There are some interesting thoughts here about how to solve email's
problems ... but I'd like to put forward some thoughts...
I believe it was Cantor, of Cantor and Siegel, the first big and
_well_known_ spammer of Usenet and the Internet (but not the first
outright spammer of the internet), who said that the internet we know
and love was going to go away, and it was going to be people like him
who killed it. What he meant was we had to accept commercialization
of the internet and its communities, but I think a more realistic
meaning might be "Spam killed Usenet, driving people to web-forums,
and Spam will kill email, driving people to the 'embedded email' in
social networking sites".
Along those lines (and I'm sorry I can't cite this) there was a study
a few years ago where late teens (or was it college freshmen,
something like that) were asked about communication mechanisms that
they use. For them, it was all about social networking sites and
texting. How did they characterize email? "that's how you talk to
old people". Meaning that the death of email is already on the way,
and the cutting edge of this blow is the generation gap between those
who used the internet before the rise of social network sites and
texting, and those who came into their own during the social
networking/texting era. The former group are "old people", and the
latter group only use email to talk to those "old people", for
everything else they use social networking sites and texting.
In a way, social networking sites provide that "end to end
authentication" that was proposed in here. Someone definitely
authenticates to get on myspace, or facebook, so that they can send
their buddy an "email". And all 0 hops are within a
protected/authenticated sphere of influence. Now imagine if myspace,
facebook, etc. all began to exchange messages with each-other. We'd
have definite ability to track a message back to its source and squash
misbehaving senders. That's the good news, and it definitely fits the
"end to end trusted authentication" model for email.
The bad news is threefold. First, there's already spam on myspace.
It's not as prevalent, because it's a closed environment, with a
single authority that can act unilaterally to squash spammers.
Hopefully, in the "social networks talk to each other" model I just
presented, they would continue to cooperate on this level (a spam
generated on myspace, and delivered to a facebook user, would be
honestly/accurately/promptly handled by myspace when the facebook user
hits the "this was spam" button). But we can't really know how these
competitors will deal with each-other's spam, if this ever happens.
Second, it's a completely closed environment. You can't really just
register and set up your own domain name, your own mail server, and go
at it, like you could with the "old" model of email. This helps to
eliminate spammers, but it also eliminates expert-hobbyists, SOHO
businesses, etc. It also makes it virtually impossible for the expert
end-user to delve into the innards of their email. IMO, one of the
great early avenues to learning about how the internet works was ...
deciphering the inner workings of email. This version of a closed
email environment would, for good and bad, be the end of the "old
west" of the internet. No more turbocharged lawnmowers on the
information super-highway.
Third, without the social networks talking to each other for message
exchange ... what we will end up with is islands, or silos, of email.
You can't just say "all of my email goes to my home email server" or
"all of my email goes to gmail/yahoo/whatever", giving you a single
point of contact. Your friends have to somehow let you know "you need
to check the message I sent you on myspace" ... not just "you need to
check your messages". The good news about myspace and facebook is
that they will send your email-of-record a notice that you got a new
message, and from whom (facebook will even send you the content of the
message). But I've dealt with some social networking sites that can't
be made to send you notices -- you have to login to find out whether
or not you have messages. And, frankly, I think that creates a huge
barrier to communication.
As much as I love the historical internet, the "wild west" as it were,
and all of its opportunities and capabilities ... I think that's going
to die. The younger generation (egad, I turn 40, and immediately
start talking about "the younger generation") doesn't care about, nor
want to use, the old model of email very much. 95% of email is spam
these days. Creating a closed model out of the old model of email is
probably not feasible (too many chefs, too many cowboys, too many
turbocharged lawnmowers), and a replacement already exists* (social
networking sites). And that existing replacement is probably where
things will go.
Within the social network site model of email, either we will end up
with something like the current model (social networking message
silos, and perhaps notifications sent back to your dinosaur email
address, or notifications sent to your IM/SMS/MMS address(es)), or
we'll end up with something that creates a connected version of that,
such that the social network sites can send email to each other.
Either way, I am willing to bet that email as we knew it 10 years ago
is on its death bed (if not already dead or in a coma), and email 10
years from now will be dramatically different than what we thought of
it so far.
(* and, arguably, that means it's too late to engineer a better
replacement; if there's any one truism of the computer age, it's that
once the masses get their fingers on it, it's too late to solve it via
engineering, you're stuck with whatever model they embrace, whether
it's a defacto standard that abuses an existing technology, or a poor
standard that got popular before a better one could replace it ... it
doesn't matter how stupid the solution they came up with might be; as
evidence of that, I'll put forward the success of web forums, the
failure of mbone, and the success of email as a file sharing
mechanism).
