Abstract
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This paper tries to make predictions
about the future of e-mail, based on a questionnaire
distributed to e-mail experts and on the experience of the author. The paper goes
through all major e-mail functionality which can be expected to arrive in the next
five years. In particular, the paper predicts that future e-mail software will provide
better facilities for organizing and searching large mail data bases, that HTML-formatted
messages will become common and support for work flow and group communication will
be better.
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Table
of contents
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Introduction
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World Wide Web (HTML and HTTP)
is the mostly used communication mode on the Internet. But e-mail and messaging are
not far behind. If you count the number of people using various Internet services,
e-mail is larger than the World Wide Web. In spite of this, most discussion about
the Internet is about the World Wide Web. And the World Wide Web has been developing
new features at a more furious speed than e-mail. Much will however happen with e-mail
in the next years.
This article is based on a questionnaire to e-mail experts at IETF
meetings and on the author's experience from twenty years of development, research
and standards work in the e-mail area.
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Fetch
versus news mode of getting information
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Information exchange on the Internet
can be done in real time (the giver and taker of the information are connected at
the same time), like video conferencing and chat systems. But more than 90 % of all
information exchange on the net is in non-real time (you read information which was
stored earlier by someone else). There are three major modes for information exchange,
the fetch,
news mode and the push
mode.
With the fetch mode, a user finds and fetches information
which is already available on the net. Information is mainly found by following hyperlinks,
by using search engines or by using bookmarks. The typical softwares in the fetch
mode are web browsers, the most common protocols are HTTP and FTP.
With the news mode, new information is distributed to
recipients. The recipients download and read newly arriving information. Very important
in the news mode is that the computer knows what you have seen and not seen, and
will help you find the new, unseen messages. You can of course also go back and fetch
already seen messages. Software for the news mode usually has much stronger features
for knowing what is new for you than software in the fetch mode. This feature is
called news
control. Typical softwares
in the news mode are e-mail, Usenet News and groupware systems like Netscape Collabra, Lotus
Notes and Softarc First Class.
An important difference between the fetch mode and the news mode
is that with the fetch mode, the information you are searching for is usually already
there, stored on some computer for you to fetch. With the news mode, new information
is regularly or irregularly sent and distributed. With the news mode, you get a reply
to a question by sending the question to one person or a group of people, and waiting
for the reply. The information you search for is stored in the brains and personal
archives of the people you send your question to, and you get it from them, not from
information already stored in the Internet.
There is no sharp limit between e-mail, Usenet News and groupware,
as seen from the user. Often all three services are combined and intertwined in the
same software. Often messages are sent to both, or are moved by gateways between
these systems. This will be even more common in the future. It is therefore not possible
to write an article about e-mail alone, and this article is about the future of the
combined services of e-mail, Usenet News and non-real-time groupware. (Similar predictions
have been made by the groupware expert David R. Woolley in his paper "The Future
of Web Conferencing" at URL http://thinkofit.com/webconf/wcfuture.htm). His
paper looks at this from the groupware viewpoint, my paper from the e-mail viewpoint,
but our predictions are similar.)
When you send a message, you usually address the message either
to one or more people, or to one or more groups of people, or both. When you send
a message to a group of people, you need not list each member, you just give the
name of the group. The messages are then distributed to those who subscribe to this
group. Note that this is exactly the same for e-mail mailing lists, for Usenet News
newsgroups and for groups, sometimes called forums or computer conferences, in groupware
software. People are interested in the service provided by the network, not in the
techniques behind. Most people prefer one single user interface for all messaging.
They do not want to use different commands for reading news from a mailing list than
for reading news from a Usenet News server or groupware server. They do not want
to use different commands to send a message to a group, if the group is a mailing
list, than if the group is a newsgroup. They do not want to use different commands
to subscribe and unsubscribe from mailing lists than from newsgroups or groupware
forums. Because of this, the client software in the future will more and more be
combined clients for e-mail, Usenet News and groupware systems.
