Email will last forever

I like to say "Email: it's good enough."

Spam is horrible, but filtering seems to work well enough these days. (Which makes me wonder why people are still spamming, but that's a separate post about game theory.)

Having tried it, and recognizing the degree to which this (at least so far) is happening in the "conscious" mind-space rather than sub-conscious/motor-muscle-memory mind-space, typing is vastly faster. Today. It strikes me as an amazingly hard problem to separate one's "inner monologue" from "thoughts i want to transmit". I suspect an easy cheat would be "imagine typing it out" to create a specific, "physical" demarcation in communication types.

There are certain phrases I hear in startup pitches that immediately cause me to tune out. One of them is some combination of social, mobile and local. Another is "fixing emaiL" or "email is broken".

It isn't.

With all the change that's happened with the Internet two forms of communication have proven to be incredibly resilient: SMS and email.

SMS is resilient because every phone has it. It's portable and it's simple. The best effort thus far at dethroning SMS seems to be WhatsApp. Sure phone companies (particularly US phone companies) charge a ridiculous amount for SMS. It's no longer the valuable bandwidth control channel that it once was. But even so, I don't see it going away anytime soon.

The beauty of email is that it's largely decentralized. With something like Facebok, you get ads inserted into your stream, you're constantly at risk of some privacy snafu and there's always the risk the service changes in some problematic (for you) way or disappears altogether (OK, Facebook isn't going anywhere anytime soon but we've all had services we like get bought out and sunsetted).

Email addresses are mostly non-portable. You can have your own domain and have a portable address but most people don't. Just like a phone number has limited portability (eg only within the same country).

Changing phone numbers and email addresses seems to be an infrequent enough occurrence for most people that they don't really care about it (as a whole).

Certain services provide useful value-adds to email. Spam filtering on GMail is a prime example. There are ads on the Web UI but hey you don't have to use it (there are POP3/IMAP interfaces) and they aren't that offensive (as, say, Facebook ads are).

The fundamental use case of both SMS and email is one person sending a message to another person. Think of this like IP (the protocol). People find each other with contacts. Think of this like DNS (kinda).

Every "email killer" I've seen has made this most important use case harder or just more complicated and, more to the point, for this use case provides no tangible benefits (that anyone cares about).

And in all cases you're giving up the decentralized nature of email so someone has control over your messages and your experience. Why would anyone make that tradeoff? It doesn't make any sense.

So forever? Well that's tough to argue. But for a really long time? Sure, absolutely.

It's insecure and it must die. To be more correct, email can not continue in its current form.

True. But on the other hand, its still (against all reason) too hard to actually do anything with such massive archives unless you really prepare for it .. like you, I have more than 15 years of email collected over the decades, but actually being able to do something productive with it depends on just how much time I want to spend setting up a system that can handle the mbox files of the 80's, the Eudora archives of the 90's, the Mail.app sql-database of the 21st Century, and so on. It has persisted, dear mail-format, but oh what a mess it still is after all these years. I'd kill for a solution that just gives me my own full-text search engine to query/manipulate this archive, without first having to configure stream-plugins to do text conversions and so on. I guess this is one of those cases where I should just set up a dedicated Linux machine (finally, a use for an rPi!) with all the years mails, and promptly set a text search tool on the problem .. trouble is, can I do that without having to train the thing to handle SMTP headers first? Intuitively I'd say "probably this is a done deal out there somewhere" but a part of me still cowers at the idea ..

(And before anyone mentions it: no, google is not my solution. I want to do offline manipulation of decades of mail archives .. not just turn it over to some Entity, Inc. to solve..)