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E-mail challenged by irrelevant messages
April 19, 2007

E-mail’s role as the pre-eminent Internet application may be drawing to a close. Evidence mounts that e-mail is becoming an unreliable communications method—choked with Spam and other irrelevant messages—that faces competition from instant messaging, VoIP, and social networking.

With regard to Spam, IDC predicts that 2007 will be the first year in which Spam e-mail volumes exceed person-to-person email volumes worldwide. "Spam volumes are growing faster than expected due to the success of image-based Spam in bypassing anti-Spam filters and of email sender identity spoofing in getting higher response rates," says Mark Levitt, program VP for IDC's Collaborative Computing and Enterprise Workplace research, who adds, "Instant messaging, joined by free and low-cost VoIP calling, will result in slower e-mail growth, especially among teens and young adults.”

As for young adults, I blogged on March 5 on the difficulty college administrators have contacting students, in part because “e-mail gets lost, overlooked, erased, or ignored,” according to Gwendolyn Dungy of the National Association of Student Personnel Administrators. E-mail’s deficiency in this regard was made horribly clear at Virginia Tech. By some accounts, social networking sites like Facebook have been more effective than standard e-mail at informing students of the tragic events of April 16.

Text messaging, too, is proving its value as an e-mail alternative. Test messages to 67,000 students at the University of Texas at Austin in January notified them of an impending ice storm and kept them safe indoors. (I suspect, though, that even messaging is as susceptible to Spam and overuse as is standard e-mail.)

Even within the corporate world, e-mail is losing its luster, which Wall Street Journal columnist Jason Fry attributes to “…the rising tide of unnecessary e-mail that threatens to drown us in apathy and distraction.”

The problem with Spam and irrelevant messages is that the cost of messages is born almost entirely by the recipient. Various schemes have been proposed to alter this fact—one is Get Back Software’s PostWare, which imposes a non-cash postage cost on each message sent. With PostWare, each must work within an e-mail budget, or allowance.

The drawback is that it only works within an organization’s internal e-mail system, but it seems to be a step in the right direction of being able to imbue truly important e-mail messages with the significance of an overnight FedEx package.

Of course, any communications channel can be no better than the message crafted to go over it. Anticipating the January ice storm, UT-Austin administrators had a crystal-clear message: “Stay home.” It’s far less clear what message Virginia Tech administrators could have transmitted that would have significantly changed the outcome.

Update, April 20, 2007: Social-networking site MySpace is testing a news-aggregation service this week, according to today's Bulldog Reporter.

Posted by Rick Nelson on April 19, 2007 | Comments (0)