Email sucks.  It's so overwhelmed by spam, malware, and other kinds of garbage that hardly a week goes by without someone suggesting that the medium has outlived its usefulness, as in Gary Flood's recent declaration that it's time to "dump email as a business tool."  (http://www.cbronline.com/blogs/cbr-rolling-blog/time-to-dump-email-as-a-business-tool-091211)

Everything Mr. Flood says about email is true; it has become a continual source of problems for almost everyone who uses it, and it's tempting to conclude that we'd be better off without it.  In fact, it reminds me a lot of sex.

Stay with me, here:  Sex is one of the worst sources of deadly diseases that most of us will ever face.  Jealousy and performance problems can lead to  physical abuse, battered bodies, and even murder.  The desparate yearning for sex can cause people to lie and cheat, leading to broken hearts and bitter souls.  Overeagerness to begin a sex life can lead to teen pregnancy, and the ensuing responsibilities can scuttle a range of grand goals for one's life.

Like sex, email has become a nexus for a diversity of social ills, in large part because it's too valuable for us to give up.  Just as we could wipe out AIDS simply by eliminating non-monogamous sex, so we could wipe out spam simply by eliminating email between people who don't already know each other.  Just as we could wipe out unwanted pregnancy, spousal abuse, adultery and more simply by putting an end to sex, so too we could eliminate phishing, malware, and more simply by putting an end to email.  

Or maybe not.  We embrace both sex and email because we are social creatures, and we wither in isolation.  We crave all kinds of intercourse with other people.  If we can't have sex, we stew in isolation, often until we're so desparate and deranged that we abuse sheep, machines, or worse.  If we can't send email, we'll send text messages, faxes, or voice mails, any of which is subject to the same abuses as email once its usage reaches critical mass.

Sure, email attracts a variety of abuses.  Nice houses attract burglary and arson.  Physical beauty attrracts stalking, harrassment, even rape.  Banks attract bank robbers (because, as Willie Sutton said, that's where the money is).  But we don't react to these ills by giving up on their underlying triggers.  Instead. we put guards on banks.  We install security systems on nice homes.  We encourage women to carry mace and whistles in bad neighborhoods.   And we build email security infrastructure that allows us to retain the advantages of email while minimizing the risks.

It's tempting to think that spam and the other problems of email are somehow very specific flaws of the current email protocols.  I've often heard people propose that the solution to spam is to throw away today's email protocols and design a whole set of new ones from scratch.  Alas, spam isn't the result of email's design flaws, but rather its design goals.  Email is designed to permit any two people to communicate, whether or not they already know each other, and whether or not they are strongly authenticated to the operators of the network.  As long as those two goals are met, spam and other abuses will be possible.  

We could reduce and perhaps even eliminate spam by requiring prior out-of-band introductions to send mail to someone, or by creating a network with absolutely no possibility of anonymity.   Similarly, we could make sex a lot safer by restricting it to pre-vetted government-assigned partners.  But it's an unappealing tradeoff; most of us would rather run a few risks than give up email -- or sex -- as we know it.

So, if you really feel you can give up email, by all means try to do so.  You'll save yourself some trouble, for sure.  But if you find that you can't, just remember to use an appropriate security technology.  You can protect yourself and still have a good time, I promise.

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