The three stigmata of email

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The articles of Cassandra Crossing I'm under license CC BY-SA 4.0 | Cassandra Crossing is a column created by Marco Calamari with the "nom de plume" of Cassandra, born in 2005.

An interesting analysis from Cassandra on the state of email.

This article was written on April 2, 2024 from Cassandra

Cassandra Crossing 581/ The three stigmata of email

Images are inserted into email messages with less and less text, sending an email becomes increasingly difficult. Is email doomed? Is it worth continuing to use it?

Who of the 24 stainless readers had caught the science fiction quote that equates email to Palmer Eldritch would have hit the mark.

Today's topic is in fact the slow decline of email, and the bleeding wounds that are its cause. But oh well, no more quotes and let's get to the point.

Cassandra, who preserves everything, and that's all, email never received could easily be accused of “emailfilia”; for this reason he will briefly tell the reasons for this habit of his, explaining how his "extremization” of conservation is not a disease, but rather a healthy practice.

What are the wounds that have been inflicted on email?

1 — phishing. Once upon a time it was spam that polluted email, but now criminals (spammers are criminals!) have understood that advertising no longer pays, and that no one wants to pay to send a million emails which are increasingly intercepted from Google and Spamassassin-type filters. 

But thanks to the new crime of ransomware and the like, the demand for vehicles of infection has increased, and therefore the amount of phishing emails received has increased, which are also increasingly sophisticated and credible. This creates a aura of suspicion towards emails in general.

In fact, in this situation, a good chunk of utonti he would probably be better off giving up e-mail completely, to avoid getting very hurt sooner or later.

Bad ordinary people, those capable of recognizing a phishing email should instead continue to use email, which for its asynchronous and long-lasting nature accustoms us to selective thinking and to writing in a more structured and thoughtful way, and with fewer smileys, which denote the inability to express oneself through words.

The email remains understandable, creates and contains its entire context, and allows a discussion to be reconstructed and understood even after a long time, and allows for very simple and immediate permanent archiving.

2 — emails made of bitmaps uploaded remotely. These are emails whose contents are increasingly not included in the message itself. A dangerous contradiction. The interpretation of the message, after a short time, becomes impossible, because the remote images are not preserved, exactly as happens with most web content, on the contrary they disappear very quickly, after only a few days or weeks. 

Therefore, archiving the email, done normally, does not save its contents, which are irremediably lost. You can archive messages by embedding the local copy of the email before it's too late, but this becomes a job for archivists, not for normal users.

It's better that way– someone will say – It was just advertising anyway.

Very bad— says Cassandra instead —anything that prevents the archiving of a "meaning", perhaps today considered banal, is a crime against culture. 

Think of the remains of daily life in Pompeii, which the inhabitants valued zero, and instead for us they are precious in every sense.

And instead modern thoughts travel increasingly diluted in images such as memes, or even worse in insipid Youtube videos that "they explain things”. Hundreds of megabytes that can be synthesized into a much more usable email that is a thousand times smaller. 

We are perhaps destined to lose the ability to use abstract language, and destined to mass illiteracy, to becoming a crowd of animals visuals?

3 — networks of relationships made of addresses. Email encourages relationships to be cultivated individually to enrich participants, and not simply by “exchange” as currency for “get rich”, even if perhaps with real money, as in social media. Address books and emails allow you to recover even remote relationships over time, and continue discussions that, if they had been made in chats, time would have already swept away mercilessly, like tears in the rain.

Closing quickly, as promised, we can say that the email stay, can be archived, maintains the information, guarantees it the historical value. That's because I am words distilled from people's minds, and for this reason much more precious than any meme or video, however apparently useful. 

Are we expecting an Internet populated only by digital natives who have therefore become functionally illiterate?

Marco Calamari

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