The Time Has Come to Ditch Email?

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."

e-mail needs to get better

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

Bad analogies. Email will get replaced. I certainly can't tell you with what, but it will get replaced. And the reason it can be replaced and the others can't is because it doesn't need to be an instant and complete replacement. Email will get replaced the same way that land lines are being replaced by cell phones.

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

In some parts of the world, landlines aren't only being replaced, they are being totally bypassed. I was in Tanzania a few years ago, and far far more people had mobiles than a landline. Running wires everywhere is an expensive operation.

There are some interesting email alternatives

Each of the items I listed are too large and complex, and are beyond repair, but in the same respect could NEVER be recreated in a reasonable time frame.

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?

A peak of ~75 messages a minute?

Me thinks you need several zeros on the end of that to get to a medium to large installation....

Re:Good sized system?

Per minute that might be medium installation, large ISP installations are gauged in emails *per second*. If these shops had only had 75 emails per second (4500/min), the admins would be freaking out wondering what part of the system had gone down.

Re:e-mail needs to get better

And they are not stopping at email, but at verbal communication. Soon the language we speak to one another will be codified. Meaning, if I want to talk to my girlfriend, I will speak through an earpiece mounted microphone. The mic encrypts my verbal language with a key that only she has. The words that come through my head-mounted mic then are amplified through a speaker which anyone can pick up, as if it were my voice speaking, but all garbled. Noone else can understand what I'm saying, because only she has the key on her headset, which is able to then re-articulate my words into her earpiece.

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

"ever tried to get friends and family to do PGP handshakes?"

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

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?

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

someday someone (or a bunch of someones) will be phished severely, escalating the urgency of authentication

This is the key issue .. the victims. These are the people who need to be targeted if we're ever going to stop spam. No technological solution will ever fix the problem so long as it remains profitable .. people will go to extraordinary lengths to make a fast buck .. The debacle with Blue Frog demonstrated just how much power spammers wield over the internet. I really doubt that even a fundamental change to the underlying protocols of email would stop them.

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

"(ever tried to get friends and family to do PGP handshakes?)"

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

http://slashdot.org/~ellem/journal/104280 [slashdot.org]

Mail really is broken. It does not work as expected or as wanted by users.

Time to ditch

It's time to ditch reality. It's fundamentally broken and inherently insecure. We should have predicted that 13 billion years ago.

Finally, an idea to take down Exchange Server!

They tried better, they tried different, who knew that the best way to destroy Exchange Server would be to just discredit email altogether?

Whatever works!

Acronym soup.

From TFA:

Build an electronic identity. Encode, hash, encrypt, compress, sign, and provide a novel way to share keys when needed, for example. I don't know how this will all turn out, but perhaps yEnc, MD5, AES, H.264, and GPG are some potential technologies that could be used together.

So, he doesn't know how to fix email, but here is a list of acronyms to get you excited about it.

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 ... that's just junk.

Go back, think about it and then write a real article.

headline

I realize basic language skills are a difficult thing for a slashdot editor to grasp, but come on! Rather than taking the title of the Register article and slapping a question mark on it, it makes a whole lot more sense to actually rearrange the words into the form of a question: "Has the Time Come to Ditch Email?" or even "Is it Time to Ditch Email?"

Use new technology?

From TFA: "Use existing, proven technologies and a few new and novel ideas - starting with the latest encoding mechanisms, a reliable hashing algorithm, fast compression, strong encryption and signatures. "

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

I recently had an opportunity to meet Eric Allman. He had people in his office, so I did not get to say hi. Afterward, I thought if I met him, what would I even say? I figured there would be an equal number of praises and complaints.

For the record: smtp rules.

I don't use email in the office

I express myself verbally when "talking" to the other developers:

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...

SMTP still works exceedingly well for its purpose. Understand this: spam and viruses will propigate through any message transfer protocol that will ever be invented. We already have effective technologies [freesoftwaremagazine.com] for filtering that stuff out of SMTP traffic, but if admins can't be bothered to implement them for their customers, I don't know why they'd implement similar measures on other protocols.

