Every now and then someone will poke their head and claim that email is dying or is dead. Almost two years ago Business Week predicted the death of email and the rise and rise of IM, wikis and blogs in its place. A year before that technology pundit Stowe Boyd forecasted that 2004,

will be the year when it becomes truly obvious … that email’s days are numbered. Not that it will disappear — surface mail and fax will linger on due to the long-tail of communication media — but it will clearly be a byway, and not the highway, for communication and collaboration.

Now ValleyWag has dredged up the first actual statistics that I have seen, in defence of its claim that “email is dying as a form of communication”:

I’m not a statistician, but it seems that there are least two things to say about this “evidence” from Valleywag.

1. The chart displays the amount of traffic - or “hits” - to email services and to social web sites. The number of times a person visits his or her email service provider may not be a safe indicator of the value that person places upon email, nor of the frequency with which email or other forms of online communication are used. All it shows is that people in the UK now visit social web sites more often than they visit their email service providers, which is… well…. unsurprising.
2. The general trend is not one of social web visits supplanting visits to email service providers, but of supplementing them. As the social web site traffic grows, visits to email service provider do not decline by a corresponding amount for most of the graph.

If there is eveidence for the death of email, this is not it.

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A policewoman in Melbourne took a photo of herself — in uniform, shirt unbuttoned, seductively posed, name badge showing — and sent it to her boyfriend as a get well message.

He (cad) emailed it to a few friends and soon (whadda ya know?) it’s all over the police email system and the local news.

She now faces an Ethical Standards investigation and the possible loss of her job.

Claire Swire (lest we forget — Wikipedia ) first blazed the trail of email stupidity, but it seems that others are only too willing to follow in her footsteps.

I guess the moral of the story here is the same as it was in 2000.

As the BBC put it at the time, “Email in haste, repent at leisure”:

Of all the technological innovations of recent decades, few have the ability to wreck your life quite as quickly, and to quite the same extent, as e-mail…

…The lesson is clear: e-mail may be quick and cheap, but it has its drawbacks. It’s more bother to find a stamp and address an envelope, but at least it gives you time to reflect on the wisdom of sending the contents in the first place.

Readers lacking in imagination will find more (or less) coverage here and here .

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Past Hawk Wings posts have talked about how spending less time with your email can lead to getting more things done (”Addicted to Email? Dr Tom has the cure“, “Emailing to live, not living to email“, “Inbox Zero: Slash and Burn at 43 Folders“).

In the end, they all depend on willpower.

A poster on macOSXHints has come up with the answer for people without willpower — using a timer switch to cut off internet access for some portion of the day.

He suggests a couple of set-up to cut off varying degrees of connectivity.

Another poster notes in the comments that the new Airport Extreme allows for a child protection option that also cuts connectivity off for a set period. A bonus for the inner child in us all.

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Remote Control Mail is a new service than blurs the line between email and snail mail by receiving all your postal items, scanning the front of them and placing the results into a web interface for you.

For a once-off activation fee of USD 25 and a sliding scale of monthly fees , the company’s service lets you see images of the postal mail you have received and then,

with a few mouse clicks you can have your mail forwarded, opened and scanned into a searchable PDF document you can read online (or print or save), recycled or shredded, or stored securely.

Interesting idea. Particularly useful, one imagines, for travelling salespeople, rockstars and others who are always on the move or have no fixed abode.

This service is only available to people with a postal address in the USA.

[Via TechCrunch ]

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Postini, the spam-catching and security-monitoring company, has released its report on the health of email for September 2006.

The company claims that spam now accounts for four out of every five emails that passed through the company’s scanners, an increase of 1.6% over August.

It also reports that,

at any given time, 50,000 unique computers on the Internet that were simultaneously exhibiting malicious behavior such as attempting to propagate spam, viruses, phishing and other attacks against email communications.

Virus-laden emails made up 0.44% of all emails that the company scanned.

Either I am particularly blessed or these reports are a bit of a beat-up.

Even when you read them cautiously (it only measures the email that Postini sees — c. 9 billion emails, and the company has a vested interest in talking the problem up), it seems so out of whack with the amount of spam than passes through my accounts.

I reckon that only 30-40% of my emails are spam. Perhaps my email service catches the rest, perhaps Australians are not desirable targets, perhaps things are worse in the corporate email world, perhaps personal experience is not the most statistically sound starting point.

Of course, that’s 30-40% too much but it’s not prophet of doom material.

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Long-time Hawk Wings readers will know that Google and data privacy are an old hobby horse of mine. (Many interesting things about Google, privacy and data ownership are summarised in a earlier Hawk Wings post, “Turning your back on Gmail”.)

Gene at Fred’s house worries about it too.

He looks around his Desktop and sees Google This and Google That and Google The Other Thing. He’s becoming dependent on Google apps to get through the day. And each new, undeniably clever and good, constantly improving Google app adds to the amount of data that Google knows about him.

He has an idea:

I think I need a new Google product to drop into beta. That would be, let’s see, Google Data Privacy. GDP would allow me to review all of the information that Google retains on me across all services, from all devices, and from all sources. GDP would allow me to determine the maximum data retention period for each of my services. GDP would allow me to selectively opt out of cross-service data mining & correlation, even if it reduced the quality of the services I receive. GDP would allow me to correct any inaccurate data in my profile. And GDP would log and alert me when my data was queried by other services.

I want my Google Data Privacy.

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