Much Ado About Email
It suddenly seems fashionable to predict the death of email. Ray Ozzie thinks that it's about to be replaced by workspaces for important tasks. Joi thinks it's broken. Hornik believes that it's the end of the web as he knows it (but he feels fine).
No way.
There's too much at stake. Email's too important to die, or even change in any significant way, and tens of billions of dollars in entrepreneurial capital and hundreds of millions of votes can be brought to bear on the spam, noise and virus problems.
Too much spam in your mailbox? Use Bayesian filters, which have gotten pretty good, or just subscribe to a service in the cloud. Need an instant, one-time email address? Mailinator it! Overwhelmed by virus-generated mail? Use a simple virus filter or rules that recognize the pattern(s) of emails generated by said virus.
So AOL has a problem with virus-generated emails hitting their servers? What's easier - for AOL to install application-level firewalls that operate at OC-48 speed and can trap virus-generated emails in realtime (yes, these exist), or for it to transition all of its users off of email?
Sure, a few, tech-savvy people will get frustrated and try and use a different mechanism. Many will use webs of trusted whitelists (think sixdegrees on your address book) or challenge-response systems. A few will storm off to some new, secure communications mechanism, that authenticates senders and imposes a true cost on them. Even fewer will migrate to wholly new paradigms like "shared workspaces."
But they'll be back - email is the ultimate network effect, and we're all locked in. Hundreds of millions of users have agreed upon a simple protocol, use it to exchange 31 billion messages per day, and no-way, no-how is that going to change.
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totally agree. RSS and other approaches aren't mission critical to millions of people. email is and always will be. let's fix spam and viruses instead of moving to something else
About a year ago my ISP installed a spam filter.
Since then I receive about 3 to 4 spams per week. Yes, per week.
:shouldershrug:
I use conventional filters on Entourage (Mac version of Outlook). Each day about 70 emails go right into the Junk folder. There are a couple of false positives. It takes about a minute to sort them out. There are also a few spam mails that get into my main personal folder. They disappear in 15 seconds.
My real problem is still management of conventional, desired email. How to file all those "Sent{" messages? Not just technologically, but ontologically! My mind has become a huge filing cabinet for putting things in virtual space, to be retrieved sometime later.
It's cliché in the Valley to knock 3D interfaces, but I can assure you, as a student of both experience design and environmental psychology, that immersive email displays will play a larger role in email management in the future. Imagine having a library at your disposal. That's the concept. Much better than a 2D desk.
The spam issue is a red herring.