[geeks] Email: Dead as we knew it

[Jonathan Patschke]

It's the usual story of the marketing folks ruining the Internet for the
geeks, but what's happening with email makes me particularly sad.

It wasn't that long ago that all the "industry analysts" were
telling us that email was dead and only for "old people," while anyone
they saw in a viable tarket market was using social media, instant
messaging, etc.  That's fine.  I was over here happily using email for
hundreds of messages per day.

Email's gotten a lot worse just in the last year or two, though.

The plain-text portion of email is entirely neglected anymore.
Sometimes it's just an exact copy (including markup) of the HTML stuff.
Sometimes it's badly-unmarked HTML with HTML-encoded Unicode characters,
corrupted URLs, and out-of-order text (because of the lack of CSS).

Somtimes, hilariously, the plain-text portion of the message doesn't
match the HTML at all.  I've gotten mail from a brokerage about some
already-passed tax deadline, only to find out it was actually supposed
to be a message about a new trading feature they were offering.  They'd
reused an old plain-text part in constructing the message.

That's not great, but alpine does an admirable job of rendering HTML in
a terminal-friendly way, so I can cope.

Almost every message I get that isn't personal correspondence is run
through an obfuscator that hides all the URLs in it, adding tracking
details, making them useless for sharing as well as adding a security
hole that just doesn't need to be there ;the older "UTM" convention for
link-tracking kept the readability of URLs and didn't funnel all
requests through a trampoline, but--oh no--someone might remove the
parameters and deflate the statistics by some miniscule amount!

I used to reply to most of these, and even engaged what a couple of
companies in what seemed like promising conversations as to how they're
setting themselves up for tragedy if that single-point-of-failure ever
gets compromised (or even just if it gets a malicious link injected).
It's happened before--even to Google.

The conversations all died out.  Now my complaints aren't even heard
anymore.

The web normalized rude interactions between individuals and between
developers and visitors.  If any of us walked into a shop only to have
some clerk cover our eyes and prevent us from walking further before
giving contact details, we'd gut-punch the jerk and storm out.  Yet,
this is the normal sort of interaction between a visitor and most blogs,
most medium-scale commercial sites, and even a few large ones.

Now they're bringing that lack of tact to my mailbox, just as the
spammers and joe-jobbers before them.

I have no solutions, no noble action to improve things.  Just needed to
whine a bit.  I can't feel like we (the geeks) built this thing, invited
the rest of the world into "our house," and then got shoved out the back
door so that we can watch them wreck the place.


-- 
Jonathan Patschke
Austin, TX
USA