Will social networks kill email?

Everybody who uses the internet uses email, but some experts say that it’s time for a change. To them, email is so insecure and so prone to hackers that it should be ditched.

For many users, alternatives such as Facebook have taken the place of email for day-to-day communication with friends and relatives. Have the endless spam emails, malicious messages and a lack of accountability left email struggling to survive?

Far from dead?
The death of email has long been touted, especially since the rise of Facebook, but it shows no sign of going away. Buying products online and using web services invariably requires an email address.

Not all experts think it’s going away – Bron Gondwana of high-tech email service Fastmail says: “Email is far from dead. It has been the killer app for the internet since before the web and looks set to stay that way.”

He explains “the email address is your primary identity online, needed to register for other web services. Email also remains the preferred and only real option for business communication. The latest social networks are great for fun, but email is still king for serious work.”

Email is still the de facto method of registering for anything else, to the point where if you don’t have an email address, you can’t really ‘use’ the internet. But is this task of verification and registration enough to keep email afloat?

Spam overload
The problems with email have existed for as long as the system itself. Its simplicity is both a blessing and a curse: because it’s so cheap and easy to send messages, it’s cheap and easy to send things people don’t want.

The market research firm Radicati reported that some nine tenths of all emails sent in 2010 were spam. Nearly 300 billion emails were sent last year, of which 262 billion were spam generated by computer programs rather than genuine messages between people.

Most users will have found that without a decent spam filter their inboxes are soon filled with messages from dodgy pharmaceutical companies, financial services and offers of adult-interest products, all of them scams and all potentially dangerous.

Fastmail’s Bron Gondwana explains that although spam is inevitable, it’s not a huge problem: “Spam has always been and will always be a problem for web services. We also see spam on instant messaging and on Facebook. However, spam is no longer a threat to the survival of email because with a good spam filter, the problem can be handled.”

Proprietary shutdown
Technically speaking, spam is possible because email is ‘decentralised’ – there’s no overall email authority that checks senders’ identities, which makes it easy for criminals to hide their email addresses and send their messages without fear of prosecution.

This has its advantages: because there’s no central authority, it is almost impossible to shut email down. The opposite is true of social networks – if the social network shuts down, users’ accounts and messages go with it.

Gondwana points out that email services let users download their messages, which social networks do not.

The future
Social networks and other ‘closed’ systems (as opposed to email, which is an open system) create other problems.

Christen Krogh, chief development officer at Opera Software, points out some of the shortcomings: “You cannot use Twitter to contact someone on Facebook. Within Twitter, you can send personal messages only to those following you. The email address will remain people’s default online identity, because of its openness and universal availability.”

Gondwana is less optimistic, citing spam as a major threat to the future success of email: “Filtering spam is an ongoing battle, and anything to win that battle will be key for users. We’ve seen the introduction of authentication on outbound messages and it is important to be responsive to spam reports.

“Email is infrastructure: the most important thing is to do it well, keep content safe, and meet users’ needs.”

Christen Krogh says it’s important to have a simple, easy-to-use email system that is available to everyone: “Web interfaces are coming of age, making email universally accessible. People want email to be available to them everywhere and don’t want to be locked into one network or one brand to get it.”

Our verdict
There is yet to be a credible competitor to email and the services it can offer. As a way of sharing information, contacting people, sending files, running businesses and keeping in touch with friends, it is still unparalleled in its flexibility.

In part, the internet exists because of email and while it has shortcomings and vulnerabilities, work is being done to make it better and safer; reports of its death have been exaggerated.