate about priviledged topics on an unencrypted medium over the Internet. Go figure. At least I can encrypt email to other like-minded individuals, and when forwarding confidential documents home. Unfortunately that’s not wide-spread.

IM also does nothing about the spam problem that email isn’t already doing. And instead of just seeing the titles of the spam and deleting them, they tend to pop-up rather intrusively in my face. There’s certainly nothing stopping spammers from creating IM accounts and bulk-sending. The same goes for SMS on cellphones. Hell, I’ve already had Bell Canada spam me on my phone, and I don’t even subscribe to SMS! I put a stop to that quickly, the benefit there being that I could complain to someone, and threaten to drop my subscription.

Push vs. Pull

Email is a push system. Someone sends you mail and it is routed to your mail server. Often you pull it down from there, but email is still a push system. You actively go out and notify people of your desire to communicate with them. The telephone is a push system. I like email as a push system because all my communications arrive in one place, and it’s ignorable. If I don’t feel like talking right now, I don’t even notice that my email is piling up. It’s unintrusive. It’s not annoying.

IM is annoying. How many times have we seen individuals using laptops for a presentation, projecting their presentation to the entire room, when a particularly embarrassing MSN popup arrives from a friend who has no idea that you’re not alone? Sure, they should probably disable IM, but it comes up so helpfully when they login that they forget to. Still, IM is a push technology.

Now, the downside of push technologies is that you do nothing, and knocks at your door arrive. This is a huge timesaver, but it’s also a pain when you don’t want that form of communication, or to speak to that individual. Knocks on my door asking for money at dinner time are greeted nicely enough, but it’s all that I can do to not tell them what I’m really thinking. I’d rather be left alone, and initiate communication when I choose, when I feel like sharing my wealth, to instititutions that I choose.

How does RSS help with this? Well, it’s a pull technology. That’s not good in the sense of saving time, but since it’s a standard pull technology with a subscription model, that’s not bad. I no longer visit websites that don’t have RSS feeds, as I simply can’t remember to. I follow my feeds in an aggregator, lately using bloglines so my read feeds are recorded regardless of my location, and when I’m interested in the full story, I go to the site with the click of a mouse. Definitely a timesaver.

How does this fit into the Email issue? Well, for anyone using Email to distribute a newsletter, RSS is a great idea. One-way communication, pull technology, no simple way for a spammer to insert themselves, and life is good. However, for a collaborative mailing list, I don’t see RSS helping very much. You’ll get notification of a new post, and if it forms a thread that you want to watch, then you can subscribe. Mind you, managing a subscription for every thread sounds like a lot of work to me.

Still, if you’re a lurker and don’t contribute anything, it works fine. I suggest that mailing lists should implement feeds for this reason. But, when it comes time to respond, what does one do? You visit the site where the conversation is taking place. Probably a blog, with each post and it’s comments representing what is now an Email thread. You then possibly login to post, since so many of these things are commercial and don’t want anonymous posting (Artima for example), and you use your browser to respond, using the particular software that is being used, with its feature set that you may or may not yet know. You then go back to your feed reader.

So, instead of having to know my email client, now I need to know how to use a host of dissimilar blogging software, and probably login every time that I want to say something. Well, that should cut down on posting for those of us with little time for such things. I simply couldn’t afford the time. Since there’s no one-standard blog interface with single-sign-on, that just sounds like way too much work to me. I’ve tried this already with online web forums, and if I haven’t been there in a while, I need to go look-up my id and password in an encrypted file that I keep. Sometimes it doesn’t work anymore because the site upgraded and screwed up the accounts database, so I have to register again, or use the “lost password” function.

It has to be simple

“Any intelligent fool can make things bigger and
more complex… It takes a touch of genius - and
a lot of courage to move in the opposite
direction.” –Albert Einstein

RSS-based conversations just aren’t simple enough yet, and until they are, I don’t think they’ll replace Email. Now, something has to. Email in its current form should die a horrible death, and be reborn from its ashes into something that we can trust. We need the convenience of a push system without the annoyance and intrusiveness. Likely a pull system, but standardized and well supported with apps that make it no effort to do the pulling, but it has to facilitate 2-way communication easily. Dan Bernstein, the inventor of a host of ultra-secure, open-source server applications has an interesting proposal called Internet Mail 2000. He’s basically proposing a pull method for mail that puts more of the workload on the sender, which would prevent 1,000,000 spam/hour being sent, like we’re seeing now. It would also greatly reduce traffic on the Internet due to Email.

It’s not perfect, but I think that something like it, perhaps RSS 5.0, will give us a new Email infrastructure with an authenticated pull model. I really don’t know, but Email won’t die until something better comes along. RSS in its current form is not enough. IM is not enough. We need something more.

We might also remember that Email was enough, when those using it were very strict in how they did so. Almost overnight all Windows-based clients implemented RTF, and then HTML, and all rendered it differnently, marketing this like a good idea. The size of Email bloated. MIME attachments came long, and were then abused with 60Meg PowerPoint attachments, subsequently followed by complaints that the corporate Email server was slow. Ya think? Who can blame a spammer for getting on this bandwagon, and utilizing HTML mail to bring you new and better spam that happens to side-step the filters?

We have no one to blame for the current state of Email but ourselves, and our inappropriate, bloated uses of it. This is compounded by our lazy approach to security and authentication. This will also happen with whatever else comes along, if we do not learn from this. So far I don’t see the contenders learning from it much at all.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 13th, 2006 at 12:31 pm and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.