EMail: The Beginning of the End?

By: Alastair Revell, Managing Consultant, Revell Research Systems
Published: 7th March 2008
Copyright Revell Research Systems © 2008

I was interested to read Ben Limberg's article on the BBC News web site this morning about how stressful email is becoming. It highlighted for me that spam continues to grow and it reminded me of my earlier article on this blog about the need to start tackling the phenomenon rather than hiding it.

The BBC article suggests that around two million emails are sent every minute in the United Kingdom. The majority of reports I read suggest that spam currently accounts for around 95% of all email in circulation, so the BBC statement implies that an amazing 1,900,000 junk emails are sent every minute in Britain!

Certainly, my own consulting practice's email logs have doubled in the last six months and I am pretty confident we are not getting that much more real email. The growth of spam seems to be as exponential as ever.

In fact, what I used to think was a pretty cool feature—the pop up facility in Microsoft Outlook that notifies you of new email—has started to take on rather more menacing conations recently. A few weeks ago we had a sudden surge in spam, which seemed to outwit our spam filters for a while, which led to the notification feature becoming a real distraction. Thankfully, we've tweaked the system and the spam getting through has now returned to more manageable levels, even for someone as intolerant as myself.

I doubt the inventor of email, Ray Tomlinson, had any idea in 1971 that his 200 line email program would kick start such an enormous communication revolution. EMail has certainly become one of the most important communications media of our age.

However, I wonder if its ascendancy is beginning to falter. Certainly, more people are telling me that they no longer check for real messages in their "spam folder" because it is too time consuming. It does occur to me that this might signal the beginning of the end for email, which would be a shame if it was just because of spam.

Reader Comments

Posted: 12th March 2008 | By Karen Brown :

i think that email remains an important tool for business, but increasingly, it is essential to be on the lists of the people you wish to communicate with. At some point, it will probably become impossible to email someone who you do not already have some kind of prior relationship with.

It will be very interesting as a new generation of young worker comes into the business world, as many of them barely use email at all, preferring to text or use services like MSN to communicate.

Services such as Twitter may also become more prevalent for communication of more than just daily trivia.

This may also reinforce the development of cliques and some form of new elite, as it will be very difficult to break into the communications of key people using electronic media - we will be back to door knocking, snail mail and making phone calls to make new/cold contacts :)

Posted: 13th March 2008 | By Alastair Revell :

Karen

You raise some interesting points about the potential development of cliques, etc.

I hope that sooner or later email will be digitally signed on a regular basis, which would mean you would know the identity of the sender. (This will probably need a move in that direction by the likes of Microsoft to make it easy for the masses.)

I dream of a world where some sort of trusted third party mechanism could vouch for that identity as not being associated with spam. Digitally signed email would make it easier to prosecute spammers under law (because you would know who they were), which might be the basis for being blacklisted.

Alastair

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