

The Decline and Fall of Email - rfreytag
http://www.cringely.com/2010/11/the-decline-and-fall-of-e-mail/

======
gregschlom
Just as every business card in the world has a phone number on it, 20 years
from now every business card in the world will still have an email address on
it. 

Email simply addresses one of the most basic needs of human communication:
sending a written message to another person. 

------
kenjackson
I'd argue the opposite.  Email is going to experience a rebirth.  Why?  The
reason why email declined at all was because of an ubiquitous messaging
platform for the masses, SMS, while email wasn't nearly so (reading web email
on a mobile device a few years ago was a rarity). 

As mobile technology evolves, the use case for SMS disappears.  Email apps
become as ubiquitous on mobile devices as SMS apps. 

And once that happens the "immediacy" advantage disappears.  Today it is just
as fast for me to send a quick email as it is for me to send a SMS.  The speed
is purely the software, where SMS was, in the past, the only one integrated
with the phone contact list. 

Now that your email and SMS accounts will tend toward having parity in the
phone's software, I think the argument for 70 or 160 character limits
disappears, especially on a phone (yes, people make the argument), where I'm
already constrained by they keyboard and the fact that I'm usually on the go. 
And especially since on a mobile device, I HATE having to refactor my message
to get the last 7 letters to fit. 

The rebirth and re-emergence of email... it will look like a better SMS. 

~~~
p_nathan
Also, note that SMS is charged per/SMS, whereas email is a few KB for a
dataplan. 

I suspect as dataplans become ubiquitous, IM and email will merge with/replace
SMS.  Possibly the whole business will reduce down to point-to-point and
multicast messages in the end...

~~~
ido

        Also, note that SMS is charged per/SMS
    

Maybe officially, but I think pretty much every cellular plan I've seen in
years either has free SMS or gives you so many free SMS per month (1000s) as
to practically make SMS charges a non-issue. 

------
rapind
_"every wall or chat posting makes unnecessary at least one e-mail, maybe
several."_ 

Really?  The noisy little comments and messages on facebook would have been
emails?  He must have been getting a lot of one word emails then like "sup",
"hey liked the post", "i agree", "nailed it", "you're wrong", "me too",
"here's 20 completely irrelevant links", etc. 

Email still serves a purpose (one that most of us rely on).  Here's my
question.  What would impact your life more, the utter disappearance of email
or the utter disappearance of Facebook? 

~~~
chadp
Disappearance of facebook would affect me less than zero.  Like throwing away a
pair of socks with holes in them. 

I could not work or live without email however. 

~~~
rapind
Exactly.  Email is still the killer app of the Internet. 

------
chadp
My email is fine and with my spam filter, only the good messages get through. 

Also, business communication in every corner of this earth relies on email. 
That is not going to be going away any time soon. 

The younger generation will have to use email when they get jobs. 

------
petervandijck
Wrong on quite a few counts.  He forgets to mention the email protocol - it is
open in the true sense of the word and therefore is quite resilient.  Also, the
spam problem has been sufficiently solved at the moment afaik (Gmail is
awesomely good at it.) 

------
wladimir
Oh no, another 'email is dead' posting. 

How many of these have we had since 1995? 

Is it really really dead now?  Even deader?  Just like the phone?  like
snailmail?  Old, simple, technologies are really resilient. 

~~~
ergo98
These posts will only ever get on sites like HN with an inflammatory title. 
"Email on decline.  Less critical."  just isn't as edgy. 

His core point, however, is obvious and hard to argue with.  Just now I was
thinking about a number of people who I used to email with regularly, yet we
haven't exchanged emails in years now.  Instead it's all texts, IMs, Facebook
messages (which is like email...but not email), and so on.  Email just dropped
off the personal radar. 

So now my email inbox is full of receipts from online purchases, and lots and
lots of newsletters that I largely ignore.  Because there isn't the higher draw
value of personal content in there, I seldom do much more than scan it. 

------
edw519
Better title: The Decline and Fall of Noisy Email

Let texting, messaging, twitter, and Facebook become the platforms for noise. 

The signal is just fine in my gmail inbox. 

------
rwl
There's lots of Gmail love going on, here and in the comments on the original
post.  But notice the first few sentences of the post:

"I have in my computer every e-mail message I have sent or received since
1992.  Minus the obvious spam, this database comes to about half a million
messages..."

Gmail does not provide a local archive of mail messages, across the shifts in
providers, mail clients, and addresses that occur over a couple of decades of
using email.  Gmail has some nice features, no doubt (I do use it myself), but
it isn't a be-all, end-all email solution, particularly for those who need or
would like to keep their email under local control. 

Gmail's spam filtering is great, but it doesn't work 100% of the time.  Some
spam slips through to my inbox; what's worse, I have noticed a variety of
false-positives (e.g., regular emails from mailing lists that I often delete
but occasionally read aren't spam), meaning that I still must give the Spam
folder a once-over before I delete its contents. 

And, as far as I know, Gmail's spam filtering algorithm is proprietary.  This
means that the only way to get it is to route your email through Google, and
accept the attendant trade-offs of doing so.  Regardless of whether that works
for you, it isn't a sustainable solution to spam to tell people to "just use
Gmail." 

I would much prefer to see a new Internet email protocol evolve, maybe
something like what's described by this commenter
([http://www.cringely.com/2010/11/the-decline-and-fall-of-e-
ma...](http://www.cringely.com/2010/11/the-decline-and-fall-of-e-mail/comment-
page-1/#comment-38525)).  Basically, if we move to a new standard protocol
where something like the features of PGP are mandatory, then building (and
filtering mail by) a _distributed_ web of trust will become much easier.  ISPs
will migrate to this protocol because it will reduce their load and provide a
better experience for their customers; et voila, we will have overcome the
network effects hurdle that currently makes PGP essentially useless. 

