I find it interesting to contrast 'forever' with another technology that will last forever 'vinyl records'. I expect there will always be point to point, store and forward communication channels, but those channels have existed for millenia, from travelers who stacked rocks to tell those who came after where the trail was, to people who send compromising photos of themselves across cellular networks. So if we set aside the tautology for a moment, communication channels get morphed into a solution for a particular need, regardless of how well they service that need, and when there is a particularly wide disparity between need and implementation, there is an opportunity to create a better channel.<p>My current favorite example is Trello as a way of communicating activity status from many to many on many projects. Something email does poorly (but has been used for in the past) and Trello does brilliantly.<p>But lets look at the points one by one.<p><i>#1 everyone has an email address</i> -- sure today they do, and 25 years ago nobody did, and 25 years from now its possible everyone will have a "fooservice" address.<p><i>#2 email is flexible</i> -- see my point above, flexing is not the same as serving.<p><i>#3 other stuff is great for professional communication but we still use email.</i> -- and before that inter-office memos.<p>I get that these guys (Front) are invested in email sticking around but I would note that putting an adapter layer in front of it is no more, nor less, efficient than putting an adapter layer in front of TCP/IP or smoke signals or a 45 year old text file transfer protocol, whether or not "email" in the form of SMTP will survive should be irrelevant to Front, the question should be will the need for their service survive.
No one mentions portability, but I believe it is a wonderful property of email - I have more than 15 years of email, moved across various servers and clients on various operating systems and it is still available and functional. What other personal communication channel is that resilient to technological change ?
The fact "email will last forever" is precisely why I believe it is absolutely the best protocol to build automatic services to access and share personal information. I have spoken about it here: <a href="http://blog.zorinaq.com/?e=76" rel="nofollow">http://blog.zorinaq.com/?e=76</a><p>Edit: Someone1234: you don't need to wait for companies to support my proposal. It already works today with Gmail: try my live demo on pm33at@gmail.com - it works by leveraging standard auto-responder features. As to the comparison with XKCD 927, it is invalid: my proposal is radically different from anything that currently exists, because it is decentralized while all current personal information sharing platforms are centralized.<p>Edit: rakoo: yes, XMPP would work too, and would probably be a bit better than SMTP because it is real time. However in practice building something over SMTP has more chances of seeing success (because not everybody uses XMPP, but everybody has email).
The reason email will last forever is that nobody owns it.<p>If Twitter goes bust then you lose all of your tweets. If Facebook goes bust then all of your status updates go out of the window.<p>But email is an open, free protocol that anyone can implement and is deliberately designed to be decentralised.<p>And so the ecosystem will last as long as a few people find it useful.
I think that a lot of "startups" are using the fantasy of an email-less world as a marketing tactic. I agree, I don't think email is going to disappear. Whether that is a good thing or bad, it's irrelevant
Sure, email is not perfect, but it is the most flexible communication method the internet has to offer. It is not tight to a single organization, or "owned" by a single company and reasonably portable with an open protocol. Tools will be invented to further optimize the experience, but in essence it will remain the same, just like a telephone call hasn't changed. I will not commit an essential part of my business again, to a single company's closed-sourced product (like for instance MS Office in the past, though OSX being the exception).<p>I recently started using Mailbox as my personal Email Client again, and I am very impressed in how they "optimized" the experience. It basically converts your emails into task items, with different priorities, in lists etc. When combined with notes, it could make any task / note app obsolete.<p>Unfortunately it only works with GMail and iCloud, but I hope Dropbox keeps investing in the product.
<i>- Email is not sexy? Design beautiful interfaces. Mailbox has managed to make email light, fast, and mobile-friendly. Sparrow was creating the most intuitive and pleasurable mailing experience etc.</i><p>I wish the author had not said "etc" at the end. He is obviously very knowledgeable about the topic. A lot of people, even people who spend LOTS of time online (like me) have not tried out every email client out there, and this is a missed opportunity to inform me and impress me with his depth of expertise on the domain his company is involved in.<p>I am sure I am guilty of this at times, where I either assume "everyone knows what I know" or I realize they don't and I don't want to sound like a braggart or something but I find myself feeling like I have been told "surely, you know all these examples and what they did different/right" and the answer is "No, no I do not -- what did they do??"
