Is Email dying?

Have we reached the point where email’s influence over our electronic lives is waning? It is hard to imagine, especially for those of us who grew up in the minicomputer/PC era. For two generations,  email was the killer application. It delivered information reliably and within a few minutes.

But today the properties that made email so attractive for so long are now a liabiliity. “A few minutes” for a response is so last year, driven in no small part by texting and cell phone ubiquity. At the same time this was happening, wikis, blogs and social networks have begun to erode email’s document exchange role. The notion of sharing photos or a slide presentation using email attachments is becoming quaint.

Now, the Internets have gotten faster, and seconds matter. Amazon offers same-day deliveries in a few cities. Motorola’s new Cliq Android phone aggregates all your messages together. And email just can’t keep up.

Jessica Vascellaro’s WSJ article about “Why Email No Longer Rules” cites that more people are on Facebook and other social networking sites than use email (it is a questionable statistic, to be sure). She claims that email is losing out to the immediacy of the real-time nature of social networks feeds and presence-aware apps like Twitter. Even Instant Messaging isn’t instant or capable enough, since it was designed for one-to-one chats. Today, the real-time Internet means that conversations need to happen with multiple people and happen quickly. The fact that this constant stream of presence information is being collected and sold, eroding one of the few aspects of privacy we control is lost on this generation, apparently.

I asked my friend Dave Piscitello to help collaborate on this article, and we agreed to share our thoughts and come up with the overall piece.

We have begun to notice in the past month or so more of our network is responding to our respective publications – weekly email Web Informants and the SecuritySkeptic.com blog – via Facebook and not via email. Adapting to the needs of our audience, we have both begun “pushing” our publications using email, Friendfeed, Facebook, and occasionally Twitter. We’ve experimented with podcasting, webcasting, and video too.

This is admittedly a shotgun approach to publishing, and begs the question of which of these communications tools, if any, are the right one for publishing? It also begs whether any of these alone are sufficient, and if not, what combinations can be used effectively? More importantly, how do we measure influence and reach, given that people can reach our blogs, Tweetstreams and FaceLinkedNingSpace networks, text or IM us, or heaven forbid, actually speak to us using a phone!

We honestly don’t know for sure, but we asked ourselves some questions and share them here for you to consider for your situation:

If you send out a weekly email newsletter, is it better to have the CEO as a subscriber or have four or five direct reports on a subscriber list who will send the same email to the CEO to act on when we touch a topic near and dear? The former puts your name on the CEO’s radar *if* he makes time to read enough of your messages, while the latter puts the decision of what is near and dear in the hands of a (presumably trusted) underling.

Is it better to post something to our FaceLinkedNingSpace pages, because that post provides personal context, starts conversation that the rest of our friends can follow along and helps you steadily build an audience over time; to blog amid a topic-based community, where a your post may “go viral” on the blogosphere and get thousands of “one time” hits and trackbacks; or is it worth the effort to use blogging and social networks in combination by drawing the attention of your friends and followers to your blog via a post and URL from your social network pages?

Is the link you embed in a Tweet going to pull audiences to your content? If you get 10% clickthrough when the industry average is a couple of percent, what can you learn and leverage from that Tweet or all Tweeted content? Is the viral effect of reTweeting or Tweetstreaming useful in growing your audience or will you disenfranchise long time followers who have become accustomed to receiving email responses “in a few minutes”?

We have a lot more questions than these, and are still searching for ways to meet our individual needs and aspirations. We both agree on how to answer the question at the top of this post: we don’t think email is dying, it’s merely settling into the roles it was always best suited to play. Email is not being replaced entirely for notification, messaging, and collaboration by these other technologies, nor will any of the newcomer applications succeed email as the single killer application. For the moment, there *is* no killer application. We need to experiment more with the existing and emergent set of applications going forward to get a better handle how we all interact online.

In the meantime, please share your thoughts with us both, using whatever technology is appropriate.

How to extract your LinkedIn contacts

If you have spent any time online using social networks like LinkedIn or Facebook, you know they can be difficult to grow your network and add contacts. But even harder is the ability to extract your contacts once you have built up a reasonably sized network. None of the social networks makes it very easy to get this information.

Why would you want to do this? Several reasons. First is the peace of mind that you have control over your own data. Should you decide to leave the network, or should the network decided to leave you (either for cause or for lack of funds to continue operations), it would be nice to have your contacts tucked safely on your own hard drive. Second is the ability to do some targeted marketing emails or just do some research: none of the networks has the right search fields when you need to find everyone that lives in a certain area with a certain job or works for a specific company. Sometimes I can find people on my network using the search tools, but often I can’t. And wouldn’t it be nice to see if everyone that is on your LinkedIn network is also on your Facebook network? Or not, if you are still trying to keep these two separate?

