I have in my computer every e-mail message I have sent or received since 1992. Minus the obvious spam, this database comes to about half a million messages from people as varied (or similar, if you think about it) as Larry Ellison and Larry Flynt. But lately my e-mail seems to be dying. Yours is, too.
What’s happening to e-mail is complex but comes down to changing contexts and competing media. Back in 1992 communication for me meant e-mail (which at that time for me was cc:mail, MCI Mail, and Internet mail), snail mail, Usenet newsgroups, bulletin board systems like The WELL, telephone, and fax. Today the mix has changed almost completely and I have Internet mail, snail mail, SMS, various chat systems (Skype, iChat, ICQ, etc.), Twitter, Facebook and other social networks, and the big one for me — WordPress. BBS’s are gone as are proprietary e-mail systems, my fax machine was thrown-away long ago and Usenet has been subsumed into the Internet as a whole.
Spam killed for most of us the native joy of e-mail. Looking back at my early 1990s mailboxes I see a rich discourse with readers and almost no spam at all. There was no noise to cut through, no need for social networks to vet our contacts. I could get to almost anyone back then by e-mail and they could get to me.
Then spam spoiled it all. I hate spam. I feel betrayed by spam and the spam industry. Remember those proposals to put an ISP postage charge on e-mails to eliminate spam? Those proposals failed because it looked too much like a restriction of speech or a violation of net neutrality, but I wish it had worked. I’d gladly pay a couple bucks per month to be truly spam-free.
But as we are wont to do, instead we added a layer of technology to deal with spam just as we had for viruses and trojans. Anti-spam became a big business just as spam had become before it. I’m paying that couple of bucks but this way it isn’t deterring spam at all, just hiding most of it.
For me a second big e-mail hit came with my switch to WordPress in late 2008. Changing from Moveable Type at PBS to WordPress on my own was a revelation since it eliminated two editorial layers and replaced crappy technology with elegant technology. But the unintended consequence for me was a huge drop in e-mail volume since readers could now comment on my work so easily (and publicly) that they didn’t bother anymore to write to me directly. I miss the mail, frankly. I get it that the new system is better for you, but it isn’t as much fun for me.
Then in the last year something new has happened, which I see as the combined rise of mobile Internet technology and Facebook. While smartphones have made us more e-mail-enabled than ever, I think people are actually sending less total e-mail as a result, substituting SMS texting and mobile use of social networks.
Facebook has brought for non-professional writers in us the same e-mail effect I saw when I jumped to WordPress: every wall or chat posting makes unnecessary at least one e-mail, maybe several.
And don’t forget that our youngest networked generation — teenagers — doesn’t e-mail at all, preferring the immediacy and intimacy of texting to almost anything else.
E-mail will never completely die, but I feel it has lost critical mass and is fading rapidly. That’s why when Facebook announced Titan, its new inter-user communication platform, they had such a hard time explaining what it was. Zuckerberg & Co. want us to see Titan as the universal communicator but they feel they can’t, at the same time, say that other media are dying as a result. They don’t want to be seen as the predators they are.
But predators are an essential part of any healthy ecosystem, remember. So this is all good, I guess.
Sad, but good.
Will it take though? I don’t know of anyone with a face book account that’s bothered with it. Maybe the younger generation will pick it up and run with it, but most of the people I know aren’t interested.
Then again they’re a lot more circumspect about how much of their personal information they’re willing to put online, let alone on one site.
Everyone I know lives on Facebook, or Twitter. For me, email is all BACN or other mail lists. Very little spam, because Gmail gets it all, but every little of interest, too. I am slowly saying goodbye to email and to the telephone, unless it’s Skype. My life is chat, SMS, and social media. And I feel good about it. I always hated email:-)
I use SMS and Skype for back and forth chatting and email for, well, mail. Letter like communications. I deleted Facebook account long time ago, but I am glad it is around, a giant honeypot for spammers, marketing people, and similar types.
Server side spam filtering works for me. As John Dvorak famously said “I get no spam.”
Yeah, Gmail has made spam a thing of the past. I wonder why spammers even bother spamming Gmail accounts. It’s a bit like a webservice with four nines uptime – it’s that accurate.
Spam is a non-issue for Gmail users.
Agree, with gmail I get maybe two spam emails a week. Of course I have to peek in my spam filter from time to time to make sure to un-spam false positives, but thats pretty rare.
You can have server side spam filtering without gmail. My ISP, Covad, has been providing it for years.
Server-side filtering has some problems. I tried to set up a majordomo list for my Lions club, using email forwards (so that everyone in the club has an email address with the club’s domain), and found that 20% of messages to the club bounce because of server-side filtering. Mostly Verizon.com. Bummer.
Verizon.com also made it nearly impossible for me to function as a co-moderator for comp.lang.c++.moderated (Usenet). Ham-handed morons.
So why not just sign the club up for a free google apps account? You can integrate it with the domain and everyone gets a gmail account. I’ve been doing this with every domain / sub-domain / willing client, etc. I’ve been forced to manage email for over the last three years and everyone loves it! Happy customers = big win!
The happiest customer of all is me. I’ve wrangled many & varied email systems in production environments for years. They mostly work, but they always break eventually. Or the user breaks the client. With the gmail infrastructure and gmail web client support is a non-issue. Install gattach on the clients and never use (or support) outlook or outlook express again. Major win!
I’ll use this as an opportunity to plug the service who John Dvorak uses to filter his spam, because I started to use them as well. My internet domain, which I’ve had since the mid 80s, is something of a spam magnet. Within hours of switching on the spam filtering service, it was like turning off a gushing faucet. Email became useful and usable again. So here’s the service that both John Dvorak and I are using:
https://www.junkemailfilter.com/spam/
Anyway, I similarly lament the tide away from email, but I still use email as my central notification space. Any social media updates that are directed specificly at me (ie facebook mail, as opposed to wall updates) I see first and oftentimes only in my inbox. Many services allow for reply via email, so my mail client has become an extension of the social media spaces, rather than a dying ancestor.
Facebook and similar services are great for general chatter into the social space, but there’s something about the ownership of your email box that makes it sacrosanct and home. Having one central location that maintains all my personal communication is crucial to having a sense of place on the internet, but before social media it was used for inappropriate tasks like group communication, for lack of better tools. Now, with the advent of those better tools, we can use it to focus on the particular uses that it does best.
I do miss the early days of email, as well as the early days of the Internet. Everyone back then was interested in the same thing as you – software fiddling and hardware configuration. Then this pesky things called AOL, USENET discussion groups, and Gopher came along and spoiled everything. Real Netizens build SMTP headers by hand. I want my bangpath back.
So there…
USENET (NNTP) was the natural evolution of the local BBS. I still prefer it to web based forums.