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...

You should re-read the article from DJB. It makes a lot of sense

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.

As much as I hate to admit it, copyright treaties have been extremely successful in perpetuating the DMCA.

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......

And of course, the NEW system won't be vulnerable to ANYTHING - right?

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...

Since we're thinking about ditching email, when are we going to ditch snail mail?

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...

If I'm to apply the same logic to regular mail, well, regular mail is doomed too; it's full of phishing, spam, and spoofing. I guess I'm not sending anything by mail from now on!! Duh!

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

I find that the people who gripe loudest about the problems with e-mail are the ones who have poor or no spam filtering.

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

What somebody needs to do is curb the fucking spammers!

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

As a systems administrator working on a few large scale mail servers the 'investment' required to cut spam and virus emails is very low if the system has been designed properly. I use open source tools on a system with in excess of 150,000 active users and it costs nothing in licenses and its on four servers and a central NetAPP filer for the mailstore. Realistically if we distribute the total cost over the user count and support issues are very low. its simple design the system. Our email service uses the following
-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

The problem with E-mail is the store and forward model of the servers, which allows people to inject spam, remain unaccountable, and impose the costs on others. That design made sense 20 years ago, but it doesn't today.

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.

The real problem is zombies, Windows PCs taken over by malware and used to host spammers. As long as armies of zombies exist, and can impersonate the owner of the computer, nothing will work. Charging for mail won't work because the zombies will spend their host's money. Source authentication won't help because the zombies will use their host's identity. Until the armies of zombies can be slain, we cannot win.

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

Your company advocates a

(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 should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
(X) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough

Furthermore, this is what I think about you:

(X) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid company for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!

The Problem is Vulnerable PCs

What makes Spam and Malware unmanagable is the sheer number of vulnerable and hacked systems.

When vulnerable boxes disappear, the bad guys would have little ammunition. My guess is that over
time, as computing matures and our OSes stabilize, security holes will be plugged faster than they
are created. When that happens, vulnerable boxen will become rare, and the bad guys will find it
harder and harder to send Spam and Malware with impunity.

And then the rainbows will soar and unicorns will return.

But the right kind of security!

I'm all with you about needing a secure alternative, but then I hear stuff about mandatory ID, etc.

Corporate whistleblowers, Chinese democracy activists, union organizers, etc. all have a legitimate reason to want to be able to send an email without it being traced back to them. How do we support that without opening the floodgates for spam/phishing/etc?

Essentially, I should be able to somehow generate an ID, where I am the only one that can connect the ID to my person. At the same time, if I send an email, my recipient will receive it - they will be aware of the fact that the email is from someone who is hiding their personal identity, but some other form of information will be connected with that ID that shows that the email can be trusted more than some bulk-mailed viagra ad. Ideally the system would not require human intervention to screen. For example, maybe the ID is such that it requires 1 week of CPU-time to generate, and the encryption method has a secure method for storing the total number of emails sent using the ID.

This way, a spammer would have to have acess to a million machines for a week to be able to send 10 million emails with a ID that has a count of less than 10.

On the receiver end, they would get the email, and it would be flagged as unsolicited and anonymous, but they would know that I've only sent 5 other emails with the same ID and that the ID was difficult to obtain.

The basic idea is that with each email you receive, there would be a set of information that you are guaranteed to know about the sender, with some of it optional. The email reader would only accept mass emails from trusted known IDs, but non-mass emails could come from anonymous IDs.

Another possibility would be some form of trusted anonymous emails. Without further external knowledge, a single message from that ID would not be trusted, but it would be possible for an ID to create some form of trust structure. For example, imagine you anonymously donate $100 to some charity, using the ID. Then you send an email using that ID to people who respect that charity. The message header would include information that would allow automatic verification that the same ID was used for the donation and the email. The receiver would then be fairly certain that the message was not spam, but they couldn't trust it enough to give out their credit card number or other info.

Anyway, this is the sort of thing I'm thinking of - decentralized, and secure in the sense that the sender and receiver can in some secure way communicate a level of trust to each other without outside interference or exposure.