Spam salvation

Paul Boutin, author of our cover story "Can e-mail be saved?", well remembers the mid-’90s, when many IT pros believed that putting everybody online would be disastrous for workplace productivity.

“They were right,” he says, “but not for the reasons they thought.”

The naysayers of that era envisioned time-frittering online diversions. They weren’t fretting about spam, which has effectively reduced e-mail to a massive time and productivity sink. When we approached Boutin to investigate solutions to the current e-mail logjam, we asked him to look beyond the conventional anti-spam fixes. Although many of these apps and services are highly effective, they too often feel like stopgap measures — retrofitted to the problem rather than built from the ground up. So we posed a hypothetical question: If we could start from scratch, how could we make e-mail effective again?

Boutin contemplates these sorts of issues for a living. A onetime IT guy himself with several years as an e-mail administrator, today he’s a contributing editor at Wiredand a columnist at Slate specializing in “spin forward” stories. For this particular spin forward, Boutin threw our challenge out to six digital revolutionaries, all with track records of delivering ground-breaking software that changed the way people interact with technology. Our impromptu round table reads like a who’s who of creative high-tech minds, from Eric Allman, author of the pioneering mail-transport agent Sendmail, to Lotus Notes and Groove creator Ray Ozzie.

This task may have started as a blue-sky exercise, but it didn’t end that way. Boutin asked our six aces “to change the basic presumption about how e-mail should work,” not simply apply Band-Aids, Boutin explains. Even given this broad charter, no one recommended we start from scratch. “They wanted to make sure that whatever they suggested could be implemented.” Although our experts took different tacks, they agreed on one issue: e-mail will forever be hobbled until someone figures out how to reliably establish a sender’s identity.

Boutin also tapped one entirely unexpected source, Internet patron saint Jon Postel, who died in 1998. In his prescient November 1975 essay, “On the Junk Mail Problem,” Postel foresaw the coming spam epidemic and offered up a cure — one that has proven difficult to implement.

For the final word on how to address the spam crisis, we turned to our own Jon: Test Center Lead Analyst Jon Udell, author of last July’s "The best way to can spam" article. True to form, resident expert Udell, who is deep into the technical underpinnings of e-mail, lays out some elegant schemes to reform the system.

So can e-mail be saved? Our luminaries may differ in their methods, but their answer seems to be yes. Let’s hope they’re right.