I am only now realising that some (many?) undergrads do not understand the concept of sending a file via e-mail because they are so used to files being saved in clouds. It's the first time I've had to explain that, if I send you a file, then you now *own* that file and, if you modify it and then (accidentally) delete it, your version of that file is gone (or in the trash, if you're lucky). #GettingOld
It is time to ban email
email · 20 comments · 750 words · read ~296 times.
I think everyone reading this post has accidentally messed up when sending an email, right?
I noticed this story recently:
The Metropolitan Police has apologised to victims of the Westminster "honeytrap" scandal after it accidentally sent an email which named all of them. … the sender, a detective sergeant in the Met’s Diplomatic and Parliamentary Protection unit, included the recipients’ names in the CC section of the email, rather than BCC, which would have concealed their identities. Met Police apologises to honeytrap victims over email
It's a nightmare that I'm sure we've all had. Back in 2016, a similar issue occurred at a medical clinic:
A London HIV clinic that leaked data on 781 of its patients has been fined £180,000. 56 Dean Street, based in London's Soho, sent an email newsletter with all patient email addresses in the 'To' field, rather than the 'Bcc' field. London HIV clinic fined £180,000 for 'serious' data breach
It's worth reading The Information Commissioner's Office report into the issue.
The use of BCC harks back to RFC 680 which was published in April 1975.
BCC: This field contains the identity of the tertiary receivers of the message. This field should not be made available to the primary and secondary receivers, but it may be recorded to provide information for access control.
So BCC has been standard on email systems for at least fifty fucking years and is still a source of confusion.
Interestingly, the 1975 standard doesn't mention what CC or BCC stand for. It is just assumed these are acronyms with which everyone is au fait. Perhaps not surprising since they were in common usage since the mid-twentieth century
When was the last time you used carbon paper to make a copy? Have you ever dictated to your secretary who a memorandum should be blind-copied to?
Email and its tooling are unsuitable to the modern world. Search any social network at any time of the year and you'll find people kvetching about its inadequacies.
Friendly reminder to use literally anything other than email if you need to have a conversation between multiple people that you have any hope in following.
— Emily (@emilyshepherd.me) 2024-12-07T00:46:28.290Z
This isn't a new sport, of course. Twenty years ago, people were complaining about how bad email was:
Email is getting out of hand and people use it in suboptimal ways. They write back and forth, sending documents over and over again, with the end result that nobody knows whether they are working on the correct version of a document and everyone has lost track of where they stand and what the last resolution was on a particular issue on a particular discussion point. […] It's becoming counterproductive and it's not an appropriate medium for many types of communication, so we need to find a way of replacing email. Dark Blogs: The Use of Blogs in Business 2005
That was written when blogs were in their ascendency. Nowadays, most modern organisations use collaborative documents. A single living document which can be continually updated or commented on. Of course, discussion about the document still often takes place over email or instant messaging or - heaven forbid! - in person.
This, of course, leads to another issue.
'%20d='M317%20381q-124%2028-123-39%2069%2015%20149%202%2067-13%2072-80%203-101-3-116-19-49-72-58-98-10-162%200-56%2010-75%2058-12%2031-3%20147%203%2032%209%2053%2013%2046%2070%2069%2083%2023%20138-9'/%3E%3Cpath%20d='M360%20293h-36v-93q-1-26-29-23-20%203-20%2034v47h-36v-47q0-31-20-34-30-3-30%2028v88h-36v-91q1-51%2044-60%2033-5%2051%2021l9%2015%209-15q16-26%2051-21%2043%209%2043%2060'/%3E%3C/svg%3E)
Perhaps we're on the cusp of obliterating email? Will the youth of today see sending an email as ridiculously old-fashioned as a paper telegram or a landline?
There are, I'll admit, some advantages to email. The most prominent being that the receiver can permanently store a copy. Notwithstanding inept attempts to recall an email (which often highlights its sensitivity) an email delivered is an email stored. That is undoubtedly useful for the recipient.
But it is hard to escape the conclusion that email is an analogue process in a digital world.
Summary: Yup, there’s problems with emails. But so is there problems with other collaboration tools.
@Edent I actually do remember using carbon paper to make copies - back when I was in middle school, I think? Or it may have been a ditto machine. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spirit_duplicator
Spirit duplicator - Wikipedia
@Edent
It’s interesting to classify it as an analog thing. When I started work email wasn’t used at work and inter-office mail was a thing, with the envelopes with lots of address lines!
Nobody ever posts in the wrong Slack channel 🙃
Andrew Aylett says:
Never send anything in an email that you'd be embarrassed by if it was leaked to the press. And never send an email to multiple people unless you're happy to have all of them know they all got it. Send everyone a separate email!
I don't disagree, though - it's possible to do confidential email correctly if you are endlessly vigilant, but it's not possible for people to be endlessly vigilant.
Nobody ever posts to the wrong WhatsApp recipient.
I can feel a "Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Communication Channels" meme coming on...
Apologies, that was meant as a reply to Miles, not Andrew.
But QED, eh?
Duncan says:
Another advantage of email is that it isn't at the whims of a single corporation. I think the main reason it is still so popular is that it can be relied on to be there, with most people having kept their address and at least occasionally checking it, next year and the year after and the year after.
