Allman thinks that problems with e-mail today extend beyond unsolicited ads. "There are lots of definitions of garbage," he
says. "Spam is just the worst one. I know several people who've just given up on e-mail. They've gone back to having 'their
person' do it. It's not just spam, it's also the continuous, 'Gee, can you help me on this?' No matter how big a shovel you
have, you can't get rid of it."
From: Bill Warner
Subject: Identify Yourself
"Saying I like challenge-response systems is like saying I like duct tape," says Bill Warner, whose frustration with endless
rounds of phone tag led to his development of the Wildfire voice system in the 1990s. Warner runs his own challenge-response
server to kill incoming spam but would rather see the system redesigned more along the lines of the U.S. Postal Service --
not meaning the government would run it, but that there would be some people-centric checks on identity and abuse.
"It comes back to authentication," Warner says. "If you want to put a server on the system and use DNS, you've got to find
your way into DNS somehow. We've managed to build a network of millions of servers around the world with a fairly open and
clear process of registering for it. Why can't we do that with e-mail?"
Warner isn't talking about validating sender IP addresses, but instead having some idea of who's behind them. "Part of the
problem is e-mail creates a large scale of anonymity. The postal service doesn't have that problem. You can send e-mail through
the postal service, and it doesn't get more than a postmark. But you don't get to drop a million messages in the system. If
you're a big mailer, you're going to be known. If you deliver a million pieces of mail to the post office, they're going to
know who's doing it," and they're legally obligated to deliver them all.
In short, Warner thinks that instead of focusing on caller ID schemes that identify servers, we should reach past the computer
to identify the person sending the message. "In a society founded on openness and transparency, one of the fundamental tenets
is that people can be identified. A person is allowed to go out in public wearing a mask. But no one will give them a job,
and no one's going to buy anything from them in a store. You're not going to let them through the front door of your business."
Same with e-mail. "You still have ways to be anonymous. But someone who wants to get in the door and do business with you
will have to take the mask off."
From: Eric HAHN
Subject: XML for E-mail
You may remember Eric Hahn as Netscape's CTO or as a member of Red Hat's board of directors. Today, Hahn is chairman of his
own startup, Proofpoint, which sells spam filtering solutions (infoworld.com/1220). Hahn thinks Proofpoint's products are
just the first instantiation of a much larger transition, in which e-mail becomes XML-encapsulated metadata.
"Corporate mail processing isn't about just spam and viruses," Hahn says. "Most companies have a long list of things they
want to see true about their mail. A corporation is going to need to do n things to each e-mail message, where n is greater
than two. How are you going to do the next eight things?"
Hahn says those eight things might include:
acceptable use policies
regulatory constraints on what can be e-mailed inside and outside the company
support for potential litigation, either as plaintiff or defendant
intellectual property concerns
line-of-business systems integration issues, such as employees who reply to customers outside of the company's CRM system.
"Today, e-mail payloads are essentially opaque," Hahn says. But unlike personal e-mail sent to and from home or the road,
e-mail sent on company time -- at least in the United States -- legally belongs to the company. "The next generation of corporate
messaging architecture will presume applying e-mail applications to every message that goes by, just as we now have Web applications."
It isn't just spam, it's the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, which steeply raises the bar on corporate self-auditing, that Hahn
says requires making e-mail content automatically parsable.
Does this mean your company will be reading my e-mail? "Not at all," Hahn says. "When we're trading patient records, or talking
about a stock trade, we shouldn't have to search the content. We should be able to annotate it," using expandable, XML-driven
solutions such as DRML (Data-entry and Report Markup Language). "We need to have an ingrained metadata structure beyond these
silly X-headers."
From: Ray Ozzie
Subject: Shift Your Paradigm
Creator of Lotus Notes, the groupware used by 100 million people, Ray Ozzie has spent years studying how people use their
inboxes. His current company, Groove Networks, produces software that allows people inside and outside an organization to
share workspaces and files over a secure, peer-to-peer connection. But Ozzie is aware that Groove's biggest competitor is
e-mail. "For most users of the Internet," he says, "e-mail is the preferred means of swapping information -- whether text
or files -- because it's easy to use and it usually works, even across firewalls."
Yet Ozzie feels e-mail has been pushed to the breaking point, past the limits of its original, intended purpose. "At a time
when we are needing new methods to cope with information overload, the e-mail paradigm is showing its 30-year-old age," he
says, resulting in lower and lower productivity gains. "Not only are there the obvious issues of spam and viruses; it's now
quite common that large files and common file types such as .doc are not allowed to pass through firewalls because of aggressive
IT bandwidth, storage, and e-mail-filtering policies."
Ozzie doesn't claim Groove is the solution for all these issues. Rather, it's one part of a strategy to move workplace activities
out of, rather than into, e-mail. "Rather than trying to cram all sorts of new things into e-mail, we should listen to what's
actually happening at the leading edge of the market: Instant messaging is a tremendously useful paradigm that takes interpersonal
communications in a new direction. Skype [which lets PC users make phone calls to each other over the Net] sits next to e-mail
quite nicely, thank you. RSS readers and aggregators are showing us that there are better ways to do notifications and publish/subscribe
than filling our inbox." Groove, for its part, provides a security-wrapped workspace for collaboration and shared documents,
rather than keeping them in e-mail folders.
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