The End of E-mail

Computerworld - Has it happened to you? Your phone rings, and a business contact asks whether you received his e-mail. You say no. You check your spam filter, and there it is. Or, you send an important document electronically to a colleague who calls you later and asks you to fax it because his network no longer accepts attachments. For many of us, these time-wasting events are now happening daily.

I won't bother to ask if you've been a victim of a virus, a worm, spyware or some other bit of unsavory code that hitchhiked its way into your PC via your e-mail queue. You have. And why waste my breath asking whether you get more real mail than spam? You don't (see "Dual Curses: Viruses and Spam," QuickLink 44143).

PC-based e-mail is rapidly becoming one of the most unreliable, unsafe and unpleasant modes of communication at our disposal. It won't be long before we abandon it.

Not only is e-mail becoming increasingly irritating to many of us, but it's also becoming more expensive for companies to manage. Much more.

IT departments in large organizations spend millions of dollars annually to manage incoming and outgoing e-mail. Antispam and antivirus appliances and filters aren't cheap, and they generally need ongoing support from subscription services to keep current in the fight against the creeps who persist in attacking our networks .

Companies concerned about the implications of sexual harassment lawsuits and intellectual property losses are investing in pricey message-management technology that inspects the contents of every e-mail. Compliance issues are forcing companies to add sophisticated information life-cycle management tools to their mass storage systems to properly archive e-mail.

In addition to buying the products, you need to train IT staff to deploy and manage them. Of course, you could outsource everything, but that's not cheap, and you never really know how secure it is.

All these headaches, for what? So workers can chew up your corporate bandwidth e-mailing SpongeBob movie trailers to their friends?

So-called realists out there will dismiss these lamentations by saying that despite all of its problems, PC e-mail is too popular to be abandoned. Perhaps. But those old enough to remember Usenet know that even a good, useful communications tool can be abandoned once it becomes overrun by hucksters, pornographers and other pond scum floating around the Internet. Usenet is still out there, but its popularity is near zero.

Well, the so-called realists will counter, e-mail is still far too useful for companies to abandon. That's what these same folks said about IBM's Selectric and the floppy disk drive. Technology is abandoned whenever cost-benefit evaluations determine it's no longer worth keeping around. And we're getting mighty close to the day when PC-based e-mail is determined to have a bigger downside than upside.

OK then, the realists will say, what's going to replace e-mail? After all, technology needs to be replaced with another technology. Agreed.

In the case of the Selectric, it took a combination of keyboards, monitors, printers, storage media and, of course, the PC motherboard to supplant those elegant machines. And that's what I predict will happen with PC-based e-mail.

I believe a mix of new tools will emerge around handheld devices like the Palm, the BlackBerry and your smart cell phone. These products are becoming more powerful, making it possible to do more than just send and receive messages. They're adding crisper displays and better input capabilities, whether with bigger onboard keyboards or external ones.

Also, with these devices, there's no underlying monopoly like Windows that sociopathic programmers can write viruses for. Spam isn't a big problem for today's handheld users. And by the time PC e-mail is jettisoned in the next few years, vendor-embraced antispam standards and legal action against spammers will make it a nonissue.

Instant messaging is another technology that could help move PC e-mail into the dustbin of history. It's hard to spoof an IM user because incoming messages by definition come from someone on your whitelist. And tracking and management tools exist to protect your company and employees from intellectual property theft, harassment and dangerous attachments.

Sure, there's no perfect replacement for PC e-mail. But there wasn't one for IBM's Selectric, either. It had the greatest keyboard ever, one the PC industry hasn't come close to replicating in a quarter century. But somehow, we've managed to get by, just as we will when PC e-mail disappears.

Mark Hall is a Computerworld editor at large. Contact him at mark_hall@computerworld.com.