Monday, September 01, 2003

We don’t need no stinking email A variety of problems have plagued email system recently.  Sobig  clogged email systems, and overwhelmed email clients.   A variety  of solutions have been proposed such as better procedures, better user education, and more government regulation. Some have said no solution will ever work because the profit motive will always be a stronger motive.  If above solutions worked we would not have any crime. I think that there is a fundamental flaw in the concept of email.  It was developed in an environment that did not envision either the profit motive or people who like to cause trouble. As I scan my sent mail folder here are some of the things I do with email: communications with co-workers, communications with friends, commercial transactions, file transfers, communicating with groups of people, synchronizing information between different computing platforms that I use.  As security becomes a more important concern I note that my email is not encrypted, but that most of it travels in SSL tunnels.  Now that I am using Evolution as my email client, I can use PGP. Perhaps I should call it Novell Evolution. There is a communication system that started from a different prospective and could be adapted to provide the kinds of communications that I need without all of the problems that email has.  Instant messaging starts with the premise that you want to know who you communicate with.  You have a list of buddies.  Anonymous people can’t send you messages, just a request to talk to you.  You can remove temporarily or permanently anybody from your list.  Normally you communicate with a person and exchange some piece of information such as a screen name before the communication. The main advantage of IM is that you can immediately communicate or send files to somebody.  Right now, IM is missing two things that email systems have, a method to send a message or a file to somebody who is not currently available and a method to file information that you have received.  ICQ has some offline facilities I believe.  My guess is that it would be easier to add the missing features to IM than to try and fix the email system. 2:13:58 PM     comment []  trackback []