Email is broken
Posted on Friday, October 31st, 2008 at 10:48pm. #
My friend and colleague Ian Forrester (I’d link, but his site’s broke) has posted recently about how broken email is. I’d just like to jump on that bandwagon a little, with a number of observations.
1. Last week, I emailed over 11,000 radio people (based on a confirmed opt-in list from mediauk.com, dating back a few years). Over 2,500 of these addresses have bounced. This is possibly a story about the heavy amount of churm in this industry right now; but also a damn nuisance, given that AOL et al penalise you if you dare to email a “user-not-known” email address. How can I check an email address? By sending an email to it – which results in a non-standard bounceback that humans need to read. Note to the wise: an “out of office” should NOT be used for a “I don’t work here any more” reply.
2. Management of lists is poor. I’ve seemingly been added to a ton of email lists recently; yet nobody uses the standard RFC mail header, and everyone adds a slightly-different-looking unsubscribe link at the bottom (or top, sometimes) of the email. Therefore there’s no way for a decent email client to offer an unsubscribe button as part of the UI, of course. I used to think that the most important thing was to have a high email recipient list. I now know that the most important thing is to ensure that as close to 100% as possible of your email addresses will be current, and that as close to 100% as possible of your emails will be read.
3. Changes of email address are broken. While HTTP traffic has the lovely 301 (“Permanently Moved”) status code, there’s nothing like that for email. Instead, I need to read every single automated reply to see whether they contain a cretinous “Hey, I’ve been let out of the asylum for a few weeks!!!?!?!?!?!!!!!” or a more useful “I don’t work here any more and I’m now bloke@newcompany.com instead if yer wanna get in touch”. Probably highlighted as an out-of-office. Sigh.
4. Gmail doesn’t offer an auto-reply with a canned message (though something’s just been added to Gmail’s Labs service). I have a high amount of filters, but none can reply. Bah.
5. The high amount of cretins who reply with “Hey, thanks for emailing, I’ll get back to you as soon as possible”, which succeeds in filling my email box with shite, as well as confirming their email address to every spammer on earth. Turn the auto-reply off, people.
6. The fact that, unlike AOL and MSN, the spam detection for Gmail is entirely arbitrary and doesn’t allow a responsible list owner to remove email recipients who are so damn stupid that they’re now flagging your double opt-in emails as spam, even though they asked for them and confirmed they wanted them via an email. C’mon, Gmail – send me any email someone’s reported for spam, and I can remove ‘em from my mailing list silently.
7. Everything Else That’s Wrong With Email That I’ve Forgotten Right Now.
Grr.
Image: Marie-Chantale Turgeon – used under licence
We were up in Newcastle/Sheffield last month for a regional skills event for 14-19 year olds (although most were 13-16).
We got them to fill in a questionnaire, that they could do on paper or using one of the computers on our stand.
The question we kept getting asked was “I don’t have an email address, what should I put?”. We estimated that 20-30% of the teenagers who filled in the questionnaire did not have an email address.
There is a generation of not so young people who think email is old-skool technology/what you use at work. They don’t *need* an email address.
The problem is that because no-one “owns” email, there isn’t anyone actually looking into why this a problem. ANd it’s being superceeded by social-network and IM services.
Outside of B2B, and possible B2C communication, email is going to be dead in the next few years.