I tried facebook and dumped it after a month or two. It felt like I was having 20 simultaneous conversations mostly about trivia. I prefer to hold my thoughts until I have something to say, and then dump on my friends via e-mail.
Our kids (10 & 12) do not use email, and can’t for the life of them understand why we bother. They use SMS and Facebook, and Facebook is in rapid decline. Jumped the shark, apparently.
Also, they are far better than we are at filtering. They clean up their iPhone and iPad home screens ruthlessly, and are quite picky about what kind of messages they bother to reply to.
The kids are OK. They grow up with it, and evolve better ways to deal. We should learn from them, not the other way around I guess. Once technology gets simple enough to use that even a child can do it, they can evolve the complex strategies that we all will need to adopt 🙂
My two 11 and 12 are not into Facebook either, text on game consoles or integrated voice preferred. I wonder if this does indicate Facebook has peaked and will be on the decline. Good thing they stayed private.
Hmm, I also heard that the young generation use to communicate without email, but what I don’t get is how they contact someone who is not their facebook friend? For kids it’s ok to not contact strangers, but generaly I don’t get the point of using only SMS and facebook.
Also, how I would get notifications about replies in the public forums if I do not have email address? Most such discussing systems use email as a form of notification.
I wonder if Bob (and others who comment on this article) might be confusing SMS with IM. IIRC, the Kim phone which targeted teens, did not have SMS but did have IM. Sorry, I don’t know any current teens with whom I could consult.
I think a lot of folks are missing the point. Facebook (and texting) work for the teenaged set because their messages are “in the moment”: nothing more complex than “where are you?” or “meet you at the mall” or “the sky is beautiful this AM”. (I will grant you that recognizing the latter is a relevant and happy on a daily basis once you pass 60.)
For actual grownups who have something meaningful to do, some transaction to make, some information to convey to clients, email and collaboration tools carry the main load. I do NOT want my biz plan or invoices on Facebook. Heck, I barely trust Google Docs, and I have yet to hear of a single breach in that service.
I’ll stick with Gmail, thank you very much.
i enjoy useing facebook because, when the wind is right and the moon is full, very intelligent conversations unfold. I fondly recall one about West Virginia’s refrigerator disposal laws.
But these are not that common. My feed is flooded with information about how my friends are playing this or that game, like this or that app, or have fallen for clearly bogus apps and pages. And as a communication tool, i dislike relying on it.
Email is superior to facebook and sms because it is Independant of the rest if your information. Giving someone your email address is far safer than friending them on facebook or giving out a phone number. An email address tells you little about the owner. you would need to be aable to hack if you wanted to even know what country someone ushually logged into an email account from. Instant messaging services like aim and gtalk are about the same.
Facebook, however, is a bad tool for communicating with anyone you don’t know. to keep it brief: all your personal information is convieniantly located in one place. This is made worse by the many who do not use the privacy tools, and the fact that everyone has a different standard for friending someone. I only add those whom i hope to enjoy talking to. Many around me need only have met someone once before adding them.
Sms has a similar, but less accessable weakness. Anyone can purchase a reverse telephone lookup on a cellphone number. Landlines are even worse: reverse lookups are often free. (i have found that, when explaining to girls why they should be careful who they give their number to, being too specific makes you come off as creepy)
Email is simple, safe, and gets the job done. So why does my mother struggle with it so much?
FYI you can hide all those game etc updates. Just click on the [x] and it will give you the option to hide any updates from this game forever. The only way to make the update stream bearable. You can also hide people – which I do as I got some in my network that I don’t actually know and that post constantly. So I just hide them as unfriending would be a bit rude.
Seriously, spam? I use Gmail and Google Apps for all my mail and don’t really know about spam.
But, ok, let’s assume the problem needs fixing. I really don’t see what the problem is, technically. SMTP was “Simple mail etc”. We’re not stuck with it forever. Create “Slightly More Complex Mail Transport Protocol” instead of flailing around trying to secure the old one. Do it for just the top few mail server providers, services and clients. Work towards the point where all reputable mails are signed, attach some level of reputation to the system so bad providers/domains/networks lose their ‘license’, and those who never spam are never blocked. Accept SMTP (for, I dunno, a decade) but be much more aggressive in handling it over time.
If we’d done this in 2000 we would have had no spam by now. Instead, we stuff around trying to secure sand using a fish net.
I agree about spam. I forward my various email addresses to Gmail and read and reply to them there.
Result:
~ 0 spam, ~ 0 real messages flagged as spam.
I really can’t understand all the praise Gmail filters get. I have to assume either people don’t get too much mail from unknown people, or they just don’t check their junk folder and don’t realize there is legit mail there.
I provide support for software, answering about 20 emails daily from people I don’t know (and not in my contact list) and every time I have to answer to a gmail account, I feel really sad because I know there is a 50% percent the mail is going to junk. And as gmail users trust their spam filters so much, I know they won’t search for my answer there. So I will have an angry customer, who thinks I am not answering his emails, that keeps writing to me asking me why I don’t answer, and to whom I keep answering, from different email accounts, and including their full email quoted to try to let the spam filters know I am *answering* an email that was sent to me, so it can’t be unsolicited spam, but my answers keep going to the void.
I know it sounds like I am exaggerating, but I am not. I think actually 50% estimate of mails to gmail going to junk is in the low side. And it is really really frustrating. That’s why I wonder how people can trust gmail that much. Is just that they don’t realize they are getting legit main the the spam, or is it that I am the only unlucky one with the problem?
I have to agree with the original post: spam has killed the joy in mail to me. Not because of my side (I turn off all email filters here, even in gmail where they don’t provide a simple way to do it), but because I can never be sure if the guy I am sending the email is going to get my answer or not (and just assume I didn’t want to answer).
What I don’t agree is that email is dying, at least in my case. I would prefer that users posted their questions in the forums (where there is no risk of mail being lost), but I would say over 90% of people prefers support via email. It feels more intimate, you can say things that you wouldn’t in a public forums, maybe share some semi confidential data that is needed to solve the problem, etc. I imagine the case of the original poster should be similar, there is many people who doesn’t want to post in a public forum (and maybe get into an useless discussion with lots of people he doesn’t care about) , and that they might prefer to email directly.
Doubt it – if they write you, then Gmail would already whitelist your email address. Wouldn’t it?
I check my spam folder occasionally. Usually it’s all spam.
Normally the email from where we answer is not the same as where they write. They write to a generic “support” address, and then that mail gets delivered to the right support guy, who answers from his own email address. (so following emails go directly through the guy doing the support and the customer)
But the filters should be smart enough to realize the full original mail quoted is the same as the email they sent, and they don’t.
