Unreliable Email

Contrary to almost every other thing related to technology, email has become less reliable over its history.

My first experience with email came in the form of bulletin board systems back in the 1980's. This was well before anyone had conceived of spam, let alone anti-spam email software. It was pretty reliable. You logged on to the BBS, left a message for someone, and it was delivered to their inbox. They'd receive the message the next time they phoned in via modem. Some bulletin boards were even part of a larger network that let you send email to thousands of people throughout the world.

I had my first experiences unreliable email when working with Microsoft in the 1990's. They were just deploying their new email system - Exchange Server. It didn't work very well. Messages usually got where they were supposed to - but it was slow beyond usefulness.

In the worst cases, it could literally take 12 hours for a message to travel to a user who sat a few offices away. During a critical project email was sometimes discarded as a means of communication due to these issues. A decade later I did a short stint at Microsoft as a contractor. To my shock, the situation had only improved incrementally. Messages still took up to a few hours to be delivered internally.

Most problems with email reliability today are caused by spam and efforts to eliminate it. If email is left entirely unfiltered, the sheer volume of spam makes many users' inboxes unmanageable. On the flip side, even the best junk mail blocker software catches non-junk email. Measuring the cost of a message never delivered is difficult.

If email were truly a reliable medium, its value would immensely improve. To achieve this, a new standard would need to be developed and deployed. Such a revision of the protocol would implicitly need to solve the underlying spam issue to be effective.

Back