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Standards
and global messaging
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Many local messaging systems and
groupware systems provide advanced services which are only available if the sender
and recipients of messages all use the same software. If a feature is to be used
by people using different software, the feature must be standardized, and the standard
must be widely accepted. This is a major obstacle to getting new features into e-mail.
However, there is a lot of work going on with standards development in the messaging
area. The rapid pace of development of new features in the World Wide Web has been
helped by the fact that one single manufacturer, Netscape, dominates the market so
much. The only serious contender, Microsoft Explorer, has chosen to closely copy
the features of Netscape. More and more people are using their web browser also for
e-mail, news and groupware, and this means that the choices of features made by the
people responsible for developing web browsers might begin to control what happens
in the mail area in the same way as it has done in the World Wide Web area. This
may cause faster global acceptance of new features in e-mail, as it already has in
the WWW area.
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Message
format
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Below is an ordinary, plain text
message:
Letter in plain ASCII format
From: Jacob Palme <jpalme@dsv.su.se>
To: Mary Dawkins <mdawkins@foo.bar>
Subject: Thursday meeting
Date: Mon, 8 Dec 1997 12:58:58 -0500
MIME-Version: 1.0
Welcome to the decorating committee meeting on Thursday,
December 10 at 9:00 a.m.
Location: Electrum building, Kista.
Please confirm that you can come.
:-) And please bring your new red dress,
it brightens up the meeting.
--------------------------------------------------------------
Jacob Palme Stockholm University
Professor and KTH Technical University
E-mail: jpalme@dsv.su.se WWW: http://www.dsv.su.se/~jpalme
Snail mail: Skeppargatan 73 Personal phone: +46-8-16 16 67
S-115 30 Stockholm, Sweden Personal fax: +46-8-783 08 29
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The same letter in HTML format
From: Jacob Palme <jpalme@dsv.su.se>
To: Mary Dawkins <mdawkins@foo.bar>
Date: Mon, 8 Dec 1997 12:58:58 -0500
MIME-Version: 1.0
Welcome to the decorating committee meeting on Thursday, December 10 at 9:00 a.m.
Location: Electrum building, Kista, see map. |
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Figure 2: Structuring
of message exchanges as speech acts (From Winograd-Flores 1986)[1]
Speech acts are common types of
utterances. Many utterances belong to a few basic speech acts. Examples are:
- Please do this for me
- I promise to do the following
- I report that I have done the
following
- I want to know something
- Here is what you wanted to know
Some people claim that by marking
messages with explicit speech act symbols, electronic communication can be more effective.
This is a somewhat controversial area, but the speech acts can be seen as extensions
to the well-known smileys (like ":-)") used in e-mail to counteract the
lack of emotional cues like body language and voice inflection.
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Figure 3: Travel
expense account as an example of workflow through e-mail
By workflow is meant the exchange of specially formatted messages
to support a particular multi-user task. A common example is the handling of travel
decisions, which has several stages:
- The employee asks for permission
to make a journey.
- The boss approves the journey.
- Tickets are ordered.
- Tickets are delivered.
- The employee submits a travel
cost invoice.
- The travel agency submits a bill.
- The bills are paid.
In each stage, the message can
have fixed fields and fixed control on who can change which fields. Different people
have different roles. The roles definition control what they are allowed to do, for
example who can approve a journey. The same person may use different roles at different
times.
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Decision
support
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Which
choice do you prefer?
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Meeting in London
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Meeting in Honolulu:
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Meeting in Singapore:
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Are you really
an expert on this issue?
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Figure 4: Example of decision
support in e-mail
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HTML will allow more
sophisticated decision support than ordinary voting. This is needed, because it is
wellknown that electronic dicussions often have a problem in achieving resolutions
of items discussed.
It is wellknown from much research on the social and organisational effects of electronic
mail that there are certain activities which are difficult to perform through e-mail.
It is difficult to make decisions through e-mail in complex issues with many differing
opinions. There is a tendency that discussions get stuck and do not advance towards
results, repeating the same arguments over and over. One way of overcoming this problem
is to use face-to-face meetings for the actual decisions. Face-to-face meetings,
however, can be very expensive, and also have their problems. If you get a new idea,
or want to check some fact, it may be too late in a face-to-face meetings. When discussing
through e-mail, you have more time to think and look up facts and sleep on the issues.