The concept of email is too fuzzy. Is it SMTP that will last forever? This technology is more like sending postcards that every middleman can read. Certainly a more private alternative will replace it someday, and it should be more spam-proof.<p>Also email serves many purposes. If it is to be replaced, it will be on a use-case by use-case manner. RSS is a better alternative to one-to-many mailing lists. Forums are a better alternative to many-to-many mailing lists. Etc.<p>But yes, we should improve what we have until we can replace it.
> The email protocol is simple and flexible.<p>Ha, okay. I'm going to include actual emails in "the email protocol", because if you just count the network protocols you're not doing anything useful. Emails are anything but simple. They were born in the early days of the Internet, and no doubt time and the impossibility of predicting the future is responsible for how things turned out — but they are anything but simple.<p>Email messages are ASCII only. You can <i>put</i> non-ASCII characters into a header however. It looks like this:<p><pre><code> Subject: =?UTF-8?B?SMOpbGzDtOKApgo=?=
</code></pre>
Writing a parser for this is an unnecessary challenge in this day. (If you ever need to do email, for parsing <i>or</i> outputting, <i>get a library</i>.) Watching a coworker unwilling to take the time to the read the RFC try to write a parser for this… is a very special hell.¹<p>The body also has to be ASCII, so just about every email client out there has to do:<p><pre><code> Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64
</code></pre>
And then encode the body in base64, wasting space and network bandwidth. Technically, you can send full 8-bit message bodies, but the sender and receiver have to agree ahead of time. Either GMail doesn't support it, or it just doesn't bother even when the email destinations are all GMail. (Or, it could be because some IMAP client might get the message, and not support it.)<p>There's also that every message has a text version and an HTML version — hopefully semantically similar — but HTML support in email clients (at least the big ones) is terrible. (see for example <a href="http://www.email-standards.org/" rel="nofollow">http://www.email-standards.org/</a> ) You'll think support is great on the web after you're done.<p>I've not covered un-wrapping headers. Or the things people think aren't valid email addresses. (Your average Joe thinks [a-zA-Z0-9]+@<a domain name> matches all valid emails. Oh, and that they're case insensitive too.) Or IMAP. Or encryption. Or even whether email gets encrypted while on the wire from Hotmail to Comcast.<p>> Slack pretends to be “an email killer”<p>I'm not sure they're out to kill all emails… just the ones that would be better as a real-time communication.<p>¹Don't test your library's output email on Gmail, either. Gmail is <i>creepy</i> good at correcting bad input. "It works on Gmail" != it's correct.<p>I do wish I could send restructured text emails and have the client just render them. In theory, email has everything I need. Clients just need to support it, that's all. I'll admit, that is kinda cool.
Disclaimer: I work for a company for whom email is a core part of business.<p>Email and letter-writing go together, in my mind. Not so much because email is a literal model of letter-writing, but rather because they give you an important abstraction that I think we all need, which is a form of passive communication.<p>You may get letters which are urgent, and you may get email that is urgent, but the nature of both is that they are hands-off. You don't need to be present to receive mail or email. Well, there is some physical mail that you do need to be present for! -- that being certified mail, some package deliveries, and those represent perhaps a different abstraction. That aside, you have a mailbox to hold mail, and a carrier to deliver it to you. Nobody needs to talk to you, to tell you that happened. You can go and check your mailbox and see what you have at any time.<p>People who want to "kill" email may dislike the form, the implementation, but the abstraction is useful. It will likely continue to be useful -- I don't foresee a time when it will not be. Email, in <i>some sense</i>, will stick around.
<i>Forever</i> is a strong word... but I do believe that email will stand still for some good years.<p>Email will last forever because email has been around since... well... <i>forever</i>. That is one key factor that the article misses: practically everyone is used to email. It's really tough to replace something so well known and widespread.<p>I guess the desire of doing so it's due to so many people struggling with email. How many times have I peeked people's email client looking to hundreds, heck sometimes thousands, of unread emails.<p>I always had inbox zero. I won't say that for me email is a joy, but is definitely no struggle. I guess I'm more organized than most people anyway...
The single most important issue with email: Team Inboxes.<p>As soon as more than one person works with an inbox, it sucks big time.<p>But I agree - email will last forever, nearly none of the products you mentioned work without an email notification feature.
