Background
The other day I posted about 1980s technology. Today I am going to expand a bit on that to give you an idea where things were and where things stand now. The technology in question is email (or, as we used to write it, “e-mail”).
Email had been around since the 1970s, but really took off in the 1980s with the widespread adoption of minicomputers. Digital Equipment Corp. had an email system called ALL-IN-1. IBM had PROFS (IBM Professional Office System). Home users wanting to exchange email with their friends had the local bulletin board system (BBS) or could use an online service like CompuServe. There were two dedicated public email services: MCI Mail from MCI and Western Union’s EasyLink.
Because of the cost of the services and storage limitations, email was not widely used for commercial purposes until the mid-1990s. In office settings email was used for intra- and inter-departmental communications. Messages, as I recall, were straight and to the point. (Again, remember there was often a cost associated with it or, at the least, storage limitations.)
The Problems
The problems started as more people got computers in their homes, and computers became ubiquitous on office desks. The number of messages exploded when this happened in the mid-1990s.
Then there was the rise of the internet and the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP), replacing costly proprietary mail services. Sending email went from 50¢ per 500 characters on MCI Mail to 0¢ through your home internet provider. Same thing for business users. Storage costs plummeted, servers shrank to the size of a large pizza box, and everyone had a computer on their desk. It was off to the races.
Oh, and with SMTP, an easy uniform email address format became standard in the form of “user@domain.tld”. No longer did we have to use something like this:
C=US;ADMD=icloud;PRMD=johnmeola;G=John;S=Meola
Fun fact: X.400 addresses such as the one above allowed you to send postal mail, Telex, and facsimile transmissions in addition to email, assuming the X.400 provider configured gateways to allow those. The only entities that would do that would have been government-run post, telephone, and telegraph (PTT) companies. In reality, I have never seen that functionality actually used.
The real problems with email started with three things: A, O, and L. As in, America OnLine. If you were around in the 1990s you remember having their CDs flood your mailbox. (I used mine for drink coasters.) Spamming, it seems, was part of their business model. If AOL simply remained a walled garden, that would have been fine and they could spam the hell out of each other and leave the rest of us alone. But AOL connected their mail (and news) servers to the internet, and that brought on some very bad behavior.
One of the things about SMTP was that it was not designed to handle mass spammers and other obnoxious people. It was designed for well-behaved computer science professors and other academics communicating with their fellow researchers who were definitely not Nigerian royalty and were not interested in pushing fake Viagra.
Thus, domain verification and other modern tools to block this garbage were never implemented.
As the spam problem got out of hand and everyone started looking for alternatives to email, marketers and email providers got together and implemented DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM), Sender Policy Framework (SPF), and domain-based message authentication, reporting, and conformance (DMARC) to ensure that only legitimate spammers got through.
This solved the worst of spam problem and cut down on phishing attempts, but it did not solve the other problems that were caused by the users themselves.
Why Email Bugs Me
From the user’s perspective
To be clear, email is not in and of itself a problem. The problem is with how users treat it, especially in the business world.
The first problem is quite simple: There is too damn much of it! Between the marketing garbage that we inadvertently signed up for to get that discount or order that product, the dumb newsletters, and those reply-alls with messages like “Thanks”, “OK”, or some other useless stuff that divert your attention, you have to spend way to much time sorting out the wheat from the chaff.
This leads to problem number two: Email is a time suck. How many hours a day do you spend going through your email? In my view, if it is more than thirty minutes a day, that’s too much. You have better things to do with your time, like getting actual work done.
Then there is a problem that certain of us have with attention and distractions. Neurodiverse people cannot handle interruptions and changes in routine, and that is exactly what email is. Every message is an interruption, and every request is a change in routine. Once a neurodiverse person has their attention broken, it can take some time for them to get back to what they were originally working on.
How you determine if an email is important? Oh, yes, I know it can be flagged as such by the sender. But how many people actually use that function? And of those that do know about it, how many abuse it? So you get an important email from your hundred-year-old Boomer boss who does not prioritize his email (there’s a specific geezer I have in mind here) and then gets mad when you do not drop what you are doing and respond straight away because you’re deep in thought trying to debug code or solve a system problem. This goes back to the first problem of their being too damn much email flying around.
From the sysadmin’s perspective
So far I have spoken from the user’s perspective. Now for the mail administrator’s perspective.
Problem one: The older lady in the office who keeps EVERY STINKING EMAIL she receives, to the point where you have to either adjust up her quota (unfair to everyone else) or have to send someone from desktop support to help her clear it out. Modern versions of Outlook do not support archiving to PST files and, besides, the existence of PST files can violate company document retention policies. So then you need to have a conversation with her about deleting old files. And if she is an executive, good luck to you!
Problem two: Phishing is still a problem, and you have to run company training sessions to teach users how to spot and report phishing emails. But there is always that one knucklehead who clicks on the link and BOOM! The company is now facing a ransomware attack. Guess who will be on the hot seat as the IT administrator.
Solutions
Here are some solutions I have from a user perspective:
1. Do not live in your email client. In fact, it is best to either close the program when you are not using it or, at the very least, disable notifications from the client.
2. Allocate certain times of the day to check email and stick to those times.
3. If you have an important message for someone, use the company’s Slack or Teams client to communicate and tag the person you want to reach so they will be alerted. Do not abuse this, though.
4. If you really need to get through to the person and your message is important, pick up the telephone and call! You will be surprised at how quickly you can resolve something with a quick five-minute phone call versus back-and-forth over Slack or, God forbid, email.
For administrators who are still managing an on-site email server, why??? Migrate it to Microsoft 365, Gmail, or AWS WorkMail. Cloud services give you a one-stop location for identity management, archiving, and document retention policy configuration. Best of all, you do not have to worry about misconfiguring a mail application that leaves your organization vulnerable.
Now here’s another writer, Zach Katsof, with some great thoughts on this topic:
Leave a Reply