The Death of Email?

I just went through the arduous process of changing my email addresses. It took several hours to go through all the websites I use and test that everything still works. It was a lot more work for me than most people because I had to change both my personal email as well as several business emails, and change some software that uses them.

I had to do this because my old email addresses have become useless. I get hundreds of emails a day, and 99.9% of them are spam. Real email messages are then lost in that sea of crap.

Why did I have to do this? Hackers have attacked several major websites in recent months, stealing hundreds of millions of credit cards and email addresses. Spammers also scour web pages across the Internet, harvesting any email addresses they find.

Spam is the perfect example of a libertarian paradise where there are no government controls on business.

But changing my email address won't solve this problem for very long. It's only a matter of time before more websites get hacked, or the address books of the people I correspond with get ripped off. Or one of the websites I gave my email address to sells it to spammers. And then these new email addresses will become useless.

The act of creating new email addresses means I have to give them to other people, from whom spammers will ultimately take them, therefore defeating the entire purpose of creating the new emails in the first place.

Email is essentially a completely open and free market, without no central controls. If you want an idea of what life would be like in a libertarian paradise with no government controls on what business can do, spam is the perfect example.

The Tragedy of the Commons
The current state of email is the tragedy of the commons on steroids. This is an economic theory, first postulated by William Forster Lloyd and reiterated by Garret Hardin, which states that people acting independently and rationally in self-interest ultimately behave contrary to the best interests of the group.

Originally the "commons" was the actual common village green in an English village, which was shared among villagers. Everyone could pasture their cows and sheep there, which of course led to overgrazing that quickly turned the village green into a barren pit of mud.

The metaphor extends to all resources held in common, such as:

• The ocean, which is being overfished and polluted by dumping and toxic runoff.
• The atmosphere, which is used as a dumping ground for automobile exhaust, coal-burning power plants and industrial pollution.
• The freeway system, which gets overcrowded at rush hour, making it useless for everyone.
• The stock market, which can be manipulated by insider trading, high-frequency computer trading and hedge fund rumor-mongers for personal gain while trashing market value for everyone else.
• The financial system, which was nearly brought down in 2008 through bad lending practices by individuals increasing their personal gain at everyone else's loss.
• The telephone system, which is exploited by con men and phony charities, like those calls from Apogee Retail begging for used clothing in the name of real charities, to which they give nothing.

The percentage of spam in email has fluctuated over time. It has been estimated to be anywhere from 68% to 90% of all email in recent years. I can't find reliable current stats, but my personal experience is that there has been a significant uptick in spam in recent months after a significant drop last year.

Spam filters help, but are no panacea. Real emails get lost when they're falsely flagged as spam, or when mailboxes get filled. And spammers are getting better at making spam look like more like real email that gets past the filters.

Another way to deal with spam is to simply reject any email you get from an address you don't recognize. That might work for individuals, but it doesn't work for businesses that need to accept queries from customers. To avoid having to deal with spam, those businesses instead turn to web forms (which have those annoying captchas to prevent spammers from sending spam through web interfaces).

Then there are the economic costs: worldwide millions of man-hours are wasted each day simply by people having to spend time weeding out and deleting spam.

If 60-90% of email is spam, that means that 60-90% of the network capacity, the server horsepower, and the very electricity that powers all the Internet infrastructure devoted to handling email is being wasted.

That adds up to hundreds of billions of dollars a year.

Which means people are just going to start giving up on email. And many of them already have: lots of people send texts, or use Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or other texting apps on their smart phones in preference to email.

So, the Internet had better come up with a real solution for spam, or email is going to go the way of snail mail.