Email usefulness

Emails are, in my opinion, still the most effective piece of consumer oriented communication software technology that we have. The reasons for this are many:

1.    Emails use stable standards, so that anybody can build the appropriate clients and servers to transmit them.
2.    Emails are asynchronous.
3.    Emails use push/pull technology, so that users receive notification without needing to do anything except set their email client running.
4.    File attachments can be included and this, combined with the text message, means that any kind of information can be transmitted.
5.    Emails can be broadcast.
6.    Filters can be applied to them as they are received, due to their detailed header information.

Such a popular form of communication was bound to attract free-loaders and time wasters.  These users fall into four categories:

1.    The file attachment abuser.
2.    The excessive broadcaster.
3.    The quote everything replier.
4.    The spammer.

Spammers in particular have done enormous damage to the usefulness of email, but all four of these users, are doing just one thing - creating information overload.  Spammers have forced many users to switch to web browser interfaces for their emails because by using a web browser interface, spam and other unwanted emails can be deleted from the email server without the hassle of downloading them to an email client.

Nevertheless in the longer term your emails are a useful resource and you really NEED to have copies of them locally, not just in the Cloud.  This was brought home to me the other day when one of my supplier's email mailboxes would no longer receive emails because it's mailbox quota had been exceeded.  I had to resort to faxing to get the message through.