Tim Flight

I think I’m about to give-up on email. Well, not really, but I’m frustrated to the point that the thought crossed my mind.

You see back when I first got on the Internet nearly fifteen years ago email was great. I used Pine as an email client and it was fantastic! But then things started to get weird. You see AOL came along and they started to allow members to change fonts and colors of text in emails. When those people sent messages outside of the AOL network the formatting was either lost or in many cases the entire message was garbled.

People started purchasing scanners and scanning in vacation photos… then emailing them to all of their friends who really didn’t give a whooping-funt about those vacation photos. And they took forever to download over that 1200 baud modem. Thankfully we quickly got to 2400 baud, 9600 baud (with an extra charge) and then 14.4 was the cat’s meow. But those vacation photos still took too long to download.

And then people started sending other attachments; documents, applications, and desk accessories. (You get big points with me if you know what desk accessories are.) The worst though were the System 7 sound files with clips of Beavis & Butthead. I won’t admit to having a large collection of those.

Fast forward another ten years and where are we now?

Now we try to send “attachments” back and forth… a task email was never designed to do. Email servers are designed to quickly process short text messages and rapidly forward them along to the recipient. All of a sudden a message comes along that is a few thousand kilobytes in size versus the normal two or three kilobytes. So how are we supposed to exchange files? Well, FTP comes to mind, but I also remember back in the day using Kermit which was quite fun.

Then the bad guys started coming out. Someone quickly realized that email would be a great way to deploy their virus. This problem has grown to the point that many people will delete any email with an attachment. Email servers are starting to impose tighter restrictions on the types of attachments that can be sent as well as the size of attachments allowed.

And of course how could you ignore spam. Filters are so tight now that tons of legitimate email are incorrectly blocked every day. People now create “white-lists” that I must click on or reply to so the message gets delivered. I refuse to participate. Many filters are setup to be more suspicious of any email that has anything other than plain, unformatted text.

And of course there are so many words we just can’t say in email anymore. If we say them mail servers will be increasingly suspicious of the email as being spam. So we can’t say m0rtgage, l0ans, prescripti0n, hArd, t3en, or p@mela.

Yet there are still several things people could do about email but don’t. People continue to Top Post, quote too much of the previous email, send “me too” messages to mailing lists, and click “Reply all” when it is completely unnecessary. I received an email the other day that was 45kb in size, dozens of pages of text… and at the top the only non-quoted portion said “I thought so too”. That was a great use of bandwidth. (sarcasm).

I received 27 individual email messages from the same person today! Was that an effective use of my time? I think I’m going to take a tip from Darren and start checking emails every 30 minutes at most. So take note, if you need to reach me within 30 minutes pick up the phone and call me since I’ll no longer be responding literally in seconds like I used to.

And to top it off we also have emails with embedded cookies that can track if we viewed a certain piece of spam and our email address just went up in value on the black market.

And how could I forget phishing. Now most business email falls into two categories. Mail that isn’t legit that poses as legit, and email that is legit that people ignore as suspected phishing or are blocked as spam. Spam has become such a problem that you can’t even give out your email address on your website. Instead we resort these silly contact forms.

So I give up. I’m quitting email. Well, not really. But it is becoming less and less useful every day.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 15th, 2005 at 10:43 pm and is filed under Computer Technology. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. Both comments and pings are currently closed.