E-mail may in the future be used more for decisions, if e-mail
is extended with features to aid decisions. Such a feature could involve a structured
description of the issues and alternatives, maintained by the moderator and available
via both e-mail and the WWW. Participatants can add their evaluations of the alternatives
in the issue list, on a scale such as "very bad, bad, maybe, good, very good".
They might also store how sure they are of their evaluation, on a scale from "not
very sure" to "entirely convinced". The computer need not compute
any decisions automatically, just summarize statistics of the opinion in the group.
People should be allowed to change their already made evaluations whenever they like.
The use of HTML forms in e-mail will make it much easier to design
such features.
One special decision task, which can be made much easier using
HTML is special kinds of decisions like booking a time for a meeting. An HTML form
could supply choices and participants could reply with their preferences for each
of the alternative choices.
When you fill in an HTML form, your filled in form will often
be sent through e-mail, not as is common today through HTTP. Sending filled-in forms
through e-mail has the advantage that you do not have to wait for evaluation, and
you can send them even if the processing computer is temporarily down. Sending filled-in
forms through HTTP, on the other hand, has the advantage that you get an immediate
response. A disadvantage with sending filled-in forms through e-mail instead of HTTP
is that it does not work very well on multi-user workstations. The reason for this
is that the web browsers are designed to assume that there is a single user on each
workstation, so the e-mail address of this user is stored in the preferences file
of the web browser.
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Not
including all in a message
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Sometimes you may want to send
a message without including all in the message you send. The recipient will then
be able to retrieve the additional information when reading the message. There is
a special e-mail standard for this, called "message/external-body", but
I do not think it will ever be popular. Instead, people will simply include URLs
in the text of their messages, which can be done in both plain text and HTML-formatted
messages.
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Multipart
messages
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The MIME standard allows a message
to consist of several different parts. The common way of using this feature today
is to add one or more file attachments to messages. Attachments are listed when you
read a message, but not opened until you click on them. Another, less common feature
is to have so-called inline parts. An inline part is different from an attachment
in that it is shown directly when you read the message. Inline parts will be more
used in the future in the following cases:
- Forwarding one or more messages
with a comment. You can put the entire forwarded message as one inline part, and
add a comment before or after it as a separate part.
- When you send HTML, inline parts
are needed for pictures, applets, etc.
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Groupware
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For many people, a majority of
their time using e-mail is spent reading and writing group messages. By a group message
is meant a message where the sender need not list the names of all the recipients.
The sender just sends the message to a group, like a mailing list, where the list
redistributes it to the members of the list.
This kind of communication is called group communication. It can
be done through e-mail and mailing lists, or it can be done by special groupware
software, such as First Class,
Lotus
Notes, Web4Groups,
Usenet News,
etc. Such groupware software often stores the messages in a central store (which
is sometimes replicated, copied, to several servers). But mailing list software often
includes a so-called archive, a central store where you can find old messages sent
via the list. And many modern groupware systems can be accessed through e-mail. When
this is done, the groupware systems looks, to its e-mail users, the same as a mailing
list system. Thus, the border between e-mail with mailing lists and groupware is
getting more and more blurred. One particular groupware system is Usenet News. Particular
about Usenet News is its size, with millions of users and tens of thousands of groups,
and that it does not have very good support for closed groups. A closed group is
a group, to which not everyone has access. Closed groups will be more common in the
future, because the growth of the Internet has caused large problems with popular
open groups in Usenet News: Too much is written, the quality is not high enough,
people with a special zeal misuse groups (in the opinion of others).
Since Usenet News has not very good support for closed groups,
and since more and more group communication will be done in closed groups, it is
possible that e-mail with mailing lists will get a increasing share of the group
communication. (Another option is that Usenet News is extended to support closed
groups better than today.)
Mailing lists is one major cause of information overload in e-mail
(another cause is spamming, which is discussed separetely later in this article).
The reason for this is simple. People write about 10 times slower than they read.
