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The Time Has Come to Ditch Email?
Posted by
Zonk
on Fri Jun 02, 2006 10:19 AM
from the i-find-it-handy dept.
from the i-find-it-handy dept.
Krishna Dagli writes to mention an article at The Register claiming that it's time we stop using email to communicate. From the article: "The problem is, email is now integral to the lives of perhaps a billion people, businesses, and critical applications around the world. It's a victim of its own success. It's a giant ship on a dangerous collision course. All sorts of brilliant, talented people today put far more work into fixing SMTP in various ways (with anti-virus, anti-phishing technologies, anti-spam, anti-spoofing cumbersome encryption technologies, and much more) than could have ever been foreseen in 1981. But it's all for naught."
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The Time Has Come to Ditch Email?
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e-mail needs to get better (Score:5, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Wednesday August 15, @03:36PM)
Short version of story:
E-mail shouldn't really go away, we need to recreate it from scratch with builtin security, authentication, encryption, etc, and those mechanisms need to be as transparent as today's e-mail.
EOF
E-mail will probably go that way, but I don't see it being recreated from scratch. Postfix evolved out of perceived difficulties with sendmail (still one of my favorite packages... obtuse, obtuse, obtuse, but lots of fun.) while in-flight.
The fixes for e-mail likely will also occur in-flight... there's too much momentum, and too many transactions dependent on e-mail for it to stop, then go.
The single most important step for me would be transparent authentication, via certs, whatever. As phishing becomes more insidious and the stakes go up, someday someone (or a bunch of someones) will be phished severely, escalating the urgency of authentication. It may start out clunky (ever tried to get friends and family to do PGP handshakes?), but as with other technology I think it can be done with transparency.
E-mail stays... (btw, if you want to send e-mail feedback to the author, this is the link [theregister.co.uk].
Re:e-mail needs to get better (Score:5, Insightful)
If you'd tried to instantly replace the phone system with a different, portable system, you'd have been doomed to failure. There's no way you would have ever gotten everyone to just give up their telephone and buy a new, different device for voice communications. But cell phones are replacing land lines because they're compatible. Even though a cell phone and a land line phone work very differently at the hand set level, they both go back to the same place and you can call one from the other. All of the differences are handled transparently to the user. He doesn't care if his voice is going out over copper pairs or over RF to a cell tower. He doesn't care if it's switched through mechanical switches or digitized and sent through a IP network. He dials and a number and he talks.
To replace email, we need to come up with a new system which provides security and authentication when communicating with other addresses on the new system but degrades gracefully when sending to a legacy email address. As more and more people switch to the new system, the old system can be abandoned. It's a piecemeal replacement, not a wholesale changeout.
The article talks about all of this, all though I've tried to clarify a few things. It even gives a possible mechanism for graceful degradation.
Re:e-mail needs to get better (Score:5, Insightful)
There are some interesting email alternatives (Score:4, Insightful)
Two questions:
1) By suggesting email "could NEVER be recreated in a reasonable timeframe" you are inferring that a reinvented email system must be complex. Why would that be? We don't have to re-invent security, authentication, encryption from scratch for use especially for email--we already have the technology and use it extensively (HTTP(S), LDAP, Kerberos, SSH, etc). What is missing in email is an elegant integration of these technologies.
2) Even if architecting a next-generation email system would take a long time, why would that be a problem? What would be a "reasonable" timeframe? Personally I don't think that a W3C-like standards body would take more than 5 years to craft a usable standard, and by the time it hit 1.0 there would already be a lot of early implementations. Sure it would take a long time to adopt, but there could be email gateways like there was between the internet and old-school nets like Fidonet, and those gateways can handle the spam and other crap before they hit any "new and improved" email servers.
When something gets as broken as email people are more motivated to fix it. There are already some interesting ideas [prescod.net] out there that could catch on...
Good sized system? (Score:5, Insightful)
Me thinks you need several zeros on the end of that to get to a medium to large installation....
Re:Good sized system? (Score:4, Informative)
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molar_mass | Last Journal: Friday September 19 2003, @11:21AM)
Re:e-mail needs to get better (Score:4, Funny)
(http://www.mattdunnerstick.com/)
It's like a private foreign language without having to bother learning a foreign language.
That's the spirit of the article.
Re:get friends and family to do PGP? - Yes (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://betabug.ch/blogs/ch-athens)
Yes, I've tried... and I've been and am quite successfull with it. Using GPG to send/receive encrypted mail and check signatures with a good plugin isn't rocket science.
