Lately I have been getting a lot of "undeliverable email" in addiition to the regular spam. 100 junk emails per day get me thinking about how much the email system needs to be redesigned.

no more nice guys

Like the Internet itself, email was never designed for consumer use. It was a invented at a time when only a small number of nerds were on the Internet. The design goal was building a robust system that worked and the users were basically trustworthy.

When the web exploded in the 1990's, millions of non-tech users crashed the party and crooks eventually followed. The email system works amazingly well at delivering email but it just wasnt designed for stopping malicious users.

There are two basic kinds of problems: spam and phishing. Spammers are basically junk mail while phishers are akin to organized crime, trying to steal information from you.

We like to think of technology as being better than the old stuff but email fails to provide some of the basic protections that regular mail offers.

privacy

Each email is basically public. Email is like a postcard - anyone can read what you write. Granted, there is so much email, who would want to read it or take the trouble to try, but still. Email lacks the equivalent of an envelope.

There is encryption technology which would act like an envelope but who actually uses it? Like a lot of tech involved with the Internet and email, the solutions are so complicated that people just dont know about them or know how to use them.

spam

Spam is the equivalent of that pile of direct mail that gets stuffed into my mailbox once a week. The senders dont know who I am; they just pay the post office to deliver material to "resident" at my address. I personally hate that stuff and have been unable to get the post office to stop sending it. Even so, spam is much more time consuming because it comes constantly.

The solution to spam is two-fold: laws that prohibit unsolicited email (which are hard to enforce) and charging a fee for all email. If a email cost 1-cent, there would be a whole lot less spam.

Which gets to a larger point. How do we get the email system changed? If it cost money to send email, companies would have a profit incentive to change the email system. I think we probably need this and it is being talked about.

Regular bulk direct mail, i.e. junk mail, is regulated both by law and the post office. You have to pay to send it. Email is attractive because it has a small benefit and no costs. Even if very few people ever respond, you can send an infinite number of emails which makes it cost effective to do. By charging money for all email, you change the profit equation and even without laws, you would change the occurrence of spam.

phishing

Phishing is another huge problem. Malicious people send out email that looks like it is from someone else, like eBay or your bank. They want you to click on a link to a fraudulent website or respond to the email. Their goal is to get your to reveal your passwords. Some of these emails are really good copies and Im sure they fool people.

The fundamental problem here is that there is no equivalent of registered mail. You just dont know who sent you an email. Knowing who sent you that email is a really basic thing that the current system totally lacks.

undeliverable email

Which all gets back to my recent problems with returned email. I get these "undeliverable" emails constantly now, which look as if someone at my domain sent them. I get a warning message from some mail program that person zxc@mydomain.com sent a bad email. What does that mean? Like most people, Im just not technically savvy enough to know what the problem is.

Is someone using my email server to send email? Is someone sending email from their own server but just putting my domain in it? Is the problem mine? Is it a problem for my ISP? I contacted my ISP and they said they were working on it but the problem is not getting any better.

mail 2.0

I love email but we really need a new system that provide more security and more privacy.

Email should be encrypted automatically by our email clients.

Sender addresses should be guaranteed or at least offer some kind of registered mail equivalent.

And I am happy to pay for such a system. If you could send 100 emails for $1, I dont think it would break the bank for consumers or companies but it would go a long way towards limited unnecessary email.

So forget Web 2.0 and start asking your ISP's for Mail 2.0. The big companies need to get together and offer a premium email system which allows us to migrate off the current system over time.