In Praise of Email

Remember a decade or two ago when it was our national pastime to complain about email? More recently, as I’ve reassessed this blog, my social media presence, and our centralized digital platforms in general, I’ve come to realize just how much the email system got right, in spite of full inboxes, spam, and security issues. Despite, or perhaps because of, its early inception, email avoided many of the worst aspects of our modern media environment.

Let’s review:

  • Email is radically interoperable and universal.
  • You can have your own email address, using your own domain name, independent of any centralized service, and portable between providers. If you wish, you can also choose an email address at a centralized provider.
  • Regardless of provider, you can easily download all of your email onto your local computer or device. You can locally search your email archive; you are not beholden to any provider’s indexing system.
  • Identity on email is [username] at [domain name] rather than just a username that presumes that you are on a specific site or service. Leaving off the domain or service name prevents interoperability because of potential namespace confusion.
  • There are commonly implemented and generally respected standards and protocols for uploading, downloading, and syncing email between machines that are not under the control of a single entity.
  • Most email systems do not signal to others that you are online, and such signaling is not part of the email protocols themselves.
  • Filtering (e.g., spam filtering) is a separate system, and you can choose different filtering systems. Those filtering systems can do many things, including blocking, muting, suppressing images, sorting, and responding — all at the discretion of the user.
  • Although some email systems algorithmically sort email by priority or importance, that is not part of the email system itself. Again, this can be added, or not, by the user, and the default is strictly chronological.
  • The creation of groups (e.g., email listservs) is decentralized and yet effective.
  • You can attach files of any kind to an email, not just an image or video.
  • There are a wide range of clients to compose and read email, with features to match every style of interaction with the email system.
  • You can end-to-end encrypt email.
  • It is possible to have an email environment without distracting ads.

Compare that list with other, newer platforms we use today. I think it looks pretty darn good. Now think about structuring some of those platforms in the same way, and how much better they would be.

Comments

marcozehe says:

I love and agree with this assessment of e-mail. Everything else came and went, but e-mail was always there to keep things together. Thank you!

Sue says:

And oh for the days of the letter….

The only problem I have felt personally is that too many people are using gmail thereby making it too powerful and the self-hosted emails don’t even reach the inbox (go straight to spam when SPF, DKIM, DMARC, everything is setup)

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