The Message and the Medium
by Mark Ontkush, Boston, Massachusetts, USA on 03.19.07
There's a witty yarn in transportation engineering concerning traffic jams. When asked to how to reduce congestion and commuting times, the sagely planner responds "stop moving things around so much". It's good advice, especially when it comes to email.
Because according to Postini's last communication intelligence report, about 94 percent of all email is spam. Spam increased 147 percent in 2006 and caused a 334 percent increase in processing requirements for corporate email. Some systems are simply melting down under the pressure - too many messages for the medium to handle. And when you figure in the massive amount of hardware and energy to keep the global electronic mail system afloat, a six percent 'success rate' is just unacceptable.
There's a lot of talk about how to solve the problem. Phil Wainewright from ZdNet thinks that, from the cost perspective alone, running an in-house messaging program borders on obscene. George Ou from same thinks it's not that bad, and of course there is always Google who has had both feet in the game with GMail, one of the largest email providers in the world.
Out of these options, services like GMail will probably carry the day. Centralization reduces the massive redundancy of resources - multiple email servers, support personnel, etc. - and it also reduces spam, as each one that is detected is removed for millions of users at once. That's a lot more efficient than having thousands of email servers getting sent the same spam, checking it, then having each one delete it for a few hundred users. In sum, global, centralized email is probably the best way to deliver that service. And that takes into account people, profit and the planet.
What's the true cost of freedom? Centralised servers may be good for fighting spam, but in long run they give much too much personal information on the disposal of a few corporations. And it's way too easy for a government to bend down a large e-mail provider to disclose correspondence than to make the same with many small ones. Anyway, sending clear text messages is a plea for trouble, so it's better to encrypt; PGP (or GnuPG) + Thunderbird (with OpenPGP plugin) are your friends. Remember, the more people encrypt, the more difficult it is for the governments to meddle with it.
Hi Sava,
This is an excellent point, worth a whole series of posts exploring. One item it brings up for me immediately is how nationalism plays a part in this i.e. how many of Google's emails are non-US and also how willing people are to trust them. I will follow this up at a later date.
mark
Hi Sava,
Hear hear! I'm a big fan of PGP and GnuPGP myself. Glad to know that I'm not alone here.
For their personal email accounts, some of our colleagues have had success with Disposible Webmail / email addresses - and when creating a New, permanent email user account - using a service that requires the first time senders to acknowlege the email FIRST before allowing it to go through to verify that they are human
For their corporate email , they began replacing the email addresses on their Websites with Formail and Fax #s - for those wishing to get in touch with the company
Brad,
Clean it up a bit and repost. You have some good points which I would like to respond to,
Mark