Thus, if all messages were personal messages sent to one single recipient, people
would spend 90 % of their e-mail time writing and 10 % reading. This would make information
overload almost impossible except for a few very popular people, to whom many other
people write. If, however, a message is sent to 100 people through a mailing list,
the total reading time for all the recipients will be ten times the writing time.
Now, information overload can occur.
There are many tools for handling information overload. Many of
these tools are basic to groupware systems including Usenet News, but they are not
today so common in e-mail. These tools are:
- Instead of putting all incoming
messages in one large inbox, messages from each mailing list is put into a separate
folder. The advantage with this is that the recipient can read one group at a time,
and choose to read the more important groups before the less important groups. Some
systems make this even easier by providing a command to read all new messages, group
by group, in a priority order chosen by the user. A user with overload problems can
also leave a group, or skip all discussion in a group during a certain time period.
- Messages are further organised
into threads. A thread is a set of messages which are replies, directly or indirectly,
to one original message. Groupware systems often provide tools for reading messages
thread by thread, and for a user to skip the rest of a thread with a simple command.
Many Usenet News clients have a command by which a user can not only skip existing
messages from a certain thread, but also skip future, forthcoming messages from the
same thread.
E-mail software will in the future
much more often contain this kind of support. The problem has been that some old
mail software did not send the information with a reply which is needed to know which
thread it belongs to. But this is becoming less and less common. There are two ways
in which a mail system can recognize that messages belong to the same thread. One
of them is explicit links between messages, conveyed through In-Reply-To and References
headers in the reply. The other is the Subject line. A reply usually has the same
subject as the message it replies to, except that the four charcters "Re: "
are added if they were not already there. In Usenet News, this is standard, but the
same custom is more and more widely used also in e-mail. When a person wants to change
the subject in a thread, a convention which is sometimes used is to give the new
message a subject like this:
Subject: This is the new subject (was: This is the old subject)
A disadvantage with this convention is whether the word "was"
is appropriate in a non-English message. "Subject:" and "Re "
are of course also English, but an embedded English word in the middle of a sentence
in another language is more confusing. The "References" header is a better
way of keeping a thread together, and IETF will probably make it a standard to use
this method also in e-mail, in the same way as it has been used in Usenet News.
Some mail systems today provide filters, and filters can be used
to filter, automatically, all messages from a certain mailing list to a certain folder.
Filters can also be used to skip threads you are not interested in. The problem with
filters is that they are too difficult to set up for many e-mail users who are not
technical experts.
Using mailing lists today is more difficult than using groupware
like Usenet News. You have to know how to setup filters to sort messages from each
list to a separate folder. You have to know how to recognize that a message came
from a certain mailing list. You have to know the specific commands to subscribe,
unsubscribe and post to each mailing list.
Future mail software will make this much easier. The mail client
will know which commands to send in order to post, subscribe and unsubscribe to different
groups. It will know which e-mail addresses are mailing lists, and if you are subscribed
or not to each list. It will automatically sort each mailing list to a folder. The
user will be able to use commands built into the graphical user interface of the
e-mail client to find a mailing list, subscribe or unsubscribe from it, post to it.
Even though the actual commands sent to the mailing list software is different for
different e-mail software, this will be hidden from the user. The e-mail client will
translate the commands given by the user into the right command sent to each mailing
list.
If your name is Mary Smith and you write a message to a mailing
list Tropical Flowers, and someone else answer to this message, the answer will usually
have the following header:
To: Mary Smith <msmith@foo.net>, Tropical Flowers <trop-flow@foo.net>
This means that with most existing mail software today, you will
get two copies of the reply, one to your personal address, one through the mailing
list. In the future, you will be able to avoid this. Your mail software will know
that you are a member of the list, and will send you (if you so prefer) the replies
only through the mailing list.
In the future, more e-mail software will be able to automatically
recognize duplicates of the same message, and correlate them, instead of showing
them twice to you as separate messages. By correlation is meant that instead of seeing
two identical messages with different recipients, you will see one combined message
with both recipients.
