Way back in the early days of the internet, any email that was sent originated from a person and was addressed to another person. Whatever you got in your inbox was a message from someone else that you could treat as valid.
That’s when there were only a few people connected to four computers on Arpanet back in 1969. By 1994 when the general public really started getting online, they were already getting automated emails and spam took off like a firestorm.
We missed a crucial opportunity to isolate the various functions of email.
Just about every item that shows up in your inbox represents someone, somewhere, attempting to add something to your to-do list. They need information from you. They want you to buy something. They are informing you of something that you need to know. They are informing you of something nobody needs to know. They are trying to swindle you out of money.
Every one of these messages is given equal weight as they pass through your email server to your inbox. We now have more sophisticated ways of sorting this stuff as it gets to us, but we are thoroughly overwhelmed with the sheer volume of junk that comes through. Even the senders we selected often abuse the access we give them.
What could we have done differently that would make a dent in the onslaught of emails?
For starters, we could have broken the protocol up into basic functions. Instead of calling them all simply “email”, they could be categorized into Requests, Responses, Information, Promotions, anything else that constitutes a primary purpose of that packet. Each of those could be further broken down into categories or types like financial, health, or individual clients.
How is this different from email apps like GMail or Outlook sorting email with folders or tags? Those methods are applied after the fact by the end user, and subject to meticulous curation. The other way separates emails at the protocol level, just as saving something as a Word file or Photoshop file differentiates those from each other. You’ve already got a sense of their purpose before you open them, and there’s high probability that a novel manuscript won’t be sent to you disguised as a layered image.
Any such proposal like this tends to invoke Cunningham’s Law, which states that the best way to get the right answer on the internet is not to ask a question, but to post the wrong answer.
It’s easy to picture respondents picking apart the idea with numerous objections. The protocol doesn’t work that way. Developers wouldn’t have adopted the standard. What happens when you have new types of messages? What does it even accomplish for end users?
This is sometimes the voice of reason pointing out the folly of a proposal. It’s also sometimes the reason humans wouldn’t have reached the moon if they’d listened to the naysayers.
The point is that sometimes they’re naysayers because they don’t see the vision. Due in part to the power of convention, we have a durable picture of how things are and could potentially be. Anything outside of that tends to get a knee-jerk dismissal.
But work with me here. Much of the email you get now is filtered by the email client. It’s automated for us to place messages into primary, updates, promotions, forums, and other categories we create. What if some of that sorting was done before the email was even sent?
Yes, I already know. Spammers and marketers would already be taking advantage of this scheme to disguise their emails as personal messages to you so that you’ll read them. This is where we’d have to pair the protocol-level sorting with something else we don’t have.
One possible technique is what I’ve called Email Pingback. Granted, this goes back to the 90s and there might by now be some form of this at work. But the general idea is that every email sent gets verified by the receiving server, and if the email doesn’t come from where it says it did, it gets deleted. It’s a little like detecting spoofed phone numbers by automatically tracing that number behind the scenes to confirm that it matches. If that call that says it’s from Dave in Richmond is actually from Michal in Slovakia, that call gets rejected before even reaching your phone. All depends on companies and individuals being who they say they are.
Cue the internet experts who helpfully point out all the reasons none of the above would work. I’m not saying this sarcastically; I frequently learn new things from these exchanges. For example, I followed a thread wherein I learned how profoundly entrenched we are in legacy traffic control systems that prevent us from implementing smarter traffic lights. Long story short, there won’t be any time soon that our roadways become responsive to conditions so you don’t sit at red lights when there’s no other traffic.
None of this is reason to stop dreaming up how things might be better. I still believe we could live in a world where emails from your friends, family, and colleagues enjoys priority placement. Where promotional and administrative get diverted to a different bucket until such time as you grant them permission to gain your attention.
That attention, by the way, is the precious resource all senders are attempting to commandeer. It is yours to protect, and you deserve the opportunity to do so. Having an email address doesn’t give everyone out there the right to take up your time.
Constructing the email protocol with this in mind could have set us up to avoid countless hours of filtering, sorting, and unsubscribing a never-ending flow of messages – and non-messages.
