Email Blows

[reprinted from Get Real, originally published on 25 June 2004]

I chaired a panel at Supernova yesterday, entitled “Spam and the Future of Email” and really got a lot of the greybeards assembled shaking their heads.

My thesis, in case you missed the sidechat, is that email blows:

Email sucks, and all the nice things about it (universal addressability, universal standards, etc.) add up to the reasons that it has become unusable. It sucks.

I think that IM is a better model — so much better that email will have to adopt the definining characteristics of IM to survive:

• Gated community — IM are networks, and the members must log in to enter. Once in, the members must follow certain protocols of interaction (either directly or indirectly enforced) or they are booted out. This could prohibit sales intrusion, sex advances, etc., depending on the network’s arrangement.
• Communication with the Known — while IM networks may allow strangers to contact us, we can opt to shut them off. In essence, we can limit communication to those that are known to us.
• Conversation, not Communique — email is not conversational, really, unless you believe that sending letters through surface mail is conversational. Conversation is generally better than dueling essays, which is the communication style that email engenders.

Well. We will see, but email — because of the fundamental flaws in the system —is falling down. What made it useful in an earlier world is dooming it in this one.

We should just switch to IM-based communication, and treat email like fax or surface mail.

Despite the generation evidence — danah boyd pointed out in a session on connected work that young people prefer other media to email — and the spam invasion, people are so comfortable with their email inbox that they can’t really contemplate moving onto a different footing.

I pointed out that earlier ‘indispensible’ communication media, like the telegraph, fax, jungle drums, smoke signals, and surface mail, have been relegated to the trash heap.

Oh well. I guess I hadn’t expected people to ask where they could sign up to join my “just say no to email” movement, but I didn’t expect that the Supernova crowd would be boiling the tar and plcking the chickens getting ready to tar and feather me.

I maintain that one of the key aspects of the future of email is that it will decrease in use relative to other media, especially instant messaging based technologies and blog/RSS collaboration tools.

Some of my panelists maintain that email is fine, and just needs to be fixed up a little — clean out the spam — and then everything can go back to normal. Personally, I think email is not particularly good for the things we try to use it to do, despite the fact that we are used to it, and it is universal.

After the panel, various folks tried to reason with me. “Don’t you understand,” several of them said, “everything connects through email, and its so easy to use.” Yeah, yeah. Fine.

Personally I am interested in the issues surrounding communicating with those known to me, or known in the context of some social group. And for those situations, email blows. I refuse to agree that we should settle for a lowest-common denominator approach for what is most important, really, which is collaborating with my closest contacts.