A Perfect Email System?

With all the practical problems of improving email, often long-term idealistic goals get forgotten. What's wrong with email today, and what would a perfect email system look like? Additionally, if designing the system from scratch, how could these problems be addressed?

In reality, starting from ground-zero isn't an option considering how much the world relies on the existing email system. Still, if the fundamental problems and possible solutions aren't recognized, it will be difficult moving forward towards a better system.

The first big problem is spam, or more importantly, the radical profitability of sending spam emails. The reason spam is so profitable, is that no monetary or other cost of placed on the sender. Some kind of electronic postage system needs to be adopted. As opposed to money, requiring the sender pay with computing power seems more practical. There are a number of proposed systems that would make this possible.

To some extent such a system could be overcome by large networks of hijacked computers. Still, the profitability would be reduced radically, irrelevant of if the spammer employed one computer or one thousand. Anti-spam filters are probably not the long term solution for spam. Unfortunately, today they are the only solution for spam.

Another concern pertaining to email is privacy. All usernames, passwords and email messages are sent in plain text format. This means that a garden-variety hacker can readily intercept not only your emails, but the information needed to access your account directly. Technology to address all these issues is already available.

The final concern regarding email is reliability. Sending an email once meant you could be reasonably sure the recipient got it. Now, spam filters seem to eat up a certain percentage of legitimate messages in addition to whatever spam they eliminate. Solving the issue of spam at a fundamental level will go a long ways towards minimizing email reliability problems.

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