Everywhere I turn in these days I read people saying "email is broken".
It's true, the content/spam ratio is making email hard to use. Even
with a pretty good spam filtering system I still find myself deleting a
lot of stuff. It's also true that nowadays I tend to find more
interesting information in my rss aggregator than in my email client.
Weblogs and other collaboration technologies can partially replace email, but does this mean that we should throw the baby out with the bathwater?
I mean: email is broken, why not try to fix it? Saying that RSS can replace email is simply wrong. The kind of content that used to belong to newsletter can perfectly fit into my aggregator, some of the work done on mail lists can probably be moved to weblogs, I can stay informed about friends' public life in this way, but that's about it.
Imagine an RSS aggregator where anyone could get you subscribed to any feed. We would get exactly in the same spam wars we have today. RSS is not better than SMTP, it's the model used by the protocol that doesn't work anymore.
News aggregators work because they are based on a subscription model, where each user decides where he want his content to come from. The equivalent with email are white lists, systems that allow users to decide who they can get email from.
But besides some basic spam filtering, what have email client developers done so far? This is another field where Microsoft rules with Outlook and where they could probably do something. I don't know exactly what, maybe some whitelist-like feature built-into the client, maybe some other smart authorization technology (hopefully which will not require to us all to have an account on some big MS server).
What I'm almost sure of is that if Microsoft would find a way to make spam disappear for its customers, spam would disappear for all of us. This is not yet another "MS vs. the world" rant: in a way or another Microsoft reached this dominant position, and from there they could do something for the whole internet.
Yeah, I know, it will be fixed in Longhorn ;-)
Weblogs and other collaboration technologies can partially replace email, but does this mean that we should throw the baby out with the bathwater?
I mean: email is broken, why not try to fix it? Saying that RSS can replace email is simply wrong. The kind of content that used to belong to newsletter can perfectly fit into my aggregator, some of the work done on mail lists can probably be moved to weblogs, I can stay informed about friends' public life in this way, but that's about it.
Imagine an RSS aggregator where anyone could get you subscribed to any feed. We would get exactly in the same spam wars we have today. RSS is not better than SMTP, it's the model used by the protocol that doesn't work anymore.
News aggregators work because they are based on a subscription model, where each user decides where he want his content to come from. The equivalent with email are white lists, systems that allow users to decide who they can get email from.
But besides some basic spam filtering, what have email client developers done so far? This is another field where Microsoft rules with Outlook and where they could probably do something. I don't know exactly what, maybe some whitelist-like feature built-into the client, maybe some other smart authorization technology (hopefully which will not require to us all to have an account on some big MS server).
What I'm almost sure of is that if Microsoft would find a way to make spam disappear for its customers, spam would disappear for all of us. This is not yet another "MS vs. the world" rant: in a way or another Microsoft reached this dominant position, and from there they could do something for the whole internet.
Yeah, I know, it will be fixed in Longhorn ;-)
2:24:05 PM 
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