Anyway, I would doubt it too if it didn’t actually happened to me, as gmail filters always get good reviews everywhere. So I am not trying to convince you or anybody, just venting.
Is your mail server using SPF entries in your DNS to validate the sending server? That goes a long way to ensure your email isn’t seen as spam.
I am not sure, and I believe that our mail provider is a little crappy, but sadly I can’t do much about it, that’s responsibility of other people who doesn’t really care too much. I will ask anyway, but I doubt much will be done.
But I have seen this “over aggressive” behavior in gmail mailing from many addresses, not just my work address, so I don’t believe it is just a problem with our mail provider. And before I removed the spam filter in my own gmail account (by adding a filter to keep spam in inbox, because google don’t allow you to disable it), I did got legit email from friends in my spam folder too. But I know it is all anecdotic proof, and I know other people has very different experiences, so that’s ok. I just wanted to share mine 🙂
Adrian, my thought first came when you mentioned talking to customers over gmail. It may be that the conversations you have use language which is closer to spam language, and so that may raise your false rate.
The other issue is indeed if this business email works off a poor provider. That may mean there are reputation problems, and these also add to the score.
My own experience with gmail parallels that of others: it just works, and works very well with regard to spam. I have about one legitimate message falsely caught in a month, out of many hundreds. Almost no spam gets through at all.
I did run a local learning filter for a year or two before Gmail, a top-reputation one, and it did no where near as well as Gmail does.
Maybe some of the conversation here will influence your employers, so you have a better time.
Regards
On Gmail and spam, I run a small internet business and get support emails every day, which are forwarded from another email address to Gmail. I check my spam folder regularly, but in the last 6 or 8 months I’ve had only had one genuine support email end up in the spam folder.
I have my Gmail account set up so that I can reply as if from the original account. Gmail adds a header line saying that the message is sent by Gmail on behalf of such-and-such account, but unless the user looks at the header information he won’t even be aware of this. He will see the reply coming from the email address he originally sent his email to.
@Mark S: If you forward all your email accounts to gmail and reply from there, don’t the future email responses go directly to gmail since that was the from address you used? If so, why even have other accounts at all?
No, in Gmail you can reply as though the message is coming from another account, and the receiver will reply to the original email address.
I have to check gmail’s spam bucket regularly. I get about 2-3% false positives. Occasionally one of those is from a customer trying to do business with me.
Email from real people i.e. friends and non-work related individuals has certainly dropped, but my morning inbox is now typically stuffed with emails from Facebook to tell me someone has sent me a message, wants to be a friend and so on, email from a dozen or so Linkedin groups to tell me …(actually very little – Linkedin is rarely a source of useful information), a few messages from ning communities and so on – you get the idea.
Oh and my favourite – I get a DM on Twitter, alerted on Blackberry, reply and a few minutes later an email to tell me I have a DM
So the vast majority of my email is alerts that I have messages in other places.
There are settings I suppose …
I agree – a huge amount of mail is not exactly Spam, but robo-mail of either a political, commercial or Facebook/LinkedIn origin. I have opted in at one point with each of these I suppose, but the total effect is much like spam – messages I have a relatively low interest in.
Facebook, is and will continue to evolve as a tool for filtering web content. I just hide anyone who is an active game player, or who posts too much non interesting stuff.
To address Bob’s post: It is weird to be old enough to see multiple generations of technology on the scrap heap! And it is strange to gauge the viability of a technology by observing whether it is useful to twelve year olds. I guess I’m now sitting at the geezers table!
My guess is that Titan will be Facebook’s Buzz. A potentially powerful product that nobody wants.
Email may be old, but it’s trustworthy in a way that the new messaging media are not.
I think Titan will be something like today’s FB messaging system, with the addition that you can also email from/to it, and also send SMS from/to it. I don’t believe FB users will not want it.
We use yahoo mail, mainly for business purposes. Its just fine !
and for the quick stuff, the chinese QQ…
The BBS set the pattern. Early adopters followed by other true believers. Next come the masses which attract the commercial interests. Then it implodes as the commercial interests ruin it (SPAM and “legit” advertisers) for the early adopters who flee to the “next thing”. And the cycle repeats. Facebook is next. It’s being made more & more worthless by commercial interests. It will be largely irrelevant in a few years and another Zuckerberg takes the stage.
Robert, you’re ascribing your personal anecdotal evidence to a communications medium. If you instead look at the data you’ll find that email continues to grow faster than Facebook. It has to since you need an email address to join Facebook. Also, it remains the most efficient way to conduct business. No one has yet developed anything more efficient. The days of sending jokes have ended but email is alive and well and growing stronger by the day.
Bob,
Where do you get your pictures? Are they royalty free? Just curious.
Thanks,
Paul
One of the worst misunderstandings with my wife occurred through the use of SMS. Had we been using email, it would have been less likely to happen, and impossible had we been speaking on our iPhones. It was so disturbing that I think everyone needs training, like all good writers, to understand the respective mediums. But I must add that in my estimation Facebook is the worst for any meaningful exchange.
Communication is changing rapidly. When Titan was announced, I wondered if the inventors had ever heard of an iPhone. Modern smartphones already coordiante all of these different types of communication, I think that is one thing they are best at.
As smartphones spread and carrier data plans are more accessible, people won’t care how their instant messages get to them. It’s incredible how some of these programs will broadcast your posts to many of the major social networks at once. This fight is just just starting and I think the winners will be those that control the aggregators.
Google’s strategy is played on a much lower hand. With Gmail(email), Talk (IM), Voice(SMS), Wave (group meeting…and no it’s not dead), Buzz (still junk, but in progress), Orkut (Social Networking), Google Maps (new commenting and posting system as well as Latitude), Picasa Web Albums, and Google Reader (I love it, not sure if anyone else does)…many of these new ways to communicate exist. Smartly, they are moving towards incorporating many of the communcation features into Gmail as your one window (at least with Talk and Voice, and then with notifications from other services forwarded to Gmail).
Anyways…I’ve rambled. But Titan is wishful thinking since I’ve tired quickly of Facebook because of its empty discussions and intrusive ads. Commenting on posts like yours is good for media, but I dismiss “wall posts” etc as too detached and impersonal. I rarely repond to them.
Additionally….
Gmail killed spam for me. It doesn’t even exist in my world anymore.
Along with 2-3% false positves (non-spam that gets flagged incorrectly), I get 5-6% false negatives (spam that makes it through). While somewhat better than my pre-GMail days, it’s nowhere near good enough.
I can deal with the false negatives, but the false positives can cost me money.
…I should probably start checking that Spam folder…I never even look in it anymore.
Email will still be the primary vehicle for communications. I use Gmail, and spam is not an issue.
