[ih] The Decline and Fall of Internet Email?

[Miles Fidelman]

John Levine via Internet-history wrote:
> 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.
>
>
Maybe not typical - but the folks who built email for use as an 
enterprise communications tool - particularly for use on projects that 
cross organizations:  Education, Academic Publishing, development 
communities, ... .

The audience & uses have expanded, to the extent that email has largely 
replaced postal mail - but the community has not put the same attention 
into maintaining the "system," as we do for postal mail, or, for that 
matter, telephone & now txt services.  Yes, spam is a problem for postal 
mail, phones, and txt - but we don't insert "moderators" in the process, 
nor block stuff without explicit instructions.

And, funny thing, don't we have an "email privacy act" that should be 
protecting us from a lot of the recent anti-spam & anti-offense mechanisms?

We seem to have made great strides in things like governing IP address 
assignment, securing routing mechanisms, and such - and put a lot of 
effort into setting up the quasi-regulatory processes around ICANN - but 
we've let folks go wild with mucking up the email environment.  This 
just strikes me as wrong - letting political & consumer considerations 
get in the way of what's essentially an enterprise communications platform.

Miles Fidelman

-- 
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is.  .... Yogi Berra

Theory is when you know everything but nothing works.
Practice is when everything works but no one knows why.
In our lab, theory and practice are combined:
nothing works and no one knows why.  ... unknown