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Three issues...

Well, nifty idea, but I'm concerned about three matters associated with this scheme:

1) Reliability. What if the sender's system goes down? Right now, once an email is sent, it works pretty hard to "get" there, even if it has to bounce around a few hours until it is actually delivered. If a sending system has a failure, all the mail up to the point of the failure has been sent and will ultimately arrive. On the other hand, with the files being saved on the Sender's system, if it goes down then suddently days/weeks/months/years of email might suddenly become unavailable for retreival by intended recipients. I can't read the mail that Dan "sent" this morning because his mail system went down this afternoon.

2) Orwellian crap. Mentioned as a "benefit" in the article (ability to unsend), a sender could re-write his sent mail as easily as he might update a web page. If I had retreived a prior copy of the mail, I may or may not have been able to save a copy to my hard drive (ever notice that some web pages can't easily be "Saved" or are saved incompletely?). My mail client may or may not keep both revisions around, or the new version could overwrite the old one. People could cover their butts, sure, if they sent out a poorly considered note, but what about the many times email is used as evidence in investigations? Then there is the problem of multiple people reading what is ostensibly the same missive but it having different contents. Sure, clients could be written to address these specific scenarios, but as long as the email message is stored "on the sender's server" then the sender has posession and therefore control over the contents of that message. People shouldn't be able to rewrite the history of communications they send out.

3) Privacy. Senders would always know who read their emails and when. This effectively activates an automatic and non-optional "receipt" function for all email. This is not around today for good reason. We want to be able to ignore, or give the perception of ignoring, any email we like. We don't want to be tracked down to which network we are using, what location we are at, what computer we are sitting at when we read our email. This idea effectively makes every email a "web beacon."

- Bill

Posted by: MerryOtter   Posted on: 10/11/04 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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