Facebook is not secure, and Titan will not be a major player in this arena. At least for adults engaged in ‘rich discourse’.
I’m 16 and over the past few years at camp I’ve noticed a really interesting trend. On the last day of camp four years ago, we all wrote down each other’s email addresses so that we could contact each other and keep in touch. Last year, however, we just wrote down each other’s full names so that we could find everyone on Facebook. That’s a huge shift in the way we chose to communicate in only three year’s time! While this is just one interesting example of email’s decline, it’s probably a pretty accurate reflection of how my generation is turning away from email and towards social media in a way that’s never really been seen before.
As others have mentioned, Gmail provides more than adequate spam filtering. It did for me from the very beginning many years ago. I even re-route my business (paid-for-domain) email through it.
As for email versus smart-phone, I’m not a rich man. I simply can’t afford the luxury of the data plan offered and necessitated by a smart phone (or a tablet device such as an iPad). And, and the moment, I’m a pitiful thumb typist.
As for the social-media sort of communication, I abhor presenting all my personal communications in an arena which is potentially (as we’ve seen in frequent changes to FB TOS) available to more than me and the other communicator. I want the privacy of one-to-one communications – especially for financial affairs such as bill paying, ordering, medical transactions, etc. (yep, folks, many of those even REQUIRE an email address!)
And did you ever notice that not all websites all connection via FB? They want an email address!
No, I do not foresee the death of email, and I do not WANT it to die. There is a strong and valid need for it, now and in the future.
Email has been ‘dying’ for ten years. Not gonna happen.
Will it be replaced for the things it isn’t great at? Like SMS/IM? Definitely. But only for people that want to let you that far in.
Will it be replaced for things it is great at? Specific communication for business or personal use? Yeah, not by FB or anything else out there right now.
I love to (re)read the tale of email’s death every few months.
The death of television… death of radio… death of blogging… these posts always suck me in as linkbait but disappoint once I read them. The fact is that we have no comparable technology to email. It is the only timely, universal, push medium we have. In fact, social media sites like Facebook push more email to the inbox to retain users than any other site on the Internet. We need email! Its failures are also its strengths… its simple, elegant, and easily integrated into any application or messaging campaign.
I struggle like the rest of the universe with SPAM and a poorly prioritized inbox… but applications are beginning to step up the experience. I use Postbox which allows me to organize by the sender (much like FB will be testing). There’s an enormous opportunity here to improve the tools rather than kill the medium – and that’s what we’ll see as email ‘evolves’. It’s not declining anywhere, though.
My inbox is still flodded with emails and it hasnt reduced. What we are seeing is many more media to communicate. Any given day, i do get messages in my email inbox, facebook wall & email, linkedin inbox, twitter DM, IM and SMS. Overall, the total number of messages per day has gone up. We are also seeing a rise in enterprise social networks which help in better collaboration for which email ia not good.
Btw, Gmail is good at handling spam and have had no problems with it
or maybe all these things you think are killing e-mail is really just getting the fluff/cruft out of e-mail.
Spam is not that much of an issue anymore – at least it hasn’t been since I switched two gmail
Facebook will never get my private message traffic. If for no other reason than I can never trust that they will be around when I need it later.
Instead I run my own domain through Google Apps, and I get may 3 spam messages a year.
While I have a higher level of trust in gmail than in FB, I routinely download and archive *all* of my gmail on my local storage using Thunderbird.
I don’t know what the excitement about texting (SMS) is. The US is a decade behind Europe in this. It’s a pain at times, useful for quick messages. Not good for anything complicated (beyond ‘let’s meet at X at Xpm). It’s also a rip-off pricewise (worse in the US where you get charged to send and receive; in Europe it’s just to send). It’s no wonder it’s popular with teenagers, they just think it’s cool and different.
[…] Cringely takes a look from 10,000 feet. What’s happening to e-mail is complex but comes down to changing contexts and competing media. Back in 1992 communication for me meant e-mail (which at that time for me was cc:mail, MCI Mail, and Internet mail), snail mail, Usenet newsgroups, bulletin board systems like The WELL, telephone, and fax. Today the mix has changed almost completely and I have Internet mail, snail mail, SMS, various chat systems (Skype, iChat, ICQ, etc.), twitter, Facebook and other social networks, and the big one for me — WordPress. BBS’s are gone as are proprietary e-mail systems, my fax machine was thrown-away long ago and Usenet has been subsumed into the Internet as a whole. Then spam spoiled it all. I hate spam. I feel betrayed by spam and the spam industry. Remember those proposals to put an ISP postage charge on e-mails to eliminate spam? Those proposals failed because it looked too much like a restriction of speech or a violation of net neutrality, but I wish it had worked. I’d gladly pay a couple bucks per month to be truly spam-free. Facebook has brought for non-professional writers in us the same e-mail effect I saw when I jumped to WordPress: every wall or chat posting makes unnecessary at least one e-mail, maybe several. […]
Compare the search volume of google insights for search comparing searches for “facebook”, “gmail” and “hotmail” – facebook messages may just kill email
I have one friend that doesn’t have texting enabled on her phone. She instead uses facebook messaging the way everyone else uses text messages.
I found it odd to be honest because there’s almost an expectation on her part that all of her friends are constantly logged into our facebook accounts and checking messages all day.
While my smartphone has the capability to notify on facebook updates it’s not something I’m willing to go out of my way to check several times an hour, or a day for that matter.
My sense is that facebook actually wants it’s users to be more like my friend, and view it as a communication hub. I’d much rather drop that friend then come to rely on facebook in that manner. She can get a google voice account and text in real time since she’s at her computer anyway. That’s far more considerate than expecting all of her friends to check their facebook accounts constantly.
Email on the way out? I must say that communication became more diverse for me over the last few years. I met people, I would no have met without connecting via social networks, especially Twitter.
When I want to communicate something of higher importance, email is often the first choice, foll
by Skype and other chat and call services.
Email is still alive and kicking for me.
Hold on just a minute. E-mail is not going anyplace. Did Google Wave kill email? No it did not.
You said it yourself. “Titan, its new inter-user communication platform, they had such a hard time explaining what it was”
If they can not explain it clearly in one sentence, of moderate length, it is not going to catch on. People like invisible complexity, nothing that they have to work at or think harder. For the average Facebook user one extra click will effectively kill anything new.
That is why a spam filter is preferred to paying one dollar a month. The filter runs in the background, silently. Even if it does not do a great job, that is easier for average Joe than thinking about a payment monthly.
I have read this same post many times. Substitute ‘letter writing’, ‘news papers’, ‘CD sales’, ‘records’, and ‘home cooking’ for email. It practically writes itself. These things change, but don’t disappear.
No corporation is going to use Facebook for email. Email is it in the working world.
