[ih] The Decline and Fall of Internet Email?

[John Levine]

It appears that Jack Haverty via Internet-history <jack at 3kitty.org> said:
>Today (literally), it seems that email is broken and unreliable and 
>there is little reason to believe it will improve.  Technical mechanisms 
>may be inadequate, incomplete, or simply not deployed. Management, 
>whoever that is for the Internet now, seems unaware or unconcerned or 
>unable to fix it.  I've personally recently heard from non-technical 
>users that their "email is broken".  They of course have no idea why or 
>what to do about it.

We are not typical mail users and I would not overgeneralize from our
individual experience. Discussion lists this one are without a doubt
the most screwed up part of the mail world, but we are maybe 1% of the
total mail users.

Normal person to person mail still works pretty well. There are
certainly glitches but when I ask people who claim it's totally
broken, it usually turns out that the problem is that they're
doing something like sending 50 copies of a message to people
they don't usually correspond with.

And the people who run mail systems definitely care that they work, I
go to meetings and talk to them all the time.  Spammers and other
crooks are persistent enough that it's a bad idea to talk about
spam filtering and other mail security in public in other than
the most general terms.

R's,
John