Russell Nelson, a.k.a “The Angry Economist” posted some thoughts on e-mail and its life expectancy. While I think he’s got some valid points, his solution is centered on a life-after-death experience of “pure pull e-mail”:
Right now, when you send e-mail to someone, you send a message from your client machine to their server. The e-mail is stored on the recipient’s machine until they read the e-mail. Under the new system, you would create a web page, and store it on a server. The URL would be something unguessable like http://example.com/~nelson/827134282173614682732.html. If I wanted to send that e-mail to someone, I would point them to that URL. If I wanted to send it to many someones, I would point a program to that URL, and it would create an index of available messages.
While this would work for “most of the time,” it’s not feasible for the communications that require the push of information. Granted, most e-mail servers would adopt mechanisms to manifest this pulling into a representation of pull. However, there will undoubtedly be the situations where the information must be pushed to recipients.
For pull to work 100 percent of the time, connectivity must be fairly ubiquitous. Which it is not. Furthermore, as much as we would hope pulling would be the ultimate filter, uncertainty of the simple point-in-time of when something was “sent” versus received introduces too many variables of alteration. That there’s a lesson in security we all know that is “unguessable” is not true.
Today, much e-mail is based on pull. In fact, 90 percent of commercial HTML e-mail sent (the legit kind) is based on pull. Images are primarily the culprit of the pull.
Ultimately I believe e-mail will evolve down a path of permission management and grants of rights, pinned by Social networks.
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