Yes, I agree Bob, it is hell getting old, but nothing we can do about it.
I don’t think email will “die”. But instead, evolve into being done over HTTP instead of SMTP.
I agree with you as to it’s failure (my archive would go back to 1984 but for a drive failure in 91). I disagree about postage. Email postage couldn’t work unless everyone switched at once. No system that requires early adopters to pay, but lets everyone else send for free, was going to get off the ground. Ironically, the cloud may offer the solution. As more and more people have their email in centralized services like Google and Facebook, we may finally see a spam free communication system, but I’m not holding my breath.
>BBS’s are gone as are proprietary e-mail systems,
Hi Bob
1) I wish Google would get their act together and allow me to text using Google Voice/Gmail. I resent having to pick up my phone for this when I am at a computer. And what about these proprietary chat systems – should I have to open a F boob account to comunicate with an Fboober?
2) You did not mention voice mail. How often does anyone check their voiocemail
You can text through Voice.
I do it fairly regularly.
From home when I’m at my computer and don’t want to bother fetching my phone from the docking cradle, and from my phone when I’d rather the recipient not have my direct cell phone number.
I text-to-phone through gmail all the time, though it could be made a lot simpler/smoother. Just send an email to @txt.carrier.domain, e.g. 8005551212@txt.bell.ca, 8005551212@txt.rogers.ca, etc.
The sucky part is having to figure out what the carrier domain is for whomever you’re corresponding with (and all they have to do is “reply” to get back to your inbox). There are websites to help tho’.
>I text-to-phone through gmail all the time, though it could be made a lot simpler/smoother.
Thanks! – but using Gmail to text to phone is kludgy/ugly as sin. Adding the mobile txt number to a contact does not even make it smoother…I wish Google would get their act together.
Every few months there’s an article like this. The sky is NOT falling and…
Email is not dying, nor is Facebook going to replace it (see Google Wave, Skype, AIM, etc.) because everyone uses email, most have been for 10+ and it’s not dependent on one specific platform. Why switch off email if it’s not broken?
If you changed the title of the article to “The decline and fall of email spam” you’d be closer to the truth.
nice analysis. I reached the same conclusion a few months ago. and my email traffic from readers, once fairly robust, has dwindled to almost nothing. sigh.
[…] on the decline of email. It will be interesting to see how people adopt Facebook’s new Titan email system. surprised […]
can we please end this debate. email is not going anywhere.
Twitter? Pah. A million losers telling other losers what they had for lunch.
And proactive social messaging? See here:
http://tinyurl.com/347sk47
You don’t need to follow people who talk about lunch. And regarding responses to Twitter, keep in mind that most tweets (at least from the people I follow) are just providing information and links and not seeking a response of any kind via Twitter.
[…] read a post from Angel Jiménez about the death of E-mail (in Spanish), where he commented Robert X. Cringely column (in English) about the same topic. I strongly agree with Angel, we are killing one of the […]
[…] de leer un post de Angel Jiménez sobre la muerte del email (en español), comentando la columna de Robert X. Cringely (en inglés) sobre el mismo tema. Estoy muy de acuerdo con Angel, estamos matando antes de tiempo […]
[…] All true sentiments, of course. I think the bigger epiphany for me at this stage, however, isn’t how email is declining as a defining medium of the web, but how, for a short time, there was a movement that enabled people to create and participate in an exchange of ideas in the wild. ”Blogging”, you might call it. Now, so much activity happens behind closed walls, and even if it isn’t, so much of it is shortened to 140 characters or less, that it isn’t private discourse one should be worried about, its the public one, shouldn’t it? […]
Email is one to one, posting or a wik is many to many. But there is room for improvement. I seldom read every post . . .
-> wiki, not wik
Julius Caesar was said to be able to dictate several letters in parallel to his scribes, up to a dozen unimportant ones and two or three important ones at the same time. We all do that now, don’t we?
The epiphany for me came when I realized that Facebook — as a side-effect — solves the identity verification problem that email does not. Identity spoofing is trivially easy with email, but requires cracking a password on Facebook.
It ids through email much the same way this site does. It basically tells them nothing about individuals they don’t want to share. Several of my friends have multiple throw away accounts with facebook, where their identification information is completely fictitious.
The difference between it and Google is that Google has started identifying through cell phone accounts via Android, and phone numbers with google voice.
Android market means direct sales for Google, and the cell phone identification, plus contact connections, will probably be able to be monetized by Google more easily than Facebook has shown itself capable of to date with it’s email id, and contact info.
Google’s the winner so far as I can see.
One further point. It only stands to reason that Google would be upset that Facebook is essentially poaching Google verified user data with contact imports into facebook without allowing the same in reverse. Google’s verified user contact info is more valuable than facebook’s even though facebook has more users, simply because Google can put more phone numbers behind it’s user’s data.
I can understand why Facebook doesn’t want to allow exports into Google.
Google would be able to monetize that information a hell of a lot more efficiently than Facebook can, especially now with Android, and Google Voice requiring names and phone numbers.
None of this is any good for user privacy! Least of all with Facebook, with Google right on it’s heels.
Why do I need an email address to post on here then??
for the same reason we stll need a physical mailing address
there as still some of us using snail mail for commerce
but it is a dwindling few – just ask the post office.
Because Bob may want to contact you if you post something useful to him like how to get rich quick.
Soon will be the day that instead of receiving emails that you have a facebook update, that you will get a facebook update that a new email has arrived.
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Blog and Facebook commenting hasn’t killed email among my readers and followers. How do I know this? I practically BEG them to share on my blog and Facebook page, but they still prefer to send email.
I don’t write about anything embarrassing, I swear!
There are just definitely people out there who still greatly prefer to communicate privately, via email.
Yes. I must stop using email ’cause then I won’t get emailed any more of this rubbish from Cringely. Of course then I won’t be able to buy anything on-line, keep in touch with grown-ups who don’t publicise their non-empty lives on Twitter or Facebook. Also I’d have no reason to send text messages as the only reason I ever do this is to get the kids to look at their email for things that would be far too tedious to send via SMS.
Cringely falls into the same trap as so many Facebook users. In their insular little lives if they don’t do it and none of their “friends” do it, it doesn’t happen! I don’t email. My friends don’t email. QED. email is dead.
Grow up!
[…] Cringely: eMail will never completely die, but I feel it has lost critical mass and is fading rapidly; http://eicker.at/eMail […]
Email wasn’t designed as instant messenger and/or “social” agent.
IM and social networks off-loaded the email system and hopefully spam will
follow.
You won’t exchange instant messages or wall posters with your insurance agent or math professor, would you? ( well, unless they worth it.. )
Email wasn’t designed as instant messenger and/or “social” agent.
