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North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical Re: AOL Non-Lameness
Email, as it now exists, has been reduced to an unreliable medium... "joe job" operators, etc., mean that people don't read bounced / returned email notifications any more (not that most of them are written in such a way as to be comprehensible to the average user circa 2006), spam filters often exist on accounts without people even being aware of it... servers filter mail before it even gets to anyone's inbox... or just block it at the SMTP server or network (such as via iptables), etc. etc., and filters can have unintended side effects that aren't noticed for an extended period (one of my compatriots realized that certain emails were being dumped into his junk email folder, which he didn't check, several months after the fact). I think many people don't even use email as their primary means of asynchronous internet communication - my kids certainly don't... the rise of social networking sites might very well be driven by the fact that they implicitly provide a functional system of authenticated communications and provide mechanisms for handling unsolicited communications. You could draw a parallel between email and social networking sites and other proprietary systems of communication, and the USPS and FedEx/UPS... email is the postal service of the web... mostly, but not wholly reliable, unauthenticated, and full of low priority or junk communications. ... and likely to be supplanted by future developments. Thomas Randy Bush wrote: > >> In the near future half the net will spend half their time >> wondering what happened to half their mail. > > they won't have that much time to do the wondering as they will spend > 90% of their time talking about it. > > qed > > randy
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