Usenet News clients today usually have much better facilities
for handling large volumes of messages than e-mail clients. In the future, e-mail
clients will get many of the features which today are available in Usenet News. In
fact, news and e-mail will be integrated, so that you can use the same commands for
both news and mail, to perform actions like:
- Find mailing lists/newsgroups.
- Subscribe to, and unsubscribe
from mailing lists/newsgroups.
- Post to mailing lists and newsgroups.
- Read new messages, one group/list
at a time in your own personal priority order.
- Be able to read and skip messages
by thread.
- Be able to access archives of
old messages from a list/newsgroup.
- rapidly read new messages, one
at a time, with just a single keyboard command to get from one to the other.
All this will make messaging software
much easier to use. People who are not technical experts are not interested in the
fact that Usenet News, E-mail and other groupware use different protocols. They are
interested in the service of group communication, not how it works behind the scenes.
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Storing
and searching
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More and more of the information
flow is done through e-mail. The increasing use of e-mail and of mailing lists will
increase the volume of information even more than today. An important part of the
knowledge base of people is their personal archive of old e-mail messages. Most e-mail
software today allows the sorting of messages into folders, sometimes nested folders
(folders within folders).
Future e-mail software will provide much more powerful tools to
store the large volumes of information. Most people today store their messages on
their personal computers. It is possible, that in the future messages shared by several
people, such as mailing list messages, will be stored in common storage areas, so-called
archives. More probable is that such messages will both be stored in archives and
in personal folders on the personal computers of some of their members.
Search will be more powerful. You will be able to make search
commands, for example, to find all messages between October 1, 1995 and June 27,
1998, to any of the mailing lists Tropical Flowers or Tropical Insects, written by
Mary Smith and containing the word "orchid".
Some e-mail software presents the search results one at a time,
other create a temporary folder with all the found messages. In the future, you will
probably be able to use both alternatives. And you will have commands to print out
the text of all the found messages on paper.
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Purging
and archiving
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An important problem with large
volumes of information is when and how to remove old messages. This activity is called
purging. For most e-mail software, purging is a manual process, the user has to specify
which messages to purge. Many users handle purging by moving older messages to special
folders instead of deleting them. E-mail software of the future will make this activity
more automatic. Maybe you will be able to get old messages in certain folders automatically
moved to special folders for old messages.
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Filters
and spam control
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Many e-mail systems also support
filters, which can sort incoming and outgoing
messages automatically into folders. Filters, however, are often difficult to set
up. In the future, it will be easier to specify some very common kinds of filters,
like filtering out a thread you do not want to see, or filtering a mailing list to
a separate folder for that list.
One type of filter which will be more common in the future is
collaborative
filtering. In collaborative
filtering, data bases are stored of which messages other people liked, and these
data bases can be used to filter your own messages.
One particular area, where collaborative filtering may be the
solution, is spam control. The collaborative filtering data bases will tell you which
message is a spam and help you filter them out.
The filtering needs are different in different areas, even for
the same user. For your personal mail, you want one kind of filter, for messages
through important mailing lists, you want another kind of filter than for messages
through less important lists. For less important lists, it is acceptable for you
if the filter actually deletes messages of less interest. For personal mail and important
lists, it is important for you that you can trust the filter to not by mistake removing
anything important. Filters will thus work different depending on how you got a message.
Another possible solution to spam control in the future may be
legislation. The international nature of the Internet makes legislation problematic
- the offenders can move their activities to convenience-flag countries with less
legislation. But maybe legislation will be able to solve the problem.
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Deleting
already sent messages
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Most e-mail users will sometimes
by mistake send a message to the wrong recipients, or send a message with a silly
error which they afterwards want to correct. It would then be very useful to be able
to delete or replace your message with a new corrected message. However, recipients
may not always like if people can go into their mailboxes and delete messages or
modify them.
The solution to this problem will probably be that you cannot
delete already sent messages, but you will be able to send new messages which are
marked as "Supersedes" of the old message. If the recipients have not yet
read the old message, they will be shown only the superseding message. But probably
they will see that it has a supersedes link, and be able to use this link to see
the old version if they so wish. Supersedes, however, will not be generally used
in e-mail until in 2-4 years from now.
