Applications, perils and possibilities

Introduction

We live in a connected world. Well, more or less. The Internet has shrunk the world like nothing before. Whether you are communicating over email, or publishing information on the web, searching an online database, managing an online purchase transaction or chatting over an instant messaging system, communication technologies have made a phenomenal impact on our lives.

There’s so much that one can talk about. What follows is a whirlwind overview of what I consider to be the Net’s original killer app. Email!

Applications

What started more than thirty years ago as a means of copying files between connected system has now become a part of our lives, both business and personal. An essential component of our everyday communications infrastructure. And the fact of the matter is that, thanks to the popularization of email by free webmail services, email is now practically a commodity service.

In its most basic form email allows for one to one communication. Communication that may involve business negotiations for that lucrative deal or for the simple joys of being able to stay in touch with family and friends scattered across the world.

However, your communication need not be limited to a human being. You could send mail to a computer (set up by a human) commanding it to do your bidding. A listserv for instance. Mailing list servers enhance group interactions via email, letting people discuss topics of mutual interests. An organization could use these to keep in touch with its clients notifying them of bugfixes, updates, etc.

As a participating recipient, if you find your mailing list messages cluttering up your inbox or distracting you as they trickle in during a working day, you could opt receiving your email in a convenient digest format, say once a day.

Add some back end scripts to create a repository - programs to sort and archive all messages processed by the list server. Slap on a web based access mechanism and you can reach this from wherever you have web access. Which is pretty much everywhere. Allowing you to browse discussions, rummage through archives, etc. using your favorite browser. Not only that, the web based access mechanism can be invaluable to the administrator too. Management and maintenance (even when traveling on vacation) was never so easy!

And conceptually, isn’t this the first step towards basic knowledge sharing and information management? In a distributed environment, loosely connected via email.

The rapid adoption of email by users all over the world and the ability of the technology to reach huge numbers of people easily, conveniently and at low costs is what fueled the next step. That of email marketing. Backed by a combination of database and web technologies email marketing allows for a very rich experience. For the recipient, interactivity and more information based on interest and demand. And for the marketer, a wealth of information including tracking user views, click-throughs, points of entry and exit, etc.

Perils

Email as with other tools can be misused and has its share of problems. In the here and now, a couple of very serious problems.

The first is viruses. Before email and the web became so popular, the most common way for your machines to get infected was by using someone else’s infected floppy. With the web, the probability of downloading an infected program increased greatly. The bad guys quickly figured out the potential of email as a carrier for the crap they wrote. Viruses morphed into worms - code that infected machines and was capable of propagating itself to any other reachable computer. Even to the ones only reachable by email. Which is a whole lot of machines.

A smart worm requires practically no human action. Successful ‘campaigns’ have the potential for enormous damage - both data loss as well as resource unavailability. ILoveYou, Nimda and SoBig are infamous and unpleasant examples of the menace.

Scripting languages like JavaScript, and more importantly VBScript in an MS Windows dominated desktop environment make things much easier for the bad guys. Now here’s some advice. As a general rule of thumb turn off script interpretation in your email client. You’ll breathe easier.

On a more permanent level, anti-virus software, preferably integrated into your mail solution should be mandatory these days. If your mailserver downloads email using POP3 from an internet server (true for most organizations today), then ask if your mail service provider offers additional anti-virus services on the Internet server. When faced with potential destruction possibilities, multiple layers of defense are advisable.

The second major problem is due to irresponsible email marketing. Bulk messaging, which in its evil avatar morphed to spam. Simply put, spam is unsolicited mail that you don’t want. At first thought it may not appear to be too bad, since by and large, spam doesn’t have a ‘destructive’ characteristic. At the worst, one simply has to delete the mail and continue with life, right?

Wrong. You may get by with that for a while, but if you use email regularly then you probably know what I am talking about. For an individual, spam makes using email miserable. On a global, Internet level, the sheer volume of spam sucks up bandwidth, storage and processing power. And the amount of spam is going up. Scarily!

Someone… in all probability you and me, the end users end up paying more due to the spammers activities. Even more important, over and above the cost there are other losses too. For instance, the time spent going through and deleting junk mail, accidentally missing out that important little message lost in the midst of all the garbage in your inbox. You see what I mean?

Now think of every other colleague in your organization being subject to the same phenomenon and think of the organizational waste of energy and resource. We have a very real problem on our hands.

Fortunately, help is available. There are anti-spam solutions available. Elaborating on how to choose one would need an article of its own. Very briefly, while evaluating a solution you might want to consider some of these attributes: filtering effectiveness, ability to train and customize, collaborative use in an organization and supported by an auto-updating service - especially good for those who want to go the quickstart and convenient route.

It is a constant war and sure enough one will lose a few battles, but by and large these perils can be minimized enough to let one continue enjoying the benefits of email.

Possibilities

Like with anything that one uses sufficiently, most people now have a definite dependence on email. Along with an ever evolving set of new expectations. Expectations from all participants. We begin to expect more. More mailbox space, speedier connections, better servers, more utilities, faster responses from people we write to, more support from our email clients, and so on and so forth.

Email systems themselves are in evolution. On multiple fronts. Combined with other technologies, there is the scope for some very useful stuff.

Wireless, for one, is a technology that has a lot of potential. And I’m not just referring to the 802.x standard. I’m talking about practical, ‘available now’ stuff. Like SMS. Being able to integrate email to SMS capability into your solution can be a big winner for some folks. Now I’m certainly not advocating reading your email via SMS. That would be a very tiring affair and such attempts are best left for an emergency.

But ponder for minute on the strengths of SMS. Short messages. Messages which can reach you almost anywhere. Isn’t this just made for alerts? Lets assume that your mail system has the capability to send out an SMS. Now, if one could program it to monitor and look for certain user defined events and send you an alert SMS, wouldn’t that be wonderful?

Using email to make aha things happen is not necessarily dependent on exotic, expensive technologies. Imagination and innovation helps. Here are some thoughts. Conceptually, email in real time leads to Instant Messaging; for some types of distributed data dissemination and synchronization, email can be a transport; gateways can be built to hook up standards based email to proprietary messaging systems; workflow applications can make use of email, and so on and so forth. I’m not saying that email is the best tool for all of these. It depends. But sometimes it can be a more than useful option.

Having said that, a word of caution. Be judicious of the email hammer, lest everything starts looking like a nail. Be extra careful, if you are not an expert.

As email becomes ubiquitous and its usage increasingly pervasive, there are lots of things to think about. Stuff including privacy and security, productivity, responsibility and plain old maximizing ROI!

But, I see a ‘Quota Exceeded’ message looming up and so I end here with a promise of more. Later.

Till then, wishing you a rich-mailing experience.

(Published in: Economic Times of India, Sept 2003)