Any argument around "Email" should first define what email is. Does the author mean SMTP will last forever? MIME? IMAP? Email is a way of sending a message using a number of old, insecure and inefficient protocols. Will better alternatives to these protocols gain traction one day? Most definitely. What will remain of "Email" as we know it today is the addressing scheme IMO. The universally acceptable way of messaging a user@any-host is the real power of email, and will remain for the foreseeable future whilst transport and encoding protocols come and go (eg VoIP succeeding PSTN). In fact, email should last as long as the DNS system exists, given that the addressing system is directly tied to it. Being a flexible P2P messaging system, email can be easily extended to provide features of any "email-killer" app out there (including realtime communication) if need be. These innovations haven't happened simply because major email server providers dominate their existing markets (Exchange!) and have little incentive to innovate given the high barrier to entry for startups selling email servers to corporates. Email clients have seen more innovation, but there's only so much a client can do to extend capabilities of email.<p>plug: for this reason we're developing a full-stack email service in Node comprising client and server apps (end plug)
It is, however, a horrifically bad protocol. We don't need a new app, but a better protocol for unified mail, IM and audio/video. XMPP is close, but flawed.
Email is wonderful and terrible. SMTP is pretty simple, and everyone with a static IP can run their own email server. Configuring it requires some study, but it's not too hard.<p>OTOH creating email clients is hard. I wrote a web server and wanted a webmail client. Basic SMPT messaging is straightforward enough, but MIME is a confusing tangle of protocols and rules that is difficult to understand and implement correctly.<p>I mostly succeeded but it took a long time. Part of the problem is the complexity means protocols are often violated and my webmail client has to deal with loads of exceptions to protocol rules to work in the real world.<p>But that's hardly limited to email. Look at http, it has arcane rules too, and some of the common security issues on the net are the result of "sloppily" implementing programs using http. (You know, XSS attacks, SQL injections and so on.)<p>Email has warts but what doesn't. Certainly email "replacements" will have warts too, especially as they are extended to cover the breadth that email has encompassed.
I like email and can't see it dying at all. I have several email addresses for various purposes and it's no hassle to manage.<p>I have about 5 email addresses and 1 work email. It's good having a dedicated "website sign-up" email address for forums and so on, where you don't care about the spam level.<p>The flexibility in setting up your in-box how you want is a great thing about email. I don't understand people who constantly complain about their in-boxes. Learn to manage your in-box, I say, and stop crying about your first-world inbox clutter problem!<p>I'm interested in secure online collaboration tools, and it's great to see so many options emerging. These secure tools can easily coexist with email and keep everyone happy.<p>Email is a familiar, reliable, predictable service that everyone knows about. It doesn't get "updated" every 3 months by some agenda-driven tech giant with ideas about how we ought to be communicating.
I hate the tight coupling slack introduces. It should have been called leash instead. Glad to see it slowly going away.<p>Email is a product of the 60s predating HTTP itself and built to stand on its own. Its non-invasive and loosely coupled which scales across all kinds of people. Not just for ADD nerds like us.
When Google Wave appeared on public I really liked and believed it would replace the email. I think one day the, now open sourced, Apache Wave Project will rebirth with:
- a fast user interface (today really sucks);
- decentralized and easy to install servers;
- Features that are missing;
E-mail is a sufficient way of communication for almost every case - just like traditional, physical mail was 100 years ago. You can send a party invite to your friends, you can send family pictures to your mother, you can discuss a project with your co-worker and you can send an invoice to your customer - all of that using a single application. If you need to contact someone immediately - use IM or phone. Why do we need a seperate tool for every scenario? Sure, they provide some useful stuff, but nothing beats simply opening your e-mail client and typing a message to whoever you want.
Email will last as long as we are thinking of computers in terms of files and text.<p>That's the foreseeable future. Anything beyond that is speculation.
Depends on what you mean by "forever." If you mean, say, 30-50 years, even maybe 1000, sure, i'll give you that, but i'm still skeptical, but to suggest that there won't be a better communication tool that comes along to replace the written word from one node to one other, i'd say you're deluded. There is lots of room for improvement.
Well for me, Email is already dead. Of course, dead software still exists, for information can not be destroyed. But, there will be more surveillance. There will be more counter-surveillance tools becoming popular. But Email will not stay on that list. Over the long run, the electronic mail will fall back behind inherently encrypted solutions. At least I hope that.