IM and social networks off-loaded the email system and hopefully spam will
follow. Email is returning to it’s original function.
You won’t exchange instant messages or wall posters with your insurance agent or math professor, would you? ( well, unless they are totally worth it.. )
[…] día de hoy he leído un interesante post aparecido en el blog "I, Cringely", que lleva por título el mismo que este, en el cual su autor discute como gradualmente […]
check out threadsy for where -I think- email can and should be headed.
I tried but their home page is seriously messed up. No info at all, just login/signup requests.
same here ;(
Nice piece Bob. I see a remarkable trend underway. There are enormous generational differences in technology adoption. I see it every day at work and at home. An executive that I work with does not have email. He is in his 50’s and a great business man. He uses his secretary. My son got his first phone (do I even need to say mobile anymore?) for his thirteenth birthday. There is now only one seventh grade classmate without one. He had north of 1,000 texts in the first week.
Seven years ago when my son was in 6th grade there were only two kids in their class without cell phones. My son was one, and he didn’t get a cell phone until he started high school. And that was a pay as you go phone, with $25. that had to last for three months of calls.
I guess we are cruel parents.
Hey, we’re cruel too! Sweet! I thought it was just me and a bunch of my friends and a lot of other people we’ve met. 🙂
I have a seventh grader without a phone. “Everyone” else has one, according to her (and at least two of her classmates, according to their parents). I suppose we’ll be looking at a pay-as-you-go in the next year or two, but honestly it’s far more a societal bauble and last-ditch safety thing than a useful piece of essential communications gear.
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Don’ t have time to read through all the comments today , with that said, you are looking at a very small aspect of what emails accomplish.
Charging for email would have never stopped spam – Just look in your (house) mailbox for proof of that – it would have been just another monthly tax on people – of which we have more then enough
Email won’t ever die for business use, it’s the written proof often needed in the life of a cube dweller
Perfect filling system with a very user friendly retrieval system for all incoming /outgoing information
For personal use it’s still the easiest way to get a file to a select audience – not all of the world is looking to broadcast their data
There is no better way of communications ( and again file keeping/ proof ) for e-commerce, conformation / tracking / follow ups
It a great tool that has needs no other tool can (yet) compete. Could you image sorting through text messages to find information? Shoot me now.
At my workplace all of my Instant messages are stored automatically in Outlook right there in a folder above email. This includes group chat sessions. I also have RSS feeds of posts and comments left on internal blogs saved and searchable in the same way. We also have an internal microblogging platform which pushes info to Outlook. So email was replaced by IM, blogs, micorblogs in a work environment. It’s stored and searchable. It doesn’t replace all of my email but a substantial amount.
The vast majority of companies doing business aren’t even getting close to that kind of communications integration, unless there is one single provider who can enable this kind of functionality across the web, desktop clients, and smartphones. (Google? MS? Yahoo!?)
While social networking fulfills a need for a different set of communication tools for personal use, Email is still one of the best tools, with the most widespread adoption and comprehensive feature set available for business to business communication.
I still find it easier to type within an outlook client, and be able to have the speed and flexibility to craft the most streamlined and understandable communications with respect to business. IM and social network messages don’t really have that important a place in the way I’ve seen business conducted.
Don’t underestimate the destructive impact spam has had on email.
As a parent of 4 kids and a technology expert, I have monitored my kids use of technology for years. When I talk to my kids, and their friends, the impact of spam on their use of email becomes apparent. They also walked away from AIM because of all the chat room problems. Initially Facebook fixed those problems, but now due to their success they are under attack. It will be interesting to see if they they can fend it off. Our kids have had less patience for Internet crap than their parents.
There was a time when I could reach many of my elected officials by email. When I had something important to contribute, I could. I know I was communicating because my representative would reply to my message, usually with questions and comments. Today I doubt seriously if my emails are getting through. Snail mail doesn’t work well either. So how do we communicate with our elected officials?
I still have rich email discussions with my friends. I enjoy them greatly.
I don’t think email will ever go away. It still needs to be made more secure and more resistant to spam. People use it to exchange important information and conduct business — email needs to be reliable and dependable.
I believe we will see a decline in email in companies and institutions. In time our kids will join the workforce and bring with them a strong desire to use the best of the Internet — social tools, blogs, etc. There are great uses for these tools in corporate Intranets. It is only a matter of time….
I still receive several hundred to a thousand legit emails a day. I have for nearly 10 years, and no sign of it dropping either; spam however, has not ever gone above 10% for me, and is probably closer to 1-2% on a normal day. Of course, I am active in the open source and computer communities too. So, no – email doesn’t seem to be dieing to me.
Yes, a lot of people are using other forms of communication. I don’t have SMS service – disabled at AT&T; nor do I have a data plan on my Nexus One (don’t want one either). I do know a number of people that do text (SMS); but they can’t text me – they have to call or send an email.
Texting is expensive – charges to send AND receive (which is why I killed it for my account) – and from what I can tell, takes way more time than a simple phone call. What could have been a 30 second conversation turns into 50 texts each way as information is exchanged but now it’s spread out over 10+ minutes, taking 15-30 seconds to write each message. (No thank you.)
There are many, many people who don’t burden themselves with cellphones, and I am just one of them. I’m not even a Luddite: I’ve long been ahead of the technology curve, for example I used to run my own BBS, yet threw it away as obsolete years ahead of the internet. I did carry a cellphone for many years, but the final year I had one was in 2000 (prior to smartphones). I never used facebook or twitter, those services turned me off from the start for their lack of privacy aspects. People are becoming savvy to their internet trail, for becoming permanently associated with their old comments on the persistent media of the internet. Cellphones and SMS are pure scams, there’s no way they are worth or ever will be worth the money being charged. I regularly use email for its file transfer and photo sharing capabilities, its relative privacy, and the fact that its service is included with the ISP charge: it has been many years since I mailed a real letter. I kept my home phone but ditched voicemail and the answering machine: nobody was using those obsolete features! Looking around at the street traffic, how many people are using bluetooth headsets any more? Bluetooth headsets are a dying trend, they are simply too cumbersome to use regularly, which is the way cell phones will go. Maybe cell + SMS will persist in a person’s life for years, but eventually people will become tired of looking after the batteries & fragile equipment & people hassling them 100% of the time & paying the relentless fees, and people will eventually become tired of their facebook and twitter un-friends (they discover there really was a reason they never kept in touch with these people).
Most of this stuff falls under the category of ‘fad’. Fun for a certain period of time, and passes away with time.
Let’s face it. Those of us who fondly remember DOS and BBS are capable of being Luddites. Perhaps we should ask ourselves how we are NOW ahead of the technology curve. I struggle to keep up but even now I’m punching this out on an old fashioned umpc from 2009.
