Is e-mail broken?

John Dvorak has written a very interesting opinion piece making the statement that e-mail is broken. I don't agree, since e-mail seems to work just fine, with people you keep in contact with. What is broken is (or actually never really existed) is that e-mail wasn't designed to keep up or plan for changing e-mail addresses. I think when mail was first written no one would have been able to conceive of having a dozen or more different e-mail addresses over the course of time (I got to about 15 different addresses with a quick count).

Dvorak suggests a centralized quasi-national system based on Social Security numbers (he seems to be forgetting the rest of the world outside of the U.S.). Another alternative is are services like Plaxo, which lets you register old e-mail addresses. Okay so that would help, but really e-mail still was intended for one person, one address, ad infinitum. Not Yahoo, work, ISP, personal domains, different jobs, various schools, etc.

But they other small comment, relating to spammers and bounced mail is this:

And the whole spam scene, because of the e-mail turnover, has to be an enormous burden on the Net. Send out 40 million messages, and you get 40 million failure notifications sent to a dead box that sends back 40 million messages saying it doesn't exist back to the host of the bad address. How much back-and-forth message bouncing becomes perpetual? Think of what's happening if millions and million of messages are going back and forth perpetually because there is nobody at the end to receive them and the poorly programmed servers are on autopilot. It's amazing the Internet works at all with all of the garbage that must be flying around on it.

You know that is definitely worth thinking about for a minute.

As a matter of fact I sent out my newsletter today and didn't get any bounces back (that I wasn't expecting…I had missed a couple names in my last pass through). But I think that has to do with it being only about 100 names and I go through and cull pretty often to only keep people in who I know are around and would be interested.