Facebook’s “email” announcement is generating quite the buzz. Some speculate that Gmail and Hotmail will soon be on their deathbeds. While Mark Zuckerberg describes email as “slow and formal,” there is a much more pertinent problem: email abuse and misuse. Anyone with an email account gets bucketfuls of spam every day. I know I do.
With email nearly as old as the internet, the protocol still in use today assumes that: 1) All users trust each other, and 2) All users have a moderate level of skill to send and receive email properly. The failure of the first assumption has led to the high levels of spam and phishing emails we see today. There is no trust: how does anyone know that a link supposedly send by a friend isn’t a botnet client? The failure of the second assumption is just as bad: how many jobs have been lost due to a hasty “reply all” click? The remainder of this post will focus on the second assumption: email misuse.
Mailing List Misuse
The timing of Facebook’s email announcement coincided with an incident that really demonstrates that it’s well past time for email to die. I have subscribed to a fair number of mailing lists throughout the past 15 years or so I’ve been using email. As per Wikipedia, electronic mailing lists fall into two categories: 1) Discussion lists, and 2) Announcement lists. Discussion lists, such as the TinyOS programming help mailing list, allow all subscribers to send questions to everyone else in the list. Someone poses a question in the email, puts the mailing list address in the “to” header, and once sent, all other subscribers get the email. Anyone with an answer “replies all” to the list so that everyone can benefit from the discussion.
Announcement lists, on the other hand, are only a one-way broadcast. Only a single owner is permitted to send announcements to all subscribers on the list with the recipients unable to reply to all. That’s the idea, anyway.
In September, I joined an alumni mailing list which I would estimate has at least several hundred subscribers. The list owner sent out regular updates at an interval of roughly once per two weeks, as illustrated in the figure below. However, following the most recent announcement, chaos ensued. On September 15th (see figure), a subscriber learned that he could “reply all” to the list and not only email the list owner, but all of the other subscribers as well. For whatever reason, the announcement list was set up like a discussion list, allowing any subscriber to reply. It only got worse from there.
Once one subscriber hit "Reply All", the rest is history...
Soon, a torrent of emails followed in the steps of the first subscriber as one person after another typed up a response and hit “reply all.” Being an alumni list, the discussion circulated among a group of individuals of about the same class year, discussing subjects that made no sense to anyone else. The responses quickly got out of hand: through the afternoon of September 15th, the sending rate soared to well past 1 email per minute.
After the initial rush of random discussion, complaints ensued.
Following a mad surge of random discussion on the 15th and another resurgence on the afternoon of the 16th, subscribers began to email the list complaining about the onslaught. One after another, again surging past the rate of 1 email per minute, subscribers demanded that they be unsubscribed and that the discussion be taken to a message board. Finally, the message was heard: everything died down and stopped completely by the evening of the 16th.
So what went wrong? First, the list owner should have ensured that he was the only one able to send emails to the list. Second, a significant number of subscribers emailed the list in an attempt to unsubscribe instead of emailing the list owner. Both mishaps plus the breach of protocol for announcement lists made things quite a mess in only a few hours.
Some other interesting statistics can be computed in the aftermath. Since the list’s inception, about 10% of the total volume can be attributed to announcements, 50% for misuse/discussion, and 40% for complaints about the discussion. Next, we show the age distribution of senders:
The misuse is confined to the 45+ age group.
Since this is an alumni list, I was able to determine the age of just about every sender within two or three years, however, beyond some quick Googling, about 2% of the senders have an undetermined age. The above figure shows that those who abused the mailing list for discussion are all older than 45. Conversely, there is a roughly even distribution of age for those complaining. There is also slightly lower percentage of users under 45. From the figure, we can conclude that the younger generations are savvy enough to avoid either: 1) Misusing the announcement list as a discussion list, or 2) Sending the list an unsubscribe email instead of the owner.
Another interesting fact is that 37% of all senders used a business email address to reply to the list. 37% of senders used their business email for personal reasons! That’s insane. Another 9% had nasty hundred word “disclaimer” signatures at the end of their messages. Stuff like: “THIS IS A LEGALLY PRIVILEGED AND CONFIDENTIAL COMMUNICATION THAT IS INTENDED TO BE VIEWED ONLY BY THE INTENDED RECIPIENT…ANY DISSEMINATION, DISTRIBUTION, OR COPYING OF THIS TRANSMISSION IS STRICTLY PROHIBITED.” I think the distribution and copying prohibition went out the window the minute they hit “reply all.” It’s a wonder more people don’t get busted for stuff they put in emails.
In conclusion, this case study demonstrates exactly why email ought to be abandoned. There are too many avenues for abuse, misuse, and unintended consequences. It would be nice to see Facebook come up with something appropriate for today’s internet.
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