Unlike ICQ, AIM, IRC, hipchat, twitter and the thousands of other flash in the pan messaging systems I've no doubt forgotten
EB says:
Yes it has faults, but it's universal. What other medium (besides paper) has lasted as long and been free from takeover from rent seeking companies? Every company has tried to make their own, controlled, monetized alternative. Many have come and failed in the past decades. IRC and Mastodon might be the most open/unencumbered, but they don't have the reach.
mike says:
As soon as I read the examples of a data breach by including addresses in to or cc I thought that's entirely the fault of people, not email as a technology, they should have sent a separate message to each person. So it's nice to see the ICO report you linked to mentions sending a separate message to each person as something the Trust failed to do. I am confused by their wording though: "The Trust failed to use an account that could send a separate e-mail to each service user." This, and subsequent mentions, make it seem like the ICO believes the ability to send the same content to multiple recipients as separate messages is a function of an email account, but seems to me that's a function of an email client.
I think a lot of problems with email could be solved by better clients. I consider clients which do not support inline replaying and do not provide signature delimiting (and automatic discarding of signatures from quoted replies) as barely fit for purpose. I’ve yet to encounter a version of Microsoft Outlook which supports either. I’ve seen Outlook users try to invent their own method of inline replying, it’s always a mess which makes me wish they had stuck to clumsy top posting plus partially re-stating the points they are responding to method.
A lot of problems with email could be solved by outlawing HTML formatted email. It aides phishing by showing people one URL and taking them to a different one. People abuse it to do ridiculous things like putting seven images in their (not delimited) signature, setting a background image on all their messages, and doing myriad things to create messages where at least part of the plain text version (if there is one) is an incomprehensible mess.
@edent says:
I fundamentally disagree with you. If a piece of technology allows for such catastrophic mistakes, then it is at fault; not people. This is what we've learned from cybersecurity research over the decades. You can't train people to work around dangerous systems; you have to fix the system.
As for HTML emails - do you think the web would be better as plain text as well? Maybe so, but the majority don't
Paul Kelly says:
I will also put in a supporting vote for email, and I am old enough to have used a manual typewriter.
As others have said, it is easier to assure continued access to the messages, and permanently archive a message (in the much looked-down upon PDF format). A discussion of one topic is conveniently contained in one email thread.
I am also a recent (~eight year) reluctant user of Slack, which I presume might be seen as one of the alternatives to email. I am not impressed with its suitability for anything less transient than announcing the sandwich van has arrived. Extracting discussions so they can be retained as long-term documentation, or to share with external parties (e.g. auditors) is a mess. Also, unless a discussion has happened with no other intervening other topics, following it is a pain.
Others have also raised the issue of shared documents. A shared Google document is delightful to work on, until something goes wrong such as when a contributor accidentally deletes stuff or rewrites something in an unhelpful way. Trying to reconstruct the lost material from version history is not pleasant. Therefore I prefer sequentially numbered versions of a document at a shared access location.
@edent says:
Amusingly, you're not the only person who thinks I meant everyone should move to Slack. I don't think I mentioned any specific alternatives in my post.
Slack - and other group chat tools - have their place. They also have some rather nasty footguns.
DinoNerd says:
You quote: "Friendly reminder to use literally anything other than email if you need to have a conversation between multiple people that you have any hope in following."
I wonder what available tool works better for this purpose?
Email is bad, given the demise of old-style netiquette, and the rise of email clients that helpfully promote the newer, less useful standards.
But I can't think what's better. Not bluesky, where this quote came from; I can't even get it to give me a list of everyone I'm following. It's also not designed for conversation, but for short format blast-o-grams without guaranteed delivery. (Think of it as ICMP with a spiffy UI.) That is, of course, in emulation of its parent, previously known as Twitter - it wants to be a better Twitter, not a better communications platform.
Not any of the myriad chat boards, essentially IRC with spiffy graphics and more centralization. They have fewer net.drops, and no net.splits - and lots more emojis/emoticons - but whether your choice is Slack, Skype, Discord, or any of the more recent variants on this theme, their ability to follow individual conversations is limited, even with optimal use of the tools (hint: use the 'thread' feature many of them have. )
Facebook? Doesn't that just show you a subset of things those you follow may have posted, without even a chance for you to choose what you get? Can you even see responses, and responses to responses?
People seem determined to treat store-and-forward systems as if they were face-to-face conversations, that can't (and shouldn't) be examined as history. Even tools designed for other purposes get used like face-to-face chat, making them unhelpful for other purposes. Unless, of course, you avoid people who are stuck in their face-to-face preference.
As I understand it, pseudo face-to-face is what people want. Real people that is, not mutants like myself or the OP. Us mutants should stop it with our inconvenient demands and criticism.
@edent says:
Teams, Google Meet (or whatever it is called this week), Slack, and a dozen different tools which have been specifically designed for multi-party chatting are all good. Old-style threaded messenger boards and NNTP also work for some forms of structured communication.
But email doesn't scale in any meaningful way for a complex discussion.
Nope - especially given where we are now with channel ownership. Just design a better 'fail safe' user interface (instead of BCC - sort of MailChimp style) and work harder on reducing spam. It will never be sexy, social or collaborative, but it is the best business communication channel we have...
As I say in my blog post, it has been over 50 years and a safer interface has yet to emerge and be adopted. At which point, the inescapable conclusion is that it is fundamentally flawed at a protocol level.
The problem is perhaps not with the medium of email any more than it is will paper mail, but with the instantaneous convenience of email, and the ability to send in a single click or key-press. To avoid most of the issues above, simple automated or peer-review of messages before they're sent (perhaps on a mandatory time-delay except for messages of the utmost urgency) would be sufficient.
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