I can tell it has been a busy week when my blogging declines and the number of open browser tabs I maintain increases. One of those tabs was some rumination by David Berlind about whether it is time to redesign e-mail. The key motivation for that is spam, which reportedly is estimated to be some 90% of all e-mail traffic.
Basically, all it would take would be for Google, Microsoft, AOL, and Yahoo to make it happen and here’s why. Collectively, they represent more e-mail users than any other group of vendors out there. If they came to some agreements on standard technologies for fighting spam, the rest of the world would have no choice but to follow. Not only that, since they run the largest online e-mail services, killing spam off through a set of mutually agreed upon “standard†approaches would be good for their businesses given how the load on their systems might one day be lightened.
By this, I take David’s suggestion to be focused on universal filtering protocols—email would still look like email. As some of the comments in that thread suggest, spam is more a creation of political policy and use than some technical problem. However, it does bring up an interesting question about our current Internet tools: At what point is an overhaul needed?
The World Wide Web is just over a decade old. The majority of Internet users have only been online during the Bush Administration. Because of the speed of technology change and adoption, the ‘net tools are in a strange position of being both old and new, both established and innovative. They were created well before the Internet became as widespread as it is today, and perhaps under those constraints aren’t the best design for the current or future state of culture. What if the problems of spam and that ilk could be addressed through a radical redesign of our interfaces and underlying systems? Would such a redesign be considered a new invention or be recognizable as an iteration of something we use now?
4 replies on “How would you redesign e-mail?”
Another thought …
Perhaps we see some of that happening with new use cultures forming around micro-blogging and personal information streams. More things come to us, fitting into our life rhythms, than the old come-and-get-it model of information distribution. But does that address spam? If the number of followers I have on Twitter who are clearly treating the community as a billboard are any indication, the answer is a definite no. Unlike e-mail spam, though, the interruption is in the form of bacn, another form of information noise (the mostly-desired alert kind), and easy to turn off in bulk. However, if all of the unique email addresses currently flowing into my e-mail inbox (and hopefully, immediately to the junk mail folder) got a twitter account and followed my tweet, it would be the same. Or, it would force me to turn off notifications from Twitter.
This is an interesting topic. I think what you are proposing is that design can usurp political policy. My natural inclination is to believe that problems should be tackled first and foremost with design–especially the radical variety. However, it’s the design of the systems that is opening up email to attack. Policy will always help discern ‘what’ are violations whereas design will try to minimize spam in the first place. The purpose of policy is to ensure that even those that are ‘staying ahead’ of design/technological advances can be dealt with legally (though, as i write this I’m realizing I can only count successful cases of this happening on one hand…)
But to answer your last questions more directly, I suppose such a re-design would be an iteration (which some might argue “is” invention) if it was an improvement on existing structure. But, I think a “new invention” might be necessary when the nature of activity itself needs to be transformed. That is, the email system in theory could be flawed so we need to propose a new one.
Could this be happening already? Does instant messaging or social network applications curb this? I think these movements may stem from an unconscious consumer movement away from the problems facing email. So, in this light, we can see these “new inventions” as an unconscious re-design. I would actually believe more that it is more likely that we can redesign the interfaces by creating an alternative method for doing the same thing. In essence, these new inventions are appropriated for personal goals until they finally become a better method of what they sought to augment. For example, I (and many people) use WordPress for more than blogging. HTML building was difficult and WordPress made it possible to have personal blogs which led to re-appropriation and work-arounds to be homepage builders.
Woops, that was long…
If Cliffe Lampe and others are to be believed, email is disappearing. Just last night I was reading comments on a similar post by Paul Stamatiou (www.paulstamatiou.com) that several people of the undergrad age said email was “old fashioned” and they “only got emails from their bank” and other official and “formel” [sic] kinds of things.
For their generation that is true, but I don’t see my parents getting on facebook anytime soon, and I for sure don’t see me favoring facebook over my beloved gmail.
So what I’m saying is… maybe this is a moot question ?
Perhaps as the generation after ours really has 5-10 year of graduates entering the workforce each company will have their own social/business network site or subsite that all have interoperable messaging capabilities, perhaps built upon an email standard that has been updated. By installing a social aspect to the system it could help severely limit spam. By not accepting messages from people you don’t know or who don’t know anyone you do at all you would effectively protect yourself.
I think it is an intriguing notion that a different channel might absorb the main function(s) of email. However, the problem with that solution being “Facebook” or any other proprietary channel is the reliance on a particular company, not a specific technology. Email encompasses not just Gmail, but Entourage, Exchange, Eudora, Mail and any number of other desktop and web/mobile applications.
As an identifier, it is possible that a company could become synonymous with that channel, in the way that Kleenex, Xerox or TiVo have done. Maybe a year from now references to microblogging will be referred to as a Twitter.