Heh. I’m still using the same user name as I used BBS’ing back in early 80’s. And while I don’t text, I do appreciate always on internet via smart phone and cell tablets.
I can’t stop appreciating your work as your skill is just tremendous. I am convinced that you have plenty more ahead of you. Can’t wait for those moments.
Spam. Oh the (conventional but not technically correct meaning) irony.
After an interesting post, it’s funny to find a bit of spam amongst the comments. Isn’t the Akismet plug-in supposed to catch that stuff?
I saw a letter written before photography. It was written with color pencil views of South Africa’s Table Mountain. What struck me was the many talents the author needed to convey his view and the need to be succinct and minimalist in his strokes. It is something that technology robs from the soul and the communication is as lifeless as a vampire leaving only the frisson of superstition on the page in the age of high learning.
What could be more “succinct and minimalist” than SMS?
Bob-
You’d rethink your “Email is dying” angle if you had a real job and received the thousands of email messages per day that came along with it!
Hey Bob,
I miss the days when you weren’t chasing companies across the US. (I know that is part of the interesting tidbits of your job, but…) In the old days, you were giving us one, two and even three articles to read every week – and I waited with baited breath for each release. You seemed to be so ‘connected’ to what was coming around the corner. Now it seems, you’re lucky if you get around to one story every week. I too lament the ‘old days’. Your ‘English whit and rhetoric’ is always a refreshing start to any day or night – whenever I can find the time to tune in. Keep the stories and editorials coming, guy. (This is not a criticism… but a pine for more of your wonderful articles and posts.) All the best to you from North of the border! You always help to make my week a pleasant one with your posts.
Hi Sandy,
I agree with your every word.
Sorry Bob (and I really am sorry) I am beginning to lose interest in what you have to say. Over the years, I have eagerly read your every word, and listened to all your podcasts (sometimes repeatedly) but lately, well… I haven’t learnt anything new, or exciting, or even for the most part – thought provoking.
I really would like the old Bob back!
With respect,
Griff
“Spam killed the joy of email”
Two things:
1. Spam? The number of spam messages I’ve seen in my Gmail inbox is less than the number of fingers I have on my two hands. Even rarer is the case that Gmail’s spam filter gives a false positive, i.e. it filters as spam a non-spam message. That’s a solved problem, so no, spam did not kill the joy of email.
2. Nothing killed the joy of email. To me, receiving a thoughtful personal email stirs much joy. Composing an email to a good friend with a list of links and personal notes attached to each link: pure joy.
Something is being killed though: the joy of writing and reading longer compositions, especially personal ones. I’m not talking about email. I’m talking about the lost art of letter-writing. That’s a much greater loss than the death of email.
[…] this year.. A New Social Location Based Service Social media as a travel planning tool: 64% say yes The Decline and Fall of E-Mail Is a Groupon acquisition the next phase in Google’s local push? Nesta map identifies UK […]
Facebook / broadcasting updates is just another tool on our bags. The young are very social and, therefore, like to broadcast more…so they use facebook more.
Mobile workers tend to use their smart-phones more for email than a desktop computer because they are so often away from their desktop computer.
Those of us with desktop computers (and spend most of the day in front of them) tend to use email clients like TrulyMail (or Thunderbird, etc.) because they do what we need. I like to share investing / trading ideas with friends so I often paste pictures of charts in the body of the message with my comments. Can’t do that via SMS, IM. I want only certain people to know what I am writing, not everyone I know.
I do care about my privacy so I tend to use encrypted email every chance I can (TrulyMail has it built in, Thunderbird can use an add-on). The young are not so concerned but they will as they get older and start searching for a job only to find what they blogged about in 6th grade is coming back to haunt them.
The thing that worries me about these trends are the “Constitutional aspects.” There was always the word “mail” in “email”, so there was always the presumption that email carried some level of privacy and protection. Of course the technically astute know that email is effectively a postcard, but even though anyone who sees it can read it, a postcard carries some level of legal protection. Nor is that protection some illusion of privacy, because the Constitution has been dragged in, there are also First Amendment aspects to it, as well.
None of the competing communications methods, IM, forums, etc, have any illusion or pretension of legal or constitutional protection. Someone recently got significant jail time for cracking Sarah Palin’s email account. I don’t know what the penalty would be for cracking her Facebook page – if any. Beyond that, if here Facebook page were cracked, the damaged party would likely end up being Facebook, not Sarah Palin. There’s a key difference there.
Similarly I lament the passing of Usenet, for similar Constitutional and First Amendment reasons.
Good article. Whatever happened to people picking up the phone to talk to someone? Put two social media users in a room and see if they have anything to talk about for more than 30 minutes. Give them a phone and they will SMS each other for hours in that same room. I bet if someone is having a heart attack in a mall, the social media users will finish the sentence they are typing before they dial 911. Sad but true. Call me old fashion, but I like synchronization communication over asynchronous. It’s much faster than any email or social media tool.
My limited experience is somewhat different. I’d rather not say why because this is a public blog going out into the ether and subject to misinterpretation. Suffice it to say some people are more social than others in all contexts.
In a programming environment calling someone, or even talking to them, breaks their chain of thought and the mental model in their heads fall to dust. It takes hours to reconstruct. It’s so much better to email or IM them; then they can deal with the interrupt at a convenient time.
[…] X. Cringely / I, Cringely:The Decline and Fall of E-Mail — I have in my computer […]
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I am a lawyer and businessperson, and email is very useful in a business sense for certain communications that aren’t ultra private. The beauty of email is that if you have any sense, you can search for past correspondence, and it avoids almost entirely the problem of missplacing paper. Furthermore, as opposed to plain mail, you can prove that you sent it and don’t have to resort to certified mail.
JD
Wow 120 comments! Bob, I think you sparked some interest.
From an importance point of view, I think two earlier columns are more important to the future of technology than this weeks. In the news yesterday was a story that Seagate wants to become a private company (reverse IPO).
I think Paul Thurrott liked your article so much that it’s almost as if he decided to “borrow” a few of your paragraphs, pad them up a bit, and post it as his own essay. Or maybe it merely reads that way.
https://www.windowsitpro.com/article/messaging/The-Death-of-Email.aspx
[…] I, Cringely » Blog Archive » The Decline and Fall of E-Mail – more like decline in prominence but otherwise good stuff here […]
Paul Thurrott agrees with Bob:
“I’m writing, of course, about the death of email.” : https://www.winsupersite.com/commentary/email_rip.asp
https://www.thesmokinggun.com/documents/internet/fbi-targets-young-russian-spam-kingpin
NOVEMBER 30–An FBI investigation has identified the young Russian man behind the notorious “Mega-D” botnet, the malicious network of more than 500,000 infected computers that was capable of sending ten billion spam e-mails a day and, until late last year, reportedly accounted for nearly a third of the spam clogging the Internet, The Smoking Gun has learned.