Usenet News has a cancel command, which physically deletes old
messages from the data bases. E-mail will probably not get such a powerful command.
Instead, e-mail will use supersedes, and perhaps also collaborative filtering, as
more soft tools to delete old messages.
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Notifications
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Notifications are special kinds
of messages which are usually sent automatically by software and inform you of different
things. Examples of notifications:
- Your message has been put into
the mailbox of the recipient. This is called delivery status notification.
- Your message could not be put
into the mailbox of the recipient. This is called non-delivery status notification.
- The recipient has read your message
(or at least displayed its text on a screen or printed it on paper). This is called
receipt notification.
- A new member has subscribed to
a mailing list or a member has signed off from it.
- A person wants to become a member
of a closed mailing list, which you are the moderator of, and you are asked to accept
or reject this request.
You may not want to see all such
notifications as separate messages. For example, you may want the software to store
delivery and reciept notifications automatically when they arrive. Then when you
look at a message you have sent, you can see the status of delivery for each recipients.
Many mail systems have these features for intranet messages, but not for internet
messages. There is however an Internet standard for notifications now, so in the
next years, we will see these facilities also for Internet messages even when the
sender and the recipient use different mail software.
For notifications with requests of membership to mailing lists,
you may want a command to your mailer to approve or disapprove the request, and the
mail client will automatically send the right command to perform your decision.
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Security
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Most Internet e-mail software
today provides very bad security. Some people claim that normal e-mail today has
no security at all. It is, for example, very easy to write faked messages in any
person's name. It is surprising that e-mail works so well in spite of the bad security.
There are a number of ways in which strong security can be added
to e-mail. Strong security uses cryphtographic methods, so that someone interecepting
the communication between client and server cannot sidestep security. The most common
functions which users will see in e-mail will be:
- Digital envelopes: Encryption
of text so that no one except the recipient can see a message.
- Digital Authentication: Check
who you are, before you can read your mail. Today, most mail systems used simple
passwords for this, which is not secure against someone intercepting the communication
between client and server. Strong authentication need more secure authentication
methods.
- Digital signatures: Authentication
that a message came from the specified sender.
- Digital seals: Checks that a
message has not been modified in transit.
The most common way to provide
these services uses so-called certificates. Digital signatures and seals require
that you have the certificate of the sender. Digital envelopes requires the certificate
of the recipient. Encryption requires that the sender and the recipient share a secret
key. This secret key is often exchanged using digital enveloping based on the recipient's
public key. If you have a falsified certificate or a faulty public key, the security
services are not secure any more. Because of this, very important is to have secure
methods of verifying that the certificates of the people you communicate with are
not falsified. Only if you have securely validated certificates, do you get the high
security needed. Many people put their certificates on their home pages in the WWW.
Downloading such certificates using ordinary web access does not securely verify
that the certificate is correct. A recipient who wants strong security, must therefore
verify the correctness of the certificate in some other way.
Many proposals have been made at different times for how to get
high security in e-mail using the methods described above. The proposals are known
under names like PEM (Privacy Enhanced Mail), PGP (Pretty Good Privacy), MOSS (Mime
Object Security Extensions) and S/MIME. Some of these proposals have been around
for a long time, but have still not become widely used. The most successful of the
methods is PGP, but S/MIME may become the accepted method of secure messaging in
the future. Legally, the PGP method may not be exported outside of the U.S.A., but
since it is widely known and used all over the world this is more of a formality.
The reason why PGP has been more successful is that it does not
require a system of certificate authorities to distribute the certificates. The establishment
of a secure such system has been a problem for the other proposals. This also means
that PGP is less secure than the other proposals. Note, however, that PGP can be
combined with a secure system for distributing certificates, and will then be as
secure as the other proposals.
In the next year or two, more and more mail systems will have
built-in support for PGP and/or S/MIME. This means that you will be able to send
encrypted messages, and give digital signatures and seals on the messages you write.
