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[REBOL] Re: I've had it with email.

From: mat:plothatching at: 29-Jul-2002 8:58

Hi Carl, Carl> At this rate, I think email will be "dead" in a few years. In Carl> fact, let me go on record saying that. A venture capitalist Carl> recently commented that this was a bold statement... but just Carl> watch. You watch. I'm not saying email will go away permanently. Carl> I'm saying that we'll have much better ways to communicate. Carl I've said this stuff recently myself (instead of VCs it was work colleagues that looked at me as if I were insane). I had to turn off my longest standing email address (remove the alias from my mail server) because of the monumental amounts of spam it gets. The equivalent of moving house to get away from pizza flyers. As someone who uses email rather for work as well, one of the greatest failings of email is that you just don't know if anyone has read it or not. You send a letter, you send a fax, people treat this stuff seriously and in the latter case you get a delivery report and know they have a paper hardcopy. People just ignore email and that's such a huge problem that it makes email useless and forces you to interrupt people by telephoning. This is a real problem, only certain types of people are happy to conduct business on the phone and that's an inefficient communications mechanism at best, being real time and relying on how good people are at making sure the salient points are all covered. I think there's lessons to be learnt in the take up of instant messenger clients. I have no idea how one combats the momentum of email but at least the instant messenger clients managed to get installed and find wide use. Likewise a new email system where it was possible to see delivery status and see visual, perhaps automatic, status responses to your email. Having a proper binary transport mechanism that doesn't base86 encode to squeeze 8-bit data into legacy systems wouldn't hurt. But ultimately some sort of third party mediation may be required just to authenticate senders and receivers (and clients, since undoubtedly some will want to override the 'features' which made such a system attractive in the first place) - that'd be the only true defence against spammers. Regards, Mat.