Before you hit the reply key and tell me that there are several different services that allow for you to synchronize your contacts, that isn’t quite what I mean. Yes, there are services such as Plaxo’s Pulse and MyOtherDrive.com that allow for synchronization of your desktop to their cloud-based contact list, but that is usually in one direction only (Pulse offers de-duplication services and better searching tools if you want to pay them for a premium membership.) Say I don’t want to have anyone from my last employer on my LinkedIn network, because I left that job under a dark cloud. (Purely hypothetical, of course, not that I am saying that this ever happened to me!) It isn’t easy to find this out with these networks, even if you do know how to manipulate their complex privacy settings.

So if you are still reading down here, I suggest you take a look at a Web service called Open Xchange, at ox.io. You can set up a free account and within a few minutes have it setup to automatically bring in all of your contacts from Google’s Gmail, LinkedIn, Facebook, and a few other places as well. What is more important though is that you can easily publish all this information (or some of it) to a Web site, or download it to a comma-separated file, so that you stay in control of your data at all times.

OX is the same technology that is white-labled by Network Solutions and 1&1 Internet as their own email services. You can also purchase a software license if you don’t want to run it across the Internet and on your own Linux servers. It has a lot more under the hood, including plug-ins for Microsoft Outlook, import/export of calendar items, iPhone apps and a shared document repository. If you want to get a feel for the software, go on over to my screencast video that I just finished on the product here.

(And while you are over there, if you haven’t seen these videos, you might want to browser around, or better yet, hire me to do one for your company’s product.)

I am glad to see products like OX take hold: all of us need better and more open ways to control our contacts.

Note to job seekers: watch that email address

If you are about to be unemployed, take a moment to follow Strom’s rules for appropriate email names:

1. Avoid use of Hotmail, MSN, AOL, and Yahoo. Get a Gmail address, or better yet, pony up the cash to get your own domain and let Google host your email for you. We are talking about $10 a year to do this properly.

2. If you must use a free account, try to not use names that aren’t professional, such as ones that include cartoon characters, sexual or religious references, or other things that are best left to your personal side. This isn’t a matter of free expression or taste. Ideally, it should be some combination of your first and last name.

3. Pick something that is easy to hear and understand. If you have to spell it out when you are on the phone, use something else.

4. Don’t use punctuation marks or numbers in your name. Why? See point #3.

5. Make sure you use one address for all of your job-related activities: resume, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Monster, Craigslist, etc. Set up these services to send you notifications when people post messages on them, so you can stay up to date. Remember, it is your brand, or it will be soon enough. You don’t want to have to check lots of different email addresses during your search.

6. Speaking of checking email, please remember to do so at least twice a day. Respond to any inquiries quickly. You want to show that you are on top of things.

7. Start putting your connections (what some of us used to call our Rolodex) in your email address book. You just need first and last name, a title or some other thing to remember the contact by, a phone number and an email address. Gmail can auto-populate your address book to help things.

8. Remember that email addresses aren’t case-sensitive, so David@strom.com and david@strom.com and dAvId@Strom.com are all the same mailbox.

Computerworld: 3 e-mail encryption packages help businesses stay secure

 You probably know by now that any e-mail that isn’t encrypted traverses the Internet in clear text that can easily be viewed with little skill and just some patience. So what are you doing to protect your company’s sensitive e-mail?

The right way is to encrypt e-mail messages in their entire path from sender to receiver. You also need to digitally sign them, to ensure that no one else has tampered with them in transit.

In today’s Computerworld, I review three solutions: Hush Communications’ Hushmail for Business, Voltage Security Inc.’s Voltage Secure Network and Connected Gateway and PGP Corp.’s Universal Server.

PC World: Ten Lessons Learned From Using E-mail Lists

This week I want to talk about the “softer” side of things: how to run your lists and choose what you write about, what you send out, how you send it out, and why you bother doing it.

E-mail is the basic lifeblood of any small business communications. It is how you get and retain customers, how you find new prospects, and how you keep and motivate your staff. Even if you have a fairly non-Internet company, such as a hardware store, you can use e-mail to bring in new business and inform and amuse your customers. You can read my ten lessons in my column this week.

PC World: Do E-mail Marketing Right

While all this Twittering and Facebooking has gotten plenty of attention, the basic bread and butter of any small business is the care and feeding of its e-mail lists to connect its customers, suppliers and partners. The better you are at doing e-mail lists and sending out regular and informative communications, the more business you will have.

You can read the first of a two-part series in my column this week in PC World here.

