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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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e-mail needs to get better (Score:5, Insightful)
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:4, Funny)
It's like a private foreign language without having to bother learning a foreign language.
That's the spirit of the article.
Parent
Re:get friends and family to do PGP? - Yes (Score:5, Interesting)
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].
Parent
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.
Parent
Re:get friends and family to do PGP? - Yes (Score:3, Insightful)
Who exactly wrote all the software we have now that the non-technical users rely on every day? Geeks. There are plenty of us around
the problem with geeks is the (Score:3, Funny)
Re:get friends and family to do PGP? - Yes (Score:3, Informative)
Setting up GPG/PGP e-mail is not a technical or knowledge problem, its an implementation problem, in terms of e-mail client design.
Re:get friends and family to do PGP? - Yes (Score:3, Funny)
Actually, some of us geeks did a lot of it 15 or 20 years ago. Lotta good it did us all. Most of the email users are using Microsoft email software, and clearly will never upgrade to anything without the MS imprimatur, so our work was pretty much in vain.
So how about some of the geeks here mention the more-secure email packages you've w
Re:e-mail needs to get better (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Parent
Re:e-mail needs to get better (Score:3, Insightful)
There's a fool born every minute; the internet just makes it easier for con-men to find them.
Re:e-mail needs to get better (Score:5, Funny)
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
Parent
Re:e-mail needs to get better (Score:3, Interesting)
The solution? For some novel open-source software to appear that handles this problem. Then it gets integrated into Thunderbird as an OPTION for a way to send mail. It should work seamlessly, and fall back to old-fashioned e-mail when necessary. You would have two e-mail accounts side-by-sid
Re:e-mail needs to get better (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't think Apple moved from PPC to x86 because of "patching", they moved because they could coerce Intel into giving them better prices on the chips (IBM didn't really care about Apple's business, and Apple's priorities and IBM's priorities didn't align). In fact, the same OS runs on both platforms with only a few changes to the kernel. 90% of the codebase
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.
Parent
Re:e-mail needs to get better (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
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...
Parent
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....
Parent
Re:Good sized system? (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
I mentioned this some time ago (Score:3, Interesting)
Mail really is broken. It does not work as expected or as wanted by users.
Couldn't agree more (Score:3, Insightful)
I've had people get pissed at me when I don't respond to their email. Reason I didn't respond is that it was sitting in a queue somewhere and I hadn't gotten it yet. Plenty of other examples I can think of but that'll do for now.
What we need is a locked out system. Something that doesn't interact with SMTP at all. True, people using that system could only email people in that system, but that wouldn't be a problem once it caught on. If you could guarantee delivery and zero spam, people would flock to
Re:Couldn't agree more (Score:3, Insightful)
Time to ditch (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Re:Acronym soup. (Score:3, Informative)
"A completely new, secure email system would be the internet's next big critical application. If it required IPv6 addressing, maybe secure email would also kill those ridiculous "tiered internet (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4552138.st
Your ISP can throttle an IPv4 stream just as well as an IPv6 stream. And why would an email protocol "kill teh tiered intarweb"? Amazing stuff.
Re:Acronym soup. (Score:3, Funny)
What? But it makes perfect sense!
All we have to do is yEnc the H.264 stream, RAR is apart, make the PAR files, GPG each package, and verify the MD5 sums after it's been e-mailed to AES [ic.gc.ca]!
But since the VP is such a VIP, shouldn't we keep the PC on the QT? Otherwise he could go MIA and we'll all end up on KP--oops, wrong argument.
headline (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Use new technology? (Score:3, Insightful)
The major problem, which the article correctly identifies, with today's email system is the utter lack of enforced identity verification. Even if you want it, there's no mechanisms to support it. The only thing you can do is accept all of that email, and then only read the stuff that's PGP signed. Combine that with the lack of ease of use of most
Father of Sendmail (Score:3, Interesting)
For the record: smtp rules.
I don't use email in the office (Score:3, Funny)
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)
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)
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.
Parent
no, the time has come for anti-spam treaties. (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Right...... (Score:3, Informative)
They don't. How does this new email stop virii? It won't
Nothing is perfect, but having reliable source authentication (so that everyone can easily tell which emails are really from PayPal and which are from criminals pretending to be PayPal) would g
Yeah, right... (Score:3, Insightful)
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)
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.
Re:The problem is spam, not e-mail (Score:3, Insightful)
"...virtually no false positives."
I get virtually no personal email. Virtually no false positives means I will be losing personal email.
Most of these stats are based on the idea of dividing false positives by the number of emails received, rather than false positives against legitimate emails.
Spamassasin lost about 1-2% of my legitimate mail. It's unpredictable and it makes email unreliable.
Not that I have a solution, just to say that for me, this kind of filtering is not it.
Curb Spammers (Score:5, Insightful)
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)
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)
(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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:in other news (Score:3, Insightful)
I've used gopher. Gopher was actually replaced by the web and HTTP. When web browsers and HTTP came along, they started to do the job Gopher was doing and doing it better than Gopher itself. That's why gopher went away.
The nntp situation is different. There's something to be
Re:in other news (Score:3, Informative)
You can get web and e-mail on your phone. Companies are developing small PDA-sized tablet computers to access the web and e-mail. When have you heard of a news reader for a phone?
My guess is that porn and w
SPF works. DKIM is coming. Not a total solution. (Score:3, Interesting)
DKIM (successor to Yahoo's DomainKeys) will do even better when it gets more traction in the MTA and MUA segment, but for right now do SPFv1 and get the issues with forw
Re:Authenticated SMTP (Score:3, Interesting)