Email - taking a long time to die
Jinfo Blog

By Tim Buckley Owen

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With the current generation of students increasingly moving away from email to social media, it’s almost a given that new employees will also reject email (as these previous LiveWire postings have indicated). But it looks as if email is going to take a lot longer to die than social media pundits suggest.

Quoting figures from the International Data Corporation, Kate Poole reports in EContent magazine that email volume is expected to have increased by 1.5 trillion between 2009 and 2014. Email is inherently more secure than social media because it is encrypted and ends up in a password-protected inbox, the article continues.

What’s more, IBM’s social media specialist Ed Brill nails the myth that young people coming out of college use email less. Apparently, it just isn’t true.

All the same, email does require some fixing, if only to deal with the time-wasting issue of spam – and Germany is proposing to do just that. Germany is already pretty tough on privacy and now, as Peter Sayer of the IDG News Service reports, it’s planning to develop a nationwide secure email service which requires senders and recipients to register and identify themselves.

Eliminating spam isn’t the primary purpose of this proposed De-mail service (which is expected to be enabled by a new law very soon), although it could well have that effect. But its secure nature will mean that it will have the same legal protection and status as paper mail.

It’s technology that ensures emails get to the right place unsullied, but it’s people who then let them escape, whether maliciously or through simple carelessness. The usual health warnings apply to a survey about security put out by a security company – nevertheless recent disclosures from log management specialist LogRhythm should make us sit up.

21% of computer users admitted that they transferred company data to their personal machines, LogRhythm’s survey said, even though more than half of these could be accessed by other people – and 14% did the same with their smartphones. And 18-24 year olds – the upcoming social media generation – were the worst offenders.

What’s more, no amount of disclaimers at the end of emails can remind people to use them sensibly, the Economist suggests. Such verbiage is probably legally unenforceable, and people have long stopped reading it anyway.

So, with a rosier future for email than conventional wisdom might suggest, the security and compliance issues surrounding its use aren’t going to go away any time soon. Indeed, for one venerable institution, it seems to be the up and coming medium; a bemused Wall Street Journal reported recently that the New York Stock Exchange was thinking of allowing email onto its trading floor for the first time.

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