The Decline and Fall of Email

http://www.cringely.com/2010/11/the-decline-and-fall-of-e-mail/

by rfreytag • 16 years ago

26 34 16 years ago

wyclif• 16 years ago

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

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.)

chadp2• 16 years ago

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.

wladimir• 16 years ago

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.

_grrr• 16 years ago

And, importantly, in the case of email, companies can host their own mail servers & thus better protect their data. Can you really imagine companies allowing facebook to host sensitive corporate communications?

tomjen3• 16 years ago

It is as dead as the telegraph.

ergo983• 16 years ago

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.

p_nathan2• 16 years ago

Agreed. I prefer email or paper letters for any substantiative communication in my personal communication - at work, email is the communication medium. IM is available, but it far, far, far lags email.

SimplePast• 16 years ago

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.

gregschlom• 16 years ago

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.

MicahWedemeyer• 16 years ago

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

edw519• 16 years ago

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.

Goladus2• 16 years ago

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.

ergo983• 16 years ago

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

Goladus2• 16 years ago

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.

latch• 16 years ago

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

rapind2• 16 years ago

"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?

chadp2• 16 years ago

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.

rapind2• 16 years ago

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

samatman• 16 years ago

I actually wish Facebook would utterly disappear.

Okay, not really; that would in fact ruin a lot of people's day. But from my selfish perspective, it would fix the only problem with quitting Facebook: All my friends are still using it.

kenjackson• 16 years ago

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_nathan2• 16 years ago

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• 16 years ago

    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.

mnutt• 16 years ago

The problem with that is that many non-business people don't have audible notifications turned on for email. When I receive an SMS I know it's a real person and thus important, whereas when I receive an email it's probably a group-buying site email or a server notification or something else not worth interrupting me. Until we get much better prioritization tools, it'll be hard for SMS to replace email.

giantsquid• 16 years ago

So anybody here not use email?

cletus• 16 years ago

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...

gst2• 16 years ago

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.

rwl3• 16 years ago

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

eegilbert• 16 years ago

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 …

rwl3• 16 years ago

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...). 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• 16 years ago

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.

rwl3• 16 years ago

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.

The Decline and Fall of Email

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