This will greatly enhance security. The presently used methods can however not be
used to encrypt messages which you send through mailing lists.
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Word
wrapping and quote marks
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By word wrapping is meant how
words are moved from line to line in a paragraph to give a neat display of text.
Word wrapping is an area which many existing mail systems have problems with. One
source of the problem is that some mail systems are based on the model that paragraphs
should be split into lines before the message is sent, other systems are based on
the model that paragraphs should be word wrapped immediately before display to the
recipient.
There is not going to be any consensus about this for many years
to come. However, more and more mail systems will be able to cope better with both
kinds of messages than they can today. Thus, the occurences when you get badly word
wrapped messages will be less common in the future.
A related problem is the common method of marking quotes by putting
"> " first in each line. This method is not well supported in many current
e-mail clients. They can sometimes not handle word wrapping correctly for such paragraphs,
and there is also often problems if the text you are quoting is in another character
set or encoding format than the text you are writing. This should not be a problem
for correctly written software, and mail system developers can be expected to handle
this better in the future.
With HTML, the accepted practice is to mark quotes with the <BLOCKQUOTE
TYPE=CITE> element, which is shown to users as a black line in the border to mark
the quotation. All mailers today do not yet handle this well, but future mailers
will.
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Newsgroups
header
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Another difficult problem, which
seems to be hard to reach a consensus on, is the meaning of the "Newsgroups"
header in e-mail messages. Different systems use it in two non-compatible ways:
- To indicate that this message
is a personal reply to a message in a newsgroup.
- To indicate that this message
was also sent to this newsgroup.
Because this is a controversial
issue, it may not be solved soon. The best a user can do is to ignore the Newsgroups
header, if it appears in an e-mail message.
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Character
sets
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If you want to send text in non-English
languages, or text containing special symbols like mathematical symbols, you need
richer character sets than provided by the old US-ASCII alphabet. Most mail systems
today support the somewhat richer ISO 8859-1 alphabet. This alphabet is enough for
most Western European countries and contains characters like Ä for German, É
for French or ¿ for Spanish. It is not enough for other languages like those
spoken in Eastern Europe and Asia. Some mailers today claim support for these languages,
but the support does not always work very well. For example, if you quote text in
one character set when you reply to a message in another character set, many of today's
mail systems get it wrong. We can hope that this will improve in the future. Most
mail software manufacturers are in English-speaking countries, but many of them understand
that they can increase revenue and sales by supporting other languages than English.
In a couple of years, most computers and mail software will support
the Unicode or the almost identical ISO 10646 character sets. Whether this will give
us better support for non-English text is something we can hope for, but not be sure
of. The problem with Unicode is that it has so very many characters, that many computers
will only be able to handle a subset, and if the sender and the recipient has computers
supporting different subsets of Unicode, messages may be garbled.
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Forwarding
of messages
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Most mail systems today allow you
to forward a message, which you have received, to additional recipients by copying
its text into your new message. In the future, an alternative way of forwarding e-mail
may become more common. This alternative is to incorporate the whole incoming message
as a body part of the new message. Comments on it, can be added as additional body
parts before or after the incorporated message. The advantage with this is that the
full incoming message is forwarded unchanged, even digital seals and signatures on
it will still work. The disadvantage is that you cannot put your own comments into
the middle of the forwarded message. This method of forwarding incoming e-mail might
be better supported by e-mail software in a year or so. |
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Very large messages
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The MIME e-mail standard has a
feature to send very large messages. Even if your mail system does not allow messages
larger than for example one megabyte, larger messages can be split into parts in separate messages. These are automatically
combined at receipt. This MIME feature is not widely supported, and it is difficult
to predict whether it will become more supported in the future or not.
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Millenium
problem
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The so-called millenium or Y2K
problem with two-digit years in the twenty-first centure is not expected to be much
of a problem for e-mail. Most e-mail today uses four-digit years, and the Internet
e-mail standard have required four-digit years since 1989.
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[1] Winograd, Terry and Fernando Flores (1986)
Understanding Computers and Cognition:
A New Foundation for Design.
Norwood, NJ: Ablex. |
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