I recently joined a company where bulk of the communication is done on hipchat. I find it to be a much much better way of communicating, especially due to the chatrooms. I now only use email when I need to have a conversation regarding a specific subject or something I need to bookmark (star) for later.
Dude, if IE6 is still around, there's not chance email is going out of business any time soon. Period. However, with the rising of new communication channels, we might get better at communicating certain pieces of information over time, that's what it's all about, anyway.
Something is weird about email: Everyone can pretend to be someone else. It would be sane to reject all emails from a domain, that has no SPF record. I was asthonished when i realized that this is not already happening. Designing a large communication system it is just pure insanity to not include a sentence like this in the spec: "One can only send messages as one of the names he has power over." This could be ensured simply by SPF. It should be safe to assume, that a domain that has no SPF-record is not used for sending emails. I know that this is not the case right now, but it would change really fast, if you would push an update to the SPF-checkers, to enforce that rule. SPAM would be much less of problem than it is right now. Today you have to block ip-addresses, which is a large mess. With this rule enforced, you could block domains. Which are much harder to obtain and have a way smaller quantity.
To the point of needing email as soon as you're interfacing with a person outside of your group: I'm seeing more and more options for this built into things like HipChat and Slack (both of which have the concept of 'guest' users).
There are certain phrases I hear in startup pitches that immediately cause me to tune out. One of them is some combination of social, mobile and local. Another is "fixing emaiL" or "email is broken".<p>It isn't.<p>With all the change that's happened with the Internet two forms of communication have proven to be incredibly resilient: SMS and email.<p>SMS is resilient because every phone has it. It's portable and it's simple. The best effort thus far at dethroning SMS seems to be WhatsApp. Sure phone companies (particularly US phone companies) charge a ridiculous amount for SMS. It's no longer the valuable bandwidth control channel that it once was. But even so, I don't see it going away anytime soon.<p>The beauty of email is that it's largely decentralized. With something like Facebok, you get ads inserted into your stream, you're constantly at risk of some privacy snafu and there's always the risk the service changes in some problematic (for you) way or disappears altogether (OK, Facebook isn't going anywhere anytime soon but we've all had services we like get bought out and sunsetted).<p>Email addresses are mostly non-portable. You can have your own domain and have a portable address but most people don't. Just like a phone number has limited portability (eg only within the same country).<p>Changing phone numbers and email addresses seems to be an infrequent enough occurrence for most people that they don't really care about it (as a whole).<p>Certain services provide useful value-adds to email. Spam filtering on GMail is a prime example. There are ads on the Web UI but hey you don't have to use it (there are POP3/IMAP interfaces) and they aren't that offensive (as, say, Facebook ads are).<p>The fundamental use case of both SMS and email is one person sending a message to another person. Think of this like IP (the protocol). People find each other with contacts. Think of this like DNS (kinda).<p>Every "email killer" I've seen has made this most important use case harder or just more complicated and, more to the point, for this use case provides no tangible benefits (that anyone cares about).<p>And in all cases you're giving up the decentralized nature of email so someone has control over your messages and your experience. Why would anyone make that tradeoff? It doesn't make any sense.<p>So forever? Well that's tough to argue. But for a really long time? Sure, absolutely.
Couple of years ago RJBS gave a great talk about email, it's complexity and issues - <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JENdgiAPD6c" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JENdgiAPD6c</a>
IMO, written communication en totale will fade away within the century. Thinking [0] is much faster.<p>[0] - <a href="http://emotiv.com/" rel="nofollow">http://emotiv.com/</a>
Made me remember the quote by Reinhold Niebuhr: "Frantic orthodoxy is never rooted in faith but in doubt. It is when we are unsure that we are doubly sure."
There are tools to make use of HTTP in all sorts of ways. Curl, Wget, Restful APIs, Sinatra, Grape, etc. Fast, flexible, lightweight.<p>Email - not so much. Want a local email server? There's Postfix - yuckkk. The overhead of spam - yuckk. The lack of tooling, the lack of configurability, the DNS complexity. The fact that it requires a SAAS to do shared inboxes. Yuck.<p>Email could be so much better.
Looking at the listed "Email is..." statements, an important one was missed.<p>Email is broken.<p>Disagree? I'm sure your response expressing your disagreement won't end up in the spam folder.