Email is Outdated
Email seems ubiquitous and irreplaceable. Is it though? It was created for a useful purpose, and worked effectively for a number of years, but I would argue that it is outdated and needs to be replaced by something better as soon as possible.I explore here why I believe email is overdue for an overhaul and note aspects where it falls short of moden needs.
In my view, email has the following issues:
- Email is impermanent
- Email is expensive to run
- Email is slow
- Email is full of spam
- Email lacks security
- Email is unstructured
- Email visual format is bad
- Email lacks interactivity
- Email lacks threading
- Email lacks correction
- Email lacks sender metadata
- Email is not transferable
- Email lacks roles
- Email lacks access levels
- Email lacks ownership
- Email requires intermediaries
Email is impermanent
While your emails themselves could be saved and stored perpetually, access and ownership to an email address is far from it. Shutdown of your email service provider can lose you access. Being thrown off a cloud provider for issues unrelated to your email account could lose you access. Losing ownership of a custom domain your email uses could lose you access. If your email is provided by your school or work, once you leave either you lose access.All of this is a problem. You work hard to establish your identity associated with your email address and have a way you can be contacted, but that method is ephemeral and could vanish at any moment.
Email is expensive to run
Email is complex to setup, and costly in time and knowledge to run your own email server. Many have even said that it is actually impossible to do anymore properly because of spam rules and dominance of email systems by bigcos. At the very minimum, to run your own email server you need a static IP address that hasn't been previously associated with spam. The IP address needs to be in a safe IP range as well.While it is somewhat inexpensive to run the software necessary for an email server, and there are container setups to set it up relatively easily, maintaining that email server is very costly in time and knowledge.
Email is slow
Considering what email does, it is horribly slow and antiquated. The format email is stored in and transferred as is out of date technology wise, as well as how most email servers store emails.
Email is full of spam
Because of very poor source verification or authorization, spam abounds through email. There is no standard mechanism for choosing a set of trusted contacts or binning untrustworthy ones. Due to the standard requiring you to give out a singular email to all online sources, the moment any of those parties get hacked your email is out in the wild for spammers.
Email lacks security
Email has no defacto and widespread security built into it. The important point here is end-to-end encryption. There have been many attempts over the years to hack this onto email, but because only some things support some specific types and there is no standard for it built in, it is nearly pointless to set it up.Besides this, because email is a separate protocol from https, it does not automatically get security improvements that https gains.
There are at least standards for verifying an email server is actually authorized to send out an email that it is providing now, but it only verifies the server/email-domain, and not the actual sender. The identity of the person typing an email is not verified. Anyone with access to the email server can forge an email from any user in the system.
Email is unstructured
Suppose you want to have an audio or video internet meeting with others, and you invite others to this. How does that invite work? An email is sent. Is there any standard way to send out such an invite? Not really. An email could contain a calendar invite file in some random format, but there is no official standard for what a calendar invite through email looks like. Worse, all calendar invites effectively look the same, and you can't tell that it is an invite to a meeting. There is no semantic structure to emails that should have such.Another example would be provision of a bill for some service. That's a pretty important thing that should stick around in records and most people would like to be able to easily filter out. It's also something that you would like any biller to have a government ID authorizing them to send out bills. You don't want spam bills ever, and if such ever exist you want to be able to easily report them to the authorities. Is there any such structure for email notifications of bills? Nope. Not at all.
Another example would be notification of a price change on a watched item for sale on the internet. Such a notification should have a link to buy the thing, information about what the thing is, and what the new price is. This way you could easily track changing prices of things in a consistent fashion.
Another example would be notification of a software build or testing finishing, with success or failure.
There are endless types of standard notifications that have been in use for many years that should now have a standard and be semantically sent out in "emails", but email contains no standard for doing so, so nobody does it, nor can they in a sensible fashion.
Such standard types of emails and their semantic structure should be collaborated on so that we have structured messages rather then a generic block of mostly text.
Email visual format is bad
Emails support very little as far as modern browser standards in visual format. As a result they mostly look horrible. There is little to no reason to not allow emails to be as advanced as webpages. Discussion of why this is and why it no longer matters deserves a post all of it's own so I'm not going into detail here. Suffice it to say, if it is safe to visit a random website, which it must be for the internet to be usable at all, then it is safe to open a random email with full website equivalent features.