The company you work for, or the operator of your company mail server, owns your (work) emails apparently, not you. Is it the same for IM’s or are they more ephemeral? How about blog comments? 🙂
Free solution to spam. Forward all your email to a gmail account and set your email client to retrieve it via IMAP. So you still keep your private domain email address, but Google cleans out 99% of the spam. Been doing it for years. I get maybe one spam per 300 legit emails.
I get more email than I ever did before. Of course, I don’t mind as long as I can have it sorted by priority.
As to social media, those are additions–not in detriment to email. Yes, there are plenty of people that I have Facebook messaged and I don’t know their email address, but I probably wouldn’t be emailing them in the first place–especially with the lack of consistency in some people’s email addresses. Keeping up with people’s hotmail and yahoo accounts was always a pain ten years ago.
I’m 28 and so I wasn’t conducting much business with email ten years ago, but this year I just turned my bathroom tiler on to using email to time-offset customer communication to late at night instead of fielding phone calls in the day while he is at the job site.
Sorry – But I don’t use social media at all and won’t use social media unless they start *REALLY* respecting the right for privacy.
[…] for 2010-12-01 I, Cringely » Blog Archive » The Decline and Fall of E-Mail – Cringely on technology (tags: email blogging) Published Wed, Dec 1 2010 12:04 PM by […]
Hey Bob,
Been reading your stuff since the back pages of InfoWorld back in the 80’s.
PBS in the 90’s.
And now SPAM in the 21st century? C’mon.
I have not been concerned with spam for years now.
You must not be using Gmail. I even switch corporate clients to Gmail from paid spam services on hosted mail servers. Untouchable at any price.
Good luck with that social networking crap. I’m too old to appreciate it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJ13LTqpHvI#t=2m30s
I still think Google’s Wave could have made a difference too if it had only been promoted. I really liked Wave and while it was a little sluggish (early beta) it was great for conversations and had a plug-in architecture. Google could have developed plug-ins for all sorts of social media sites in addition to email and website comment boards and had a titan before Facebook’s “Titan”.
Interesting… This was my 1st time to this blog. Greatful for sharing . I have to subscribe to this site. I am a room specialist for 5 years. My home decorating hint of the century is: Please do not overdecorate a room. Space is essential. Happy Thanksgiving..
Bob,
All these communication things are starting to be divisive and overwhelming.
It used to be at the end of the day I looked in my mailbox for mail. It came and sat there until I looked for it.
In my house, if the phone rang, I answered it. Then came voice mail if you bought a recording product; voice messages came and sat there until you looked for them.
That’s now two things to look at.
Then came email. It came and sat there until you looked for it.
That’s three things to look at.
Then came twitter, facebook, and I don’t know what. And a person could have multiple email accounts, especially as Google and Yahoo and perhaps others provided free accounts. I don’t do those things because I don’t want to have three, four, five, or more things to look at and manage.
The instant messaging thing is also a problem because it is an interruption to my life. I get side-tracked and it takes time to get back to what I was doing. It’s sometimes useful if picking up someone at the airport, but a phone call usually does just as well for that communication.
Nothing takes the place of a well-written and crafted product. Not that paper mail is any better inherently, but I think my friends and associates write more carefully considered and interesting things on paper. Even email can be trivial, with short, ill-considered and/or things only of transient value. But email is what our company has. I often get copied as part of multiple persons on the distribution list, and then persons respond to all, and there is a clarification, and more responses, etc. It gets old after a while. But indeed it is becoming a medium that is used as a permanent record of work, rather than the older paper method.
I am very happy with personal web sites containing information about remote members of the family, most specifically photos of our grandson, living in a foreign country. It’s a joy to watch him grow up. And Skype and/or other video connection means are a great feature that modern technology permits.
But I’m still not joining the great technology revolution to be a member or user of every social connection method. I try to keep the communication entry points to only a few connections that I need/want to maintain.
Three cheers for old SMTP! You were great while you lasted.
Clearly, spam is the real killer of email. I’m with you that simply charging a nominal fee would have been enough to kill most spam. It’s too late for that, of course.
The key feature of smtp is that is it is a store and forward mechanism. So, email sits on someone’s server before getting to the recipient. That give email a persistence that is not always desirable (see wikileak’s “cablegate”).
But I like the asynchronous nature of email communication. I don’t always have time to respond to inquiries when I read them. But I’m an old man who thinks multitasking is best left to machines.
Lary (& guys) like a kid 🙂
if he stopped to use an internet, that means internet is dead; if he closes his eyes, that means world just finished its life…
Kid, man… the facemail service most likely will be dead 🙂
commercial article. no news – just a frick
Bob, this is pathetic. The death of email article has been done many many times, many many years ago. What’s next? How about a piece about how the Viet Nam war was a mistake. Now that would be original.
[…] no idea four years ago how ubiquitous social networking would become. Cringely weighs in with “The Decline and Fall of E-mail,” where his main point is that the death of email is from spam and the rise of social […]
[…] Johnny Depp bans phones in his home. Technologist Bob Cringely says goodbye to e-mail. Gartner says PC shipments are up 14 percent. We all need a backup plan: Comcast went […]
Thank you for this very unique blog of yours. I can not set to picture your sources for these ideas, but this has made a good impression on me. Hopefully there is more to come.
[…] veteran like Cringely must surely be aware that E-mail was corrupted not by spam, a problem that is not just solvable but essentially solved for all expert users, but […]
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Ritsuko only told him of a position he would work for was defense, but he had strong convictions against jobs involving the military.
After the two pilots changed into their regular school uniforms, they began to leave NERV for home. On the way home, the two children barely spoke a word until Shinji dared to speak while Asuka’s busy thinking.
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What you say may well be true, but it’s not affecting my workload. If anything, I’m receiving more b2b email briefs these days than I’ve ever had. I’d better stop skiving and get back to writing those emails…
[…] so maybe it isn’t really news. But Robert Cringley has eulogized email quite nicely. As someone who still remembers the thrill of sending his first email via BITNET, I feel it […]
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ironic, one of your major complaints about email is getting so much spam, and here it is creeping into your comments section.
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In the united kingdom, studies demonstrate that about 70% from the woman human population do not use the beats by dr dre headphones and rather straps on ill-fitting, not comfortable ones.
I get it that the new system is better for you, but it isn’t as much fun for me.
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internet > real mail in my opinion…
Henry…
[…]I, Cringely » Blog Archive » The Decline and Fall of E-Mail – Cringely on technology[…]…