According to Anne Bonaparte, email might fizzle out if people and businesses don’t do anything to help save it. Her reason?
“In the world of IT, e-mail is treated a lot like electricity. We want it to work and not have to worry.”
“But e-mail’s functionality has been devalued by unrelenting abuse in the form of spam, viruses and phishing. We’ve even reached the point where one must ask whether fed-up users are ready to declare ‘lights out’ on e-mail.”
She goes on to say how a recent study showed that respondents correctly identify phishing e-mails 82 percent of the time, while they “correctly identify legitimate e-mails only 52 percent of the time”.
“These findings suggest that e-mail users may be getting better at discovering phishing scam attempts but are even more skeptical about legitimate e-mail.”
Apparently, even online banking has gone downhill just because of the lack of security that some banks have online. Ecommerce is also a victim.
“Banks are seeing this skepticism impact online banking, and retailers are seeing its impact on e-commerce–just when this Web activity was becoming mainstream.”
She kind of ends on a happy-ish note though:
“It is the responsibility of everyone–individuals, private enterprises and government–to preserve e-mail in its most valuable form. If this continues, the light of e-mail will not go out.”
Personally, I use the Hotmail email service and with their spam/junk mail filters and everything, I barely have any problems with my email. So, for me, I’m not worrying. I feel email has woven itself into our lives so much that it most likely won’t disappear anytime soon. At least not until we develop telepathic technology!