Email lacks interactivity
When email is used for business purposes, those notifications may actually be a business process and have an associated workflow process. As a result, it is often desirable for en email to have various actions that could be taken on it. In emails, since they are unstructured and imsemnatic, there is no email record of what actions were taken on a notification. This is suboptimal.
Email lacks threading
Email is often uses for threads, especially when an "email list" is used. There is no standard way to do this built into emails. The creation of threads should also be intentional, not just a chain of responses.
Email lacks correction
Suppose you send out an email, and you realize soon after ( or even much later ) that the email contains some mistakes. You want to correct them. Email has no such feature.
Email lacks sender metadata
Wouldn't it be nice if you could see detailed information about the sender of an email?Imagine if you could see a mixture of the following things about email senders:
- Your connection to them, such as if they are a coworker, or a connection on a social network.
- Supposing they are a well-known persona, proof that they are that person
- The resume of the person ( should they choose to share it )
- Links to various webpages the person wishes to share
- A short blurb talking about who the sender is
- If the sender is a company, government signed information with official info about that company
- If the sender is a representative within a company, information about their role in the company, signed by the company.
Email is not transferable
Suppose company X is hosting your email. You want to change to company Y hosting your email instead. There is no transfer procedure built into the email standard. Suppose when you do the transfer, you save all your emails locally, and want to keep seeing and accessing those emails but also receive new ones and access all of the emails equally. Well... you can't do that without some special custom email client. There is no standard for it.
Email lacks roles
As a result of focusing on an email address as the sole form of identity, there is no notion within email of a person serving a role in a company outside of emailing role@company.com. It is very useful to be able to contact a specific role within a company, enough that there should be a standard mechanism.As an extension to this, it also lacks responsibility in the sense of someone accepting responsibility for an email and acting on it. This could be done by allowing responsibility for an email to be transfered to a different person, not just forwarded. Such a transfer should be transparent to the sender so that they can see who it has been transferred to.
Essentially, a role may not be a single person. If you contact support@company.com, it could be that any of a number of support reps could take responsibility for that email. You wouldn't want multiples of them to do so, and you'd like to continue having the ability to interact with the person that took responsibility.
Email lacks access levels
In some cases it is desirable for a sent email or a received email to appear in a public location. There is no standard way to do this, or to indicate that it should be allowed. I refer to this as transparency as it is desirable for all communication to be public in certain scenarios.More than just a single setting of transparency or not, there should be levels of data security.
Some examples:
- Open to being shared companywide
- Open to being shared across a team ( essentially recipients but those recipients can change as the team changes )
- Requiring a certain level of security ( cannot transfer off company machine )
- Containing of legally auditable information requiring storage for a certain amount of time
- Open to being access by people with a certain level of access or role
- Open to being accessed by anyone approved by organization X
This is similar to file permissions on a network share, but different in that it is internet-wide and could involve people around the globe and in different organizations.
Email lacks ownership
Suppose you work for company A. Emails pertaining to work projects belong to the company, and when you leave you should not have them or access to them. Emails though pertaining to your paystubs or benefits should still belong to you. Currently it is required that all emails to your company email essentially belong fully to the company and not to you personally as the employee. Companies work around this by sending some information to your personal email. Unfortunately there are still a lot of emails that should really belong to you despite going to your company email. An example of this would be interactions with an open source project where you are allowed to work on that open source project as part of your work. In that case the company wants to have records of those emails, but you also personally should have those emails as well.
Email requires intermediaries
If you want to send an email to a@b.com, you cannot just connect to a simple service at b.com and communicate your message. You need to generally pay for an smtp email sending server and send it there instead first.The main reason things are this way is because of spam, but spam should be solved by the legitimacy of the sender, not by the legitimacy of a service the sender pays to use to send their emails.
What is generally done is that mail servers are rated as having been known to send out spam or not. It is basically adding a dependency on a service to be an intermediary that checks usage of the service to keep away spammers.