Sunday, October 5, 2003
"E-mail is broken" says Salon.com
Posted by Jason Dunn in "ARTICLE" @ 07:00 PM
The continuing decline of email as a viable communications tool due to spam is something I'm very interested in. I keep jumping to new anti-spam solutions, looking for the "perfect" way to protect myself from spam. This Salon.com article is a must-read for those of you who share my interest in this topic.
"Somewhere between that spam promoting spyware disguised as a chipper e-greeting and the latest e-mail-borne virus masquerading as an urgent software upgrade, something got lost. Not just a single overlooked urgent message from your boss, lodged in a sea of ghastly teenage bestiality spam, but something more fundamental, something more essential.
It's impossible to say exactly when the ritual of opening the e-mail in box went from being the lure that brought you online in the first place to a slough of deleting drudgery, full not only of irritating commercial messages that you never signed up to receive, but also of potential threats that could bring down your computer. But there's no use being nostalgic for that earlier, simpler time, whenever you got online, whether that was in 1984 or 1998. You can't go home again, or at least, you can't go back to a home without spam.
The questions now are: Can e-mail be saved? How bad is the problem, really? And what can be done to fix it? Salon interviewed four Internet pioneers, computer scientists who have been online longer than most of the rest of world and who, in some cases, helped set up the systems we use today..."
"Somewhere between that spam promoting spyware disguised as a chipper e-greeting and the latest e-mail-borne virus masquerading as an urgent software upgrade, something got lost. Not just a single overlooked urgent message from your boss, lodged in a sea of ghastly teenage bestiality spam, but something more fundamental, something more essential.
It's impossible to say exactly when the ritual of opening the e-mail in box went from being the lure that brought you online in the first place to a slough of deleting drudgery, full not only of irritating commercial messages that you never signed up to receive, but also of potential threats that could bring down your computer. But there's no use being nostalgic for that earlier, simpler time, whenever you got online, whether that was in 1984 or 1998. You can't go home again, or at least, you can't go back to a home without spam.
The questions now are: Can e-mail be saved? How bad is the problem, really? And what can be done to fix it? Salon interviewed four Internet pioneers, computer scientists who have been online longer than most of the rest of world and who, in some cases, helped set up the systems we use today..."
