Midlife crisis for email, 40

ADAM TURNER

It is 40 years since American computer engineer Ray Tomlinson put the @ into email addresses, triggering a communications revolution that would forever change the way we correspond.

Yet email now faces a mid-life crisis as young people turn to newer forms of communication, such as Facebook and Twitter.

Internal messaging systems have existed since the 1960s but in 1971 Tomlinson was helping build ARPANET for the US Department of Defence and laying the foundations of the modern internet. Tomlinson needed an easy way to send electronic messages between the various computers hooked up to ARPANET. He chose @ - generally referred to as the ''at'' symbol - to designate that a message was intended for a specific user ''at'' a specific organisation. The email protocol continued to develop but, for the next 20 years, it was restricted to academic and military use.

The internet was opened up for commercial use in the 1990s and email went mainstream - driven by the rise of internet service providers such as OzEmail and the birth of free webmail services such as Hotmail, Yahoo! and, later, Gmail. Businesses also embraced email, helped by the rise of the BlackBerry and smartphones.

Email had several advantages over existing forms of communication such as phone calls, letters and faxes. Email is fast, cheap, convenient and asynchronous - the latter meaning that, unlike a phone call, the receiver can deal with it when it suits them. Emails are also easier to store, search and archive than reams of paper or ephemeral phone calls that go in one ear and out the other.

The convenience of email meant it wasn't long before we struck email overload. Today there are an estimated two billion email users worldwide, together sending about 300 billion emails a day, according to monitoring service Pingdom. About 90 per cent of these emails are junk mail known as ''spam''. It's a problem that cuts to the very heart of email's shortcomings and has driven many in search of alternatives.

Email's greatest strength is also its greatest weakness: anyone can send an email to anyone, practically free. To make matters worse, email wasn't initially designed with security in mind, so it's easy for people to fake their sender details. It's little surprise email caught the eye of scammers - letting them contact people with bogus offers that are too good to be true.

Meanwhile, other spam is designed to trick you into clicking on a link to install malicious software that steals passwords and other sensitive information.

Imagine how much junk you would get in your home letterbox if advertisers weren't constrained by printing and delivery costs. Now imagine they ignored ''No junk mail'' stickers and there was no way to stop them sending it. You would spend all day sorting through junk mail in search of real letters, unless someone was prepared to do it for you. And, thus, another industry was born: spam filtering.

Today, most webmail services offer very accurate spam filtering, as does most desktop anti-virus software. These help weed out the junk from genuine messages. Spammers have not been defeated but, increasingly, accurate filtering is making spam seem less of a burden.

But the damage has already been done and people are looking elsewhere. Efforts to reinvent email, such as Google Wave, have stumbled, but social networking sites may hold the answer.

One of the best ways to combat spam is to only accept messages from people you know. This mentality has driven many people to embrace services such as Skype, Windows Live Messenger, Facebook and Twitter as alternatives to email, especially as most non-work messages are sent to family and friends who are probably also using these other services.

Social networking services such as Facebook and Twitter were originally conceived as platforms for sharing content but both integrate with SMS and feature built-in internal messaging platforms users have embraced quickly.

Facebook has about 800 million active users, of whom more than half log in daily. Together they send 4 billion internal Facebook messages every day.

For today's young social networking users, having grown up with the convenience of SMS and instant messaging, traditional email is often seen as too formal, cumbersome and slow, just as those who grew up with email might view the fax machine or handwritten letter. Of course, all these older technologies still coexist, they just serve different roles.

It seems email is destined to be mixed into a new social concept of a unified inbox - combining voice, video and text from various sources to the point where the message is all-important but the delivery method is invisible and irrelevant. At that point, Ray Tomlinson's @ symbol won't die but, rather, fade away as it is assimilated into this new way of communicating with the world.

Timeline

1971: Ray Tomlinson introduces @ symbol

1993; SMS

1996: Hotmail

1999: BlackBerry

2003: Skype

2004: Gmail

2004: Facebook

2006: Twitter

2009: Google Wave

2011: Google+

2011: Apple iMessage

- © Fairfax NZ News