At 8:19 AM -0400 2006-08-15, Barry Warsaw wrote:
I tend to be more sanguine about things. I'm younger than you but I've been around for long enough to have heard about the death of the internet/arpanet for 25 years. It hasn't happened yet and I don't think email and SMTP is going away any time soon.
We're certainly getting there for some people. I found out the other night that my Mom no longer bothers doing e-mail. Okay, she's 62, retired six months early due to medical problems (terminal cancer), but she's still got a few good months left and she doesn't want to waste them trying to fight spam in her mailbox. So, she just reads most of the time.
My own spam load is around 90-99%, depending on how bad the day is. My ISP routes all their mail for their customers through Postini, and they catch 90% of that, but that still leaves a lot for the ISP to deal with. So, they set up their own secondary anti-spam handling system, which is still as large or larger than the entire rest of the mail system put together. And I still get an annoying amount of spam that gets through to my client, which also has anti-spam features integrated.
I can certainly see why many people would get to the point where they start feeling like e-mail no longer has any real value. I certainly feel that way about most USENET newsgroups I know of, and for the same reasons.
Maybe all the kids will gravitate toward other modes of communication and leave us dinosaurs to our spam riddled 20th century telegraphs.
They already have. It's called IM, chat, or txtng -- depending on the exact platform.
Many times I've said that e-mail is the only universal mission-critical platform, but I've also said that each organization may have their own mission-critical applications on top of that. AOL is no different.
When I was the Sr. Internet Mail Administrator for AOL, we had only two mission-critical applications -- e-mail and chat. If they weren't available, then most customers would just leave, because there wasn't much of anything else that they wanted to do.
And "spim" is already a major problem, or so I hear. I haven't heard of "spat" or "sptxt" being much of an issue, but I'm sure that they'll figure out a way to abuse those systems as well.
Thanks to Dateline NBC and Stone Phillips, we have certainly seen way more than we ever wanted to know about how predators use IM to lure kids into abusive situations, and I guess that would probably be the worst form of "spim".
Or maybe we'll stay just barely ahead of the spammers enough to eek out the benefits of email and mailing lists for another 20 years.
I think we'll try, and for some people we will succeed, but my fear is that more and more people are going to start giving up on e-mail and will switch to alternative communication methods.
Those methods are likely to be less convenient because if it's too convenient for us then it will probably be much too convenient for spammers.
-- Brad Knowles, <brad@stop.mail-abuse.org>
"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
-- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), reply of the Pennsylvania
Assembly to the Governor, November 11, 1755Founding Individual Sponsor of LOPSA. See <http://www.lopsa.org/>.