Keeping your business communications safe and secure (New York Times)

As more small businesses rely on email and Instant Messaging for their communications, there are a number of inexpensive methods that they can use to keep their conversations private and ensure that only the intended recipients read them. And these days even the smallest business can make use of security products that are easier to use and don’t require a computer guru to setup. 

You can read more in my story in today’s New York Times about simple tools and techniques that businesses can employ here.

Yet another reason to keep that birth date private

The talk about Sarah Palin’s Yahoo emails being made public (you can easily find them, but believe me, they aren’t worth the time to read) bring up yet another reason to not post your birh date on various social networks. Granted, a public official is probably an easier target, but apparently access to her Yahoo account was made easier by the fact that she chose information that just about anyone could easily figure out to recover her password.

Of course, why she was using a Yahoo email account for government business is an entirely separate issue. Our governor here in Missouri (who is not running for higher office, let alone re-election) can tell you why that is a bad idea. Perhaps this will motivate a few more people to use encrypted email, or at least pick up the telephone, when they want to keep something private.

Ten years of email

This week Google’s Gmail crossed the 7 GB storage threshold – meaning that anyone can get a mailbox with at least that much storage, and for free, too. (The size continues to increase slightly each day, wonder of wonders.) It made me stop and think about how much my email habits have changed in the past ten years, when Marshall Rose and I sat down to write a book about Internet emails. Back then, 7 GB was a lot of room for your mailbox, and I don’t think anyone imagined that we would have it free of charge, either.

Of course, one thing that is very odd is that Gmail has been in beta like, forever it seems. (We are coming up on close to 5 years.) I wonder when Google will consider it good enough for a release candidate? If this had been Microsoft, we would be on v 3.1 or something by now, for sure. One wag suggested that the real product name is “Gmail Beta.” Har har.

Ten years ago, I was using desktop email software to store my messages. If memory serves me, I used a succession of products, including Eudora, Thunderbird, and Lotus Notes. When I had problems with T-bird corrupting my messages about two and a half years ago, I switched to Gmail, and have been a pretty happy camper for the most part. What is interesting is that Google hosts the email for my strom.com domain, again, completely free of charge and with a very capable user interface as well. I don’t need to store my emails on any desktop, because it lives in the cloud.

So ten years ago, we had the following email programs popular enough that we included them in our book: Lotus cc:Mail (extinct), Netscape Messenger (extinct but replaced by Thunderbird you could say), Eudora Pro (still very much alive, although no longer under the thumb of a phone handset maker thankfully), Compuserve (not extinct but should be), AOL (ditto and back then it was on v3), and Microsoft’s Outlook Express (v4 that came with IE v4, and replaced with the Mail app in Vista).

Curiously, CS and cc:Mail were proprietary software that didn’t start out using Internet protocols and standards, and had their basis in local area networks (cc:Mail) and closed online systems (Compuserve). The ones that are still among us are Internet-savvy. Indeed, you could say that AOL had one of the first popular gateways to Internet emails (although MCIMail beat it by several years, it wasn’t very popular). Compuserve was also very popular in its day, despite having email addresses that only a geek could love like 73234,5869. Trying saying that string often to your friends.

Back ten years ago, we didn’t have Web-based emailers that were worth much of anything. They had few features, couldn’t really interoperate with all that many browsers, and had lots of other quirks. Outlook’s Web interface was dog slow and required all sorts of tricks to work across a public Internet connection. We wrote in our book: “Either the market will enforce adult supervision … whereby IMAP technology is … standardized or a huge opportunity will open up for Web-based email readers.” Gmail has tried to play both ends here, with its support of the IMAP protocols as part of its service.

In our book, we introduced the concept of having 100% pure Internet for your email – having products that faithfully implement Internet standards natively if possible. And yes, Notes/Domino, Groupwise, and Exchange are all far from 100% pure, which is why they are in decline.

Back ten years ago, email was still a relatively new concept for corporate communications. You could still find pockets of people who weren’t accessible via a “dot com” email address, and not that many people put their email address on their business card. It was rare to find a corporation that would be diligent about answering their emails from their customers in a timely fashion. Well, some things don’t ever change.

Back then we didn’t have the broadband penetration that we do now, and certainly not the Wifi penetration that we have now. It is perhaps harder to resist the urge to check your email because it is so available. With Blackberries, iPhones, and Internet kiosks everywhere you don’t even need a laptop to stay connected. And the US is even far behind other countries now, sad to say. Ten years ago we still had dial up modems that we used to get connected. I haven’t touched a modem in so long that I can’t remember when, but it was probably around ten years ago when I started tossing them and not carrying them on business trips anymore.

