Should email be considered a reliable system?

This article at the Washington Post is about AOL blocking emails sent out warning of hurricanes and other dangerous weather patterns. There should be an easy way around this and that is to whitelist the group sending the emails (and it looks like that is what AOL is saying they should do - add that address to your address book and it will get through).

But a larger question is whether or not email should be treated as a guaranteed delivery system? If you send something, should you assume that the intended recipient received it and read it? I would submit that even without the issues of spam filters, this is still a dangerous and perhaps even silly way of viewing the email delivery system. But there are many who do feel this way about email - even though even with regular (non-registered) snail mail, you can't assume that it will reach its end destination.

There are companies who are trying to cash-in on this concept with software that is running on your machine and will receive updated content deliveries - ensuring that the end user