I am on the verge of despairing over the future of e-mail. I'm seeing
figures suggesting that over ninety percent of all e-mail traffic is now spam. Wow. The world is going dark out there.
I am having an increasing number of "all spam downloads" on my computer. I download e-mail, my spam filters tag the spam, it gets trashed and my inbox ends up completely empty. 100% futile e-mail downloads. Wow.
At the same time, I am seeing mobile devices appear that are all about dedicated attention to managing e-mail. No browsing, no voice calls - just e-mail. I don't get e-mail, I get spam. Admittedly, I have taken steps to move some of my electronic communications out of my inbox. Over the last while I have been un-subscribing from information sources that I can get via RSS/Atom feeds. I get lots of work-related e-mail but its from a small number of sources.
I am reminded - in a bad way - of the relationship between registered letters and postcards. In some countries, postcards have become so hit-and-miss in terms of delivery that they are only used for vacation "wish you were here" messages. You would not use them for anything important. I fear we are heading the same way with the open, global e-mail system.
Unfortunately, all the alternatives have problems. All the alternatives appear to need to actively inhibit communications in order to improve the quality of the communication. There is some universal law hidden in there I think. "The quality of an electronic message is inversely proportional to the ease with which it was sent and received" - or something like that. E-mail will not disappear of course - even under the burden of ninety percent spam. It will, however, be increasingly less important as a business tool.
Technology marketing being what it is, the replacement will probably be called e-mail too but it will have to work on a very different model and substrate. White-lists based on bona-fide business IP addresses, digital signatures, "call back" systems, micro-payment digital postage stamps etc. etc.
I have a hunch which is also a suspicion and a fear. I fear that the only pragmatic way to make e-mail quality go up significantly is via re-inter-mediating the communication channel. We will reach a point of desperation here the privacy concerns of that model are outweighed by the convenience of it.
Whoever cracks that will win and will win big. I would pay some money for higher quality "e-mail". I'm pretty sure you would too. Who will take our money?
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Hasn't gmail already
Hasn't gmail already intermediated mail? I like it a lot because it deals with most spam. Yes I have privacy nags, but I just have to deal with them...use https...say a few prayers...Superboreen, Yes, I think
Superboreen,Yes, I think gmail is a good example of re-intermediation with spam-removal as one of the value adds.
Sean
Email paralysis
You're spot on Sean.When you take the spam out of the equation the problem is still significant. I've seen some reports that the average knowledge worker sends and receives 25k emails a year and spends 28% of their time dealing with the information overload that entails. Recent articles in the Guardian, LA Times and NY times have all covered this problem in some detail.
Email has revolutionized how people work together but it is a pre-web technology that's hit the concrete ceiling.
Fortunately, there's quite a few companies, big and small working on the problem at the moment. At Enterprise 2.0 this year and the energy was palpable.
There's a range of approaches being taken from: trying to fix email (I'm reminded of the Ted Nelson quote about grafting arms and legs back on a hamburger), to porting consumer Web2.0 features to enterprise platforms. Some companies are doing very different things.
Michael Arrington covered it in some detail in Techcrunch in March this year. “The long term answer to all of this isn’t that people need to try harder to respond to communication requests... There are lots of startups addressing the email problem... I’m thinking of something significantly more revolutionary than fixing email. Like a new way of communicating entirely.”
The problem is far from solved, but it is getting some serious focus now.