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    Home » Nathaniel Borenstein » A short history of e-mail’s future

    A short history of e-mail’s future

    By Editor6 December 2010
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    [By Nathaniel Borenstein]

    Scarcely a year goes by without someone making radical predictions about the future of e-mail. Only a few have even been right.

    Facebook has reopened the topic with predictions of how the new Facebook Messages product will shape e-mail’s future — a scant five months after the social network’s chief operating officer predicted the death of e-mail. Both predictions echoed similar musings from decades past.

    Predictions of the death of e-mail go back to e-mail’s beginnings as an extension to the file transfer protocol. This ugly hack, which allowed researchers on perhaps dozens of machines to send each other messages, was widely seen as a scandalous waste of expensive resources, and more than a few system managers expected to stamp it out.

    They were wrong. And though I’ve devoted nearly my entire career to e-mail, I blush when I admit that my first assessment of it, in 1978, was that it was a useless toy. I was wrong.

    In the intervening years, I’ve probably heard dozens of “death of e-mail” predictions. They, too, were wrong.

    Spam, everyone’s favourite e-mail villain, made its debut in the 1970s as well, and though it didn’t become a major problem until much later, some technologists immediately went to work to “fix the problem”.

    Most of them expected quick success. They were wrong. A few, like Bill Gates 20 years later, were bold enough to predict the complete eradication of spam by a date certain. They were very wrong.

    In a related topic, hundreds of technologists and privacy advocates have predicted that the widespread use of encryption would soon make e-mail more private and secure. But people seem to want privacy at any price, as long as it’s free. If it requires a single extra step, they tend to reject it. The encryption-boosters were wrong.

    Another recurring prediction has been the unification of e-mail with other kinds of tools. In 1982 I built a system known as Bags, which integrated e-mail, bulletin boards, and calendaring software. The bulletin boards fit in very nicely, while the calendaring software did not. I was wrong.

    Years later, with RSS, voice mail, and fax seamlessly integrated into my mail reader, I still haven’t seen good integration of calendars or instant messaging. This bodes well for some of Facebook’s plans, as the heart of Facebook is multiple RSS-like message streams. But if they expect to be able to integrate too many other things into their mail interface, they’re wrong.

    I spent roughly nine years working on my greatest success, multimedia mail. But I got a lot of it wrong. In the late 1980s I built an open-source multimedia mail reader — coincidentally also named Messages — and expected the world to beat a path to my door. I was wrong, but at least it was a mistake that led to Mime.

    And although Mime seemed like the biggest revolution in the history of e-mail, it only succeeded because it was designed to be evolutionary.

    I also expected to transform e-mail with what I called “active messages” — messages containing programs in a restricted, safe language, to be executed when viewed. I developed two such languages, and demonstrated some remarkable applications, but I completely missed what the emerging Web was doing to the idea.

    E-mail that contains a Web link can do almost anything an active message can do, so there’s little appetite for developing an active messaging infrastructure. I was wrong.

    Predicting the future is hard. Even successful predictions tend to be partial. When people asked why I was working so hard to create multimedia e-mail, I used to say: “Some day I’ll have grandchildren, and I want to get cute pictures by e-mail.” Most people laughed, and they were wrong.

    But I expected my daughters to scan printed photos, never anticipating cheap digital cameras. And I certainly didn’t expect that magic first e-mailed picture to be a sonogram of a pair of zygotes, just a few days after in vitro fertilization and implantation. (Cute pictures were still 8 months away.) I wasn’t exactly wrong, but it wasn’t what I expected, either.

    So, I trust you’ll pardon my cynicism when I hear about the next revolution in e-mail. What I’ve seen, for over 30 years now, is the gradual evolution and expansion of e-mail’s capabilities, its reach, and yes, its flaws. Facebook may well contribute to the next steps in that evolution, and I look forward to their innovations, but I don’t expect any revolutions.

    Of course, I may be wrong.

    • Nathaniel Borenstein is the chief scientist for Mimecast. Previously, he was a distinguished engineer for IBM Lotus Division
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