One thing that hasn’t changed much in ten years is secure email usage: almost no one does this, despite some major advances in encryption ease of use. In our book, we called the state of secure email standards “a sucking chest wound” saying that no one has a solution that is multivendor, interoperable, and Internet standards based. That is mostly true today, although there are some solutions that do a better job at hiding the certificate management and automatically decrypt and encrypt message traffic. And several multivendor attempts in the past decade to standardize on approaches have mostly met with failure. Still, despite the many well-publicized breaches, secure email remains out of reach of ordinary humans.

I hope you enjoyed my trip down email memory lane. Certainly, email has become the glue that binds together so much of our communications.

For more 10 years ago perspectives, see Vint Cert’s article in IPJ here.

Choosing the right email listserv

I am doing a seminar tonight here in St. Louis that talks about how to use blogs and other Internet tools for self-published authors. And one of the first things that I wanted to talk about has to do with email lists. Ironic, but the underpinning of Web 2.0 is something so old that we take it for granted.

Email is at the core of just about anything else that you do on the Web: it is the primary notification mechanism for Facebook et al. when you make changes to your site. It is the way these social sites find your network of contacts, and the way that you keep your audience informed of what you are doing, too. You can have the best Web site going, but you need to remind people about what you have on it. Ironically, that was the original reason that I started Web Informant lo’ those many years ago.

Why bother with an email list when you can just send out a bunch of emails from your desktop? Several reasons: First, you get a more professional means of communication that can manage all the bounces and mistaken reply-to-everyone situations. Your desktop program isn’t designed to send out a message to hundreds or thousands of recipients either, while the list servers are. You also don’t have to reveal all your subscribers in the “To:” field, which I still see from certain PR people. (Hey, thanks for sending me your contact list! I will be sure to take note of whom you think are my colleagues.) Finally, a list server or list provider can manage unsubscribes automatically, as well as post your messages in an archive that is available online for anyone to review.

Over the years I have used many different technologies to maintain this humble email list, so I have had some experience with the technology. If you are starting a new list, you have three basic choices: the free, the cheap, and the pricey. While price alone is a good way to decide, there are some other reasons that are less obvious. Let’s talk about a few typical providers for each category: Google and Yahoo Groups (free), Mailman hosted by EMWD.com for $4 a month and iContact. If you don’t want to read how to do this and want to watch one of my screencast videos that actually shows you the process, go on over to http://yourpersonalgeek.tv now.

No matter what method you choose, you will need to assemble all your email addresses that you want to start your list with. You can export these from your email program into a text file, and then bring up the file in a word processor program. The first time that you do this is painful, no doubt. You have to cull through all your correspondence, and I guarantee you that many of your addresses will be outdated, given how quickly people change jobs these days.

For free list servers, I like Yahoo Groups. It offers a lot of control, easy list management, and the Web-based control screens are easy to understand and figure out where things are located. There is one big downside, though — the ability to set up large lists quickly. Yahoo only lets you add 10 people a day to your list without asking them to opt-in. To get around this, you can use Google Groups, which supports lists up to 500 names. Google Groups has fewer features though. I use Yahoo Groups for supporting many community lists that I maintain.

To get started, go to groups.google.com or groups.yahoo.com and click on the create a new group button at the top of the page and fill out the form. You can cut and paste the email addresses from your master list right in the Web form and you are ready to go. With both Google and Yahoo, you have a few parameters that you want to make sure you set correctly in terms of who can join your list and how they see messages from you. I suggest you experiment with just a few names as a test before you add the entire list so you can get the hang of things.

Mailman is a more professional program and gives you all sorts of control over the message and recipients, and it is what I currently use for this list. I recommend the provider EMWD.com – there are others but they are more expensive. You need to obtain an account for $10, and this will give you access via the Web to a series of control screens, fill-in forms, and zillions of parameters. This is more complex than Google, but you have more control.  As I said, each list only costs $4 a month to operate. You need to set up a subdomain that points to their list server, and you can usually do that with your registrar’s control panels.

But this may not be fancy enough for your purposes. If you want to add Web links in your emails and track who clicks on which link, such as for promotional purposes, then you want iContact. I personally don’t like rich HTML emails but I know many of you want this, so I mention it here. The cheapest plan is $10 a month for up to 500 names. If you have 2500 names, the fee increases to $30 a month.  The more names, the more you pay a month. The advantage of iContact is that you can send out very snazzy emails, with pictures, color, and links to Web sites, and maintaining lists is all they do. You don’t have to mess with setting up domains or servers, either. And like the others, everything is set up with a series of Web forms that are fairly easy, with lots of control over how the newsletter will look like.

So there you have it. Good luck with your list.