Well here’s a great little story to get people going today. As a matter of choice, I have consolidated all of my domain registrations with Joker.com. To simplify my life, I was relying on the free mail service provided by Joker for receiving e-mail at these domains.

For the last week or so I have been sending mail out from my SparkCard account and was somewhat dismayed that I was not getting anything back in response. This was somewhat baffling, but I didn’t put much stock into it initially.

Today I was investigating the problem because I had sent out a few messages to people that are usually quick to respond. As it turns out, Joker was broken! Naturally, I an send messages from the account but I can’t receive responses.

Moral of the story: make sure you plan ahead when it comes to how your e-mail is going to be handled. Special warning to bloggers that have comment notification: Joker only allows 200 messages a day and those bastards are filling my inbox already.

Google is making starting to show off its latest messaging trick. Earlier this year, there was the release of GMail with much fanfare. Today, they’re going straight to your pocket - for your cell phone. News.com has more:

Called Google SMS, the service is the newly public company’s broadest push yet in the mobile market and comes as Google and its rivals in the hotly competitive Web search industry race to expand their reach.

Google SMS delivers business and residential listings, product prices and dictionary look-up. The Mountain View, Calif.-based company is not taking a percentage of the 5-cent to 10-cent per-message charge levied by mobile carriers, nor will advertisers influence results.

Source: News.com, “Google tests short message service”

This seems somewhat interesting, but definitely not “cool”. Some time ago I had heard about a couple of services that let you take pictures of ISBNs on books and have price data passed back to you. Then there’s semacode, which lets you decode a 2D barcode using your (Nokia) cellphone and be re-directed to a URL. Similar concept, but “cool”.

Though only somewhat related, the Brits are about to prove how SMS-dependent they are. The Good Pub Guide is doing some interesting triangulation to help people find a cold, frosty one. Engadget has on this.

SPAM seems to be one of the forces that we can’t bring ourselves to eliminate. Despite our pure scorn for it, the negative consequences of implementing true SPAM protection seem quite unreasonable for most of us. It’s hard to tell, and for the most part I don’t hold much faith in the trend, but malicious attachments, virus-infected messages, and SPAM seem to be down in some contexts.

For every 4,756 business e-mails sent from March to August, just one contained an offending or nonwork-related attachment, such as pornography, cartoons, jokes and greeting cards. That’s compared with a 1,357-1 ratio in the same period last year, according to a study from e-mail security firm MessageLabs.

The company could not say for certain what caused the drop but speculated that stricter enforcement of corporate policies could be helping.

Source: news.com, “Less junk in your in-box?”

The article seems to list a number of reasons that the SPAM count might be down, including summertime inactivity, improved corporate protocols, and legal action taken against spammers. Hmm.

Sendmail, publishers of the popular open-source mail server, has released a new beta module that implements the SenderID specification. For anyone that doesn’t remember what SenderID is, it is the child of CallerIDfor E-mail and the Sender Policy Framework. SenderID validates mail from the source to make sure the message originated from the valid MX records (as best I understand it).

News.com has more:

The majority of e-mail carried across the Internet uses the open-source Sendmail program, which runs on the Linux and Unix operating systems. The new module for the program allows e-mail administrators to modify their systems and add the authentication technology. The e-mail server will then forward messages with the necessary Sender ID information and authenticate incoming e-mail messages using the system.

[…]

Sendmail is distributing a test version of the software to get enough companies onboard and gauge a computer’s ability to authenticate e-mail messages in real time. Adding the authentication to an e-mail server slowed processing down by 8 percent for outbound traffic and 15 percent for inbound traffic, according to the Sendmail’s testing site.

Source: News.com, “Sendmail searches for antispam testers”

Two main questions here. First, is this slowed processing time significant enough to prevent it from being used. If mail is still received and then verified, seems that the bandwidth actually goes up (with processing times). Second, if e-mail becomes reliable again, will people stop rallying for RSS-based one-to-one conversations a la RSS E-mail?

I spent the better part of an hour last night talking with two of my best buddies, who also happen to be unix system admins, about the use of RSS as an alternative to E-mail.

Despite all our attempts to figure out a solution that was viable, we kept hitting dead ends. For the most part, however, the obstacles are not technical at all, but rather are social. Driving adoption of something like RSS-based e-mail is the main hurdle. Simplicity and ease-of-use is another large trap.

Yesteday, I received a trackback to the Top 10 list I quoted. The guys on the end of that conversation had some interesting points to make in favor of e-mail. It seems worthwhile to mention them here.

• “Email is a de-facto lowest common denominator - With few exceptions, when I send an email I know that the recipient will be able to open and read the contents. […] to expect that we’re all going to switch any time soon to RSS, or instant messaging, or whatever alternative technologies exist - is optimistic to say the least.”

• Email is asynchronous - “Something that instant messaging advocates often ignore, I think, is that email is an asynchronous medium - it doesn’t matter if I’m not logged in at the time when the message arrives, because it will be stored for me to deal with later.”

• Email is cross-cultural - “Despite the scope for misunderstanding and miscommunication, email provides an acceptable sense of distance to allow for a relationship to develop - the language of messages can casualise over the course of the interaction, whereas it’s far more difficult to be as formal in an instant message.”

• Email is auditable - “In an ideal world, these situations wouldn’t arise in the first place - but we live in imperfect times, so there’s sometimes a valid place for a communication tool with a built-in audit trail.”

Source: infosential.com, “Reports of the death of email have been greatly exaggerated”

This raises a point that I was making yesterday with my friends. The substitution of RSS for e-mail usually implies the use of some other medium, namely IM, as the method for spontaneous conversations. IM is wildly popular, but it’s also no substitue for what e-mail is (not yet anyway).

