News Email is dead

From The Inquirer:

EMAIL IS BROKE, and if we continue to use the current protocols that manage it, we'll simply get to the point where we won't want to use it. That’s a shame.

After differing false starts (largely because the world hadn’t been networked together), email is arguably the application that drives inter-business and individual communications today. From pizza parlours to cell phones, connectivity is still driven around personal communications as the killer app. And whether it's web-based, POP or IMAP, the underlying protocols are as open as a book and subject to lots of spamming skullduggery.

Sure, you can fight back, but no one has time. Sam Spade (www.samspade.org) has a great app to find spammers and kill their accounts. It might even work if it weren't for the fact that most mail service providers don't look at their spam complaints until the damage is far past done.

I surveyed the accounts of ten 419 spammers (I'm guessing the same guy) last week, most of them located at home.nl. I sent not one, but ten complaints. As of today, the complaints haven’t been addressed save for the cursory do-not-reply acknowledgement sent by most mail providers. Despite the fact that most people are on to what 419 spam is (the famous Nigerian Letter and variants) there are people like my dear sweet dottering mother that’s occasionally unlikely to even remember what day it is, let alone details about 419. As PT Barnum said, "there's a sucker born every minute".

And so, three years from now, two classes of email will likely emerge: authenticated email, and wild-and-woolly unauthenticated email—the type we use today

Full article here

Email's dead baby, Email's dead....