~~~
phirephly
I don't quite understand what you mean by Gmail having no way to locally
archive email.  I use POP to locally cache all of my email on all my computers. 

~~~
rwl
True, it can be done; I didn't mean to imply that it couldn't.  This certainly
isn't the "default" way to use the service, though. 

But the little bit of extra work one has to do in Gmail to get local access to
your mail is simply one trade-off.  The real point is that using Gmail involves
a variety of trade-offs, which many email users may not be able to or may not
want to make.  So "just use Gmail" is not a sufficient answer to the problem of
spam. 

------
Goladus
The ability to comment publicly on articles largely replaced emailed comments. 
But most people don't have blogs, and probably never will, so I wouldn't call
that a sign email has fallen. 

~~~
ergo98
But if they're not putting their opinions and thoughts out there, it's
doubtful they were getting responses in any form. 

~~~
Goladus
There are plenty of reasons to contact someone other than responding to an
opinion on a blog. 

I've got a dozen emails in my inbox right now from friends, contacts, and
organizations like the choir I sing in. 

~~~
ergo98
For sure.  Unlike the RIM story of yesterday, he isn't claiming it's dead.  He
just talks about the decline and fall. 

And I think there's a lot of truth to it.  I don't quite buy the junk mail
argument -- I publicly publish my email address everywhere because junk mail
is generally a solved problem -- however I just think there are a lot of other
options that have added value or lower friction. 

A big personal use of email previously (5+ years ago) was the sending of
pictures.  You know -- the relative that sends you the 20 5MB pictures. 
Thankfully that is a thing of the past now, and people either post them on
Facebook, Flickr, etc. 

How about sharing other types of files?  It was a major problem when Outlook
started banning a lot of file types because that impeded how a lot of people
used email.  Now every uses Dropbox and other avenues to distribute files. 

Perhaps the reality is just that email was, for a time, used for a lot of
things that it wasn't appropriate for, and now it's back to its core value. 

------
wyclif
Email is still the killer app IMO.  To quote Twain, rumours of its death have
been greatly exaggerated. 

------
SimplePast
IMHO email is unavoidable for business communications.  It's one of the first
cloud hosted apps, the tools are mature and it has a probative value. 

------
MicahWedemeyer
Ah crap!  Email is dead!  Somebody go tell Mailchimp that they have to give back
all that money. 

------
latch
Not that its a solve-all, but I get the sense that he's never used gmail. 

------
eegilbert
I find myself longing for less clever spam filters.  Remember the good old days
when you could claim that your spam filter ate someone's email?  Ah, plausible
deniability …

------
cletus
Spam killed email?  Complaining about spam is something I only hear from people
who don't use gmail.  Prior to that I had a yahoo address.  I still login a
couple of times a year to keep it alive.  Very occasionally I see a relevant
message there but really it's 90% spam. I can't believe how bad yahoo still is
for spam. 

Also don't blame the spammer for spam.  Blame people.  Fact is, there wouldn't
be spam if it didn't work.  The ugly truth is that one person in a million who
can't find porn or Viagra on the Internet by themselves pays for all the spam. 

Facebook is obviously big now for communication but don't write off SMS yet
because it has one thing all the messaging wannabes still don't: ubiquity. 

Of course the fact that AT&T charges me 25 cents per SMS sent AND RECEIVED (no
other country does this to my knowledge; certainly Australia and Europe don't)
or I have to pay $90 for a pretty basic level of service (ludicrously high by
OECD standards) is another story entirely...

~~~
gst
Spam is really not an issue anymore.  I've got some mail adresses that would
receive hundreds of spam mails per day (those addresses are older than a
decade now). 

With fairly simple means I can block almost all of those mails on my own
mailserver with practically zero false positives.  In fact, the false positive
rate was so low that I now directly reject those mails during the SMTP dialog. 
This frees me from checking my spam folder, and at the same time gives senders
of legitimate mails (false positives) a notification that their mail has not
been delivered. 

~~~
rwl
This sounds like a great setup.  Would you mind sharing the details? 

~~~
gst
I mostly use standard settings of Postfix and some extensions, nothing fancy. 
Some things that my mailserver's config does:

\- Wait 15 seconds until responding on the SMTP port.  For real mailservers
that's not a problem, but spammers typically use a very low timeout as lots of
their mailadresses are invalid (and mailservers often don't even exist
anymore). 

\- Enforce some SMTP protocol characteristics.  E.g., spammers often try to
"pipeline" all their data directly after connection establishment. " Real"
mailservers don't do this (at least not until the remote server explicitly
states that it supports pipelining).  So we can just reject the connection if
this occurs. 

\- Use Greylisting (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greylisting>).  Disadvantage:
Seems to cause problems with some mailservers. 

\- Use zen.spamhaus.org blacklist.  Disadvantage: There may be some false
positives, but have not encountered them so far.  You can mitigate
disadvantages of Greylisting and the Spamhaus blacklist by not using the
blacklist for a accept/reject decision, but for a greylisting/no-greylisting
decision.  So "good" IPs aren't greylisted, and dubious IPs must pass the
Greylisting check. 

\- Strictly enforce SPF if the sender's domain configured it with "-all".  This
blocks all the rolex.com spam. 

\- Not yet, but I will use this soon: Add support for Spamhaus' SWL whitelist
and do no further Spam checks for messages from trusted IPs. 

\- If a message passes all those checks use Spamassassin for a content check. 
We can allow a pretty high Spamassassin here as most spam mails have been
blocked in the previous steps.  By using Spampd with Spamassassin, Spamassassin
can reject messages during the SMTP dialog.  In addition, Spamassassin is
configured to use Razor, to detect "known" spam messages. 

------
giantsquid
So anybody here not use email?