Agreed, setting up keys and such is hard, but with friends and familiy we geeks can help. We do that with E-Mail, Games, Wordprocessors, why not with PGP?
My experiences with PGP with friends and family: Do You Use PGP? - Encryption is not just for techies any more [betabug.ch].
Re:get friends and family to do PGP? - Yes (Score:5, Interesting)
Because we're looking for a long term, widespread, permanent solution. There aren't enough of us geeks to hold the hand of every user in the world.
Re:e-mail needs to get better (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.phpgd.com/)
This is the key issue
Instead we need to educate the victims. Stop people clicking on links in emails *ever*, stop people buying "cheap prescription meds online", stop people sending thousands of dollars to the Nigerian interior minister.
Only when spam stops working will spammers stop working.
Re:e-mail needs to get better (Score:5, Funny)
(http://www.ringdev.com/ | Last Journal: Tuesday May 08 2007, @01:50PM)
I've got one of those! It ends in a chest-thump then a simulated pistol shot in the air! We can always ensure that our friends are definately our friends with that hand shake.
-Rick
I mentioned this some time ago (Score:3, Interesting)
(http://ellem.is-a-geek.org:5280/...html | Last Journal: Tuesday October 02, @10:35AM)
Mail really is broken. It does not work as expected or as wanted by users.
Time to ditch (Score:5, Funny)
(http://carewolf.com/)
Finally, an idea to take down Exchange Server! (Score:3, Funny)
Whatever works!
Acronym soup. (Score:5, Insightful)
Sorry, but to be taken seriously, you'd at least have to have a basic framework already thought out. Just claiming that it's broken and maybe one of these TLA's that you've heard of might be used to fix it
Go back, think about it and then write a real article.
headline (Score:4, Insightful)
(http://evil.google.com/)
Use new technology? (Score:3, Insightful)
So in 25 years time today's technology will stop 90% of communication being spam? Spam exists in the spite of the best efforts to stamp it out. Whatever we do it'll be the same. Writing an article full of buzzwords and hypothesis doesn't really help a lot.
Father of Sendmail (Score:3, Interesting)
(http://www.totallygeek.com/)
For the record: smtp rules.
I don't use email in the office (Score:3, Funny)
(http://www.parallelrealities.co.uk/)
FIX YOUR FUCKING CRAPPY CODE!
I also use sign language, but I don't have much of a grasp of it and stick to the usual middle digit up in the air.
If it ain't broke... (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://honeypot.net/ | Last Journal: Friday April 07 2006, @09:33AM)
Put another way, if you run your own mailserver and still get spam and viruses, it's because you haven't chosen to address the problem. If you use someone else's mailserver and still get spam and viruses, it's because they haven't chosen to address the problem. Nothing stands between you and a clean inbox but motivation, whether your own or your ISP's.
And no, broken hacks like DJB's "Internet Mail 2000" will never get real-world acceptance as they make it as difficult for legitimate bulk senders to broadcast as for spammers. SMTP is here to stay as the standard method for (somewhat) reliably routing messages between people on unaffiliated networks. Replacing it with a similar system with new pitfalls isn't the answer we're looking for.
Re:If it ain't broke... (Score:4, Interesting)
(http://honeypot.net/ | Last Journal: Friday April 07 2006, @09:33AM)
I did and it doesn't. I routinely need to send out 50,000 copies of a customer newsletter. Right now, SMTP allows me to start the process now and gradually spool out the copies at my network's own convenience until I'm finished. Under Dan's crackpot idea, I send a broadcast to 50,000 customers letting them know that there's a newsletter waiting for them. When they all come to work at 9AM and simultaneously attempt to download a 1MB PDF, my router cries tears of pain and my customers hate my slow-loading message.
Dan's idea sounds fine under certain very limited circumstances, but can't possibly work in the real world.
no, the time has come for anti-spam treaties. (Score:3, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Tuesday November 06, @02:39PM)
why not use it for something beneficial for a change, and introduce treaties to the UN for the harsh enforcement of anti-spam measures.
Once the international safe havens are removed or severely curtailed, there will be less of it, and everyone but the ad nazis and the "big data" industry which has arisen to serve them will be better off.
Right...... (Score:5, Insightful)
No, wait, let's think that through. Let's take video games as the paradigm. Every year companies spend upwards of 20 million per video game. Every year, they come out with the newest, latest, greatest in copy protection. This copy protection is only limited by their imaginations (and the hardware). And yet days after release, and sometimes prior to release, their code is hacked, cracked, and distributed.
