[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.