Stowe is dead-set that e-mail will see its end sooner than later, vowing that he “hates it” for many reasons, beyond the SPAM issue. I’ve argued (see “Will RSS Replace E-mail?“) that RSS is not entirely ready to provide what e-mail is providing us now.

Chris Pirillo provides an intriguing Top 10 reasons why e-mail will meet its maker. Here they are, abridged:

1. RSS is an unspammable medium.
2. As of yet, you can’t spread a virus (or worm) through an RSS channel.
3. The user is FINALLY in full control of his or her subscription (entirely).
4. Instant organization.
5. RSS was crafted with repurposing in mind.
6. High-Impact, Cost-effective, Immediate, Measurable, and Targeted.
7. Entries can be changed, removed, or expired.
8. Users will continue to think twice about sharing their e-mail address with anybody, even after any sort of “legislation” is passed.
9. News aggregators will continue to evolve, but are “good enough” to start using today.
10. The idea of RSS, much like e-mail, is not going to disappear.

Source: Lockergnome, “Why RSS Will Kill E-mail Publishing” via Radiant Marketing

I think two one of the more interesting questions to ask ourselves are:

1. How will we simplify the creation of RSS channels between individuals?
2. How will we secure RSS channels?

There are many solutions that now provide e-mail to RSS gateways. Unfortunately, the abdication of this throne will require more than generating RSS from e-mail as that’s really a different beast.

On the security front, we’re right now forced to use SSL and HTTP-AUTH. Unfortunately, the support for these is somewhat limited while also obtrusive by design. I can imagine the world where I have to authenticate all 300 of my active channels and how annoying that would be for me.

Everyone knows that SPAM is out of control and continuing to dilute the value and flexibility of e-mail as a communication medium. There’s so much abuse that Stowe Boyd is running his own “Just Say No To E-mail” campaign.

However, some of us still have faith in the system, and believe that, with a little time, things will correct themselves. Many new technological forces are already being ratified into place things are beginning to happen that could quite possibly reduce the level of SPAM by leaps and bounds.

It seems the “world” audience is not ready to give up yet either.

GENEVA — The United Nations is aiming to bring a “modern-day epidemic” of junk e-mail under control within two years by standardizing legislation to make it easier to prosecute offenders, a leading expert said Tuesday at a technology conference.

[…]

Top priority is pornography “that may come to the attention of children,” Mr. Horton said. “I think it’s time we did something formally about this. We will have to come to some sort of general understanding.”

As much as 85% of all e-mail may be categorized as spam, the ITU said, compared with an estimated 35% just one year ago. The vast majority is generated by a few hundred people, but authorities aren’t able to prosecute many of them under current legislation.

Source: WSJ.com, “U.N. Wants to Help Standardize Global Antispamming Law”

Unfortunately, this just seems brawnier that it is. It’s nice to think that the world community can prevent this problem, however, the problem does not stem from where they’re aiming. Realistically, technological solutions have to be the first round of defense. Server-level protection will reduce the benefit of spamming once it locks out enough information.

The issue with legislation, in my opinion, is that there will always be 1) people that ignore the consequences of committing crime and 2) countries that will not obey “known” conventions. The deliverables from this UN interaction will most likely be a series of best practices in the form of “legislative templates”.

We’ve heard lots about the Mail Wars, as they were, and now there’s another army entering with big guns. Hotmail has announced that they will now boost the storage limits to 250MB for the free accounts and 2GB for the $19.95 annual subscribers. This sneaks by Yahoo! with their 100MB for free offer. Similar hikes are soon to come from AskJeeves as well.

One interesting observation made in a News.com article:

Indeed, Google’s initial steps into storage increases countered the industry’s trend to charge extra for more memory. Over the past few years, Yahoo and Hotmail have both taken steps to decrease memory in hopes of convincing free users to become paying subscribers.

Source: News.com, “Hotmail to offer 250MB of free storage”

Amazing what a little disruptive force applied at the epicenter can cause in an industry as a whole. This is, really, no different than what we say in the Web Hosting Wars when more and more space was provided to users that needed to host their 300K of web site files in their 2GB buckets. At least e-mail continues to accumulate.

This raises one important question: could GMail have trouble getting off the ground once invites start free-flowing? Consider the forces at work. GMail sports this new mail interface, which in many respects breaks the “rules” of e-mail (yes they are rules since everyone is used to the way mail used to work) and required adjustment to a new interface paradigm. GMail has this potentially scary, privacy-issue-ripe advertising supported model that’s already raised flags, eyebrows, and even litigation. Competitors have had the power of hindsight to react appropriately without adding the specter of big brother (aside from the one’s that were there before).

Let’s wait and see.

http://www.anticlue.net/archives/000266.htm

There seems to be a great deal of discussion lately about the highly exaggerated death of e-mail as the RSS camp starts to make a case for moving to an RSS-centric model per individual communications.

Ross Mayfield has a rather lengthy look at the higher-level issues which tend to revolve around the different paradigms used in mail (push) versus RSS (pull). Here’s some of those thoughts for background:

Push Models have higher transaction costs because risks and costs are not evenly distributed. It costs nearly nothing to compose and send a message and costs practically nothing to send an additional copy to someone. Costs are borne by readers, something well known and the cause for spam, the burden of processing messages coming to you without your control. Risks are borne by the Receiver for having an address alone. The real costs are incurred when the Receiver tries usurp control over costs.

[…]

Contrast this with Pull Models. The difference is the Reader chooses and can control whom they want to subscribe to and when they want to be interrupted. Risk is borne by the Sender with every message they put out and the quality, albeit with a low bar and informal culture, they are consistent with. Costs are controlled by the Receiver. They choose what to subscribe to and more importantly unsubscribe from, on average less than 150 feeds, an expected group size.

Source: Many 2 Many, “Re-ID”

(more…)