This author somehow thinks that going back and redoing everything will fix it. The author is naive.
Call my analogy a bad one if you will, but the SECOND you put ANY type of system into the hands of the criminals / spammers, they will find ways to exploit it. This is proven time and again.
How exactly does this new email system stop phishing? Oh, right, it can't. Have a link, go to a malicious website, etc. How exactly does this new email system stop users from clicking executables thinking that they are going to see nudie pictures of Katie Holmes? They don't. How does this new email stop virii? It won't.
Encrypt your email if you want security. Password protect your account. Use filtering to dump spam before you read it.
OH, and I forgot to mention - I'll be sending you a snail mail letter that looks completely official. It's about a man I met in Nigeria, who has some money he'd like to give you.
Yeah, right... (Score:3, Insightful)
(http://stephen.evilcoder.com/)
Anyways, these suggestions for improving email are full of fancy features (hashing and compression!) but all they really serve to do is complicate the protocol. Right now, SMTP is so simple that it can be implemented by the tiniest of embedded systems. Take that away and whatever protocol you come up with probably will never be as popular SMTP.
Besides, most of these proposed changes don't do too much to prevent spam without any of the questionable side-effects encountered with the current proposals to counter spam (ex., lost of anonymity, cost, proving identity a la SSL certs)...
Applying the article logic to regular mail... (Score:5, Interesting)
If you get a letter from a car dealer stating that you won $3000 in credit if you buy one of his cars, do you automatically go and buy one? NO. Same thing goes for email, you don't open all emails and follow all links blindly.
The problem is with educating people how to use email and the Internet as a whole. When enough people stop being click-happy... spamers will lose interest as no one will be paying for such a service, and phishers/spoofers won't find enough people to fall for their tricks.
Simply, educate people about this powerful tool before you through them in! this is not only for email, it goes for anything to do with the internet and any form of communication as a whole.
Just my $0.02.
The problem is spam, not e-mail (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.threesquirrels.com/)
I guess I'm lucky that I have an ISP [magma.ca] who takes spam blocking seriously, using a combination of Brightmail and a user configuarable Spam-Assassin install that seems to block 98% of spam and which has virtually no false positives. On the weeks when I monitor it, they may mis-label one in several tens of thousands of messages, usually from mailing list or other source that just barely triggers the filter.
Most people assume that the lousy, error prone spam blocking offered by many ISPs is the best than can be acomplished. That's simply not true.
Unlike the article author, I still find e-mail a reliable and essential tool, and can't see a need to make significant changes at this time.
Curb Spammers (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://slashdot.org/)
And I don't mean "curb" as in curtail their activity, I mean "curb" as in stick their fucking heads on a curb and stomp on them!
I am not sure about investment (Score:4, Interesting)
-Qmail, vpopmail, simscan, spamassassin and clamav. On a userbase with the amount of users we have its very easy to distribute, its easy to scale and the performance is great.
replacement for E-mail is E-mail (Score:3, Interesting)
The solution is fairly simple: change to a different E-mail protocol; one simple approach is to have a protocol in which the sender stores the message until deliver and the only thing that gets delivered to the recipient is a small notification.
On a related note, it really is pretty silly as well that there is SMTP in addition to IMAP; in the future, the client-to-server protocol might well just be simple IMAP (with an "outgoing" folder), and there can be a separate server-to-server protocol like the one described above.
Spam is the symptom. Zombies are the problem. (Score:3, Interesting)
(http://www.animats.com)
But the zombies are vulnerable. The lamest Windows OSs, the DOS/Win95/98/ME family, are slowly dying off. XP is at least potentially fixable, and Vista is much tighter.
We've made real progress. It's tough to send spam today without committing a felony. Spammers are routinely going to jail. Spam as a means of even vaguely legitimate marketing is dead. Spam-friendly hosting is getting harder to find. Ironport gave up selling its "spam cannon" rackmount spam sender. Spam filtering is better than ever. Spammers have been reduced to using zombies because anything more direct gets them hammered.
Surprised this hasn't appeared yet (Score:5, Funny)
(http://www.seizurerobots.com/)
(X) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
(X) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
(X) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
(X) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
(X) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
(X) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
(X) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
( ) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
(X) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
(X) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
(X) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with Microsoft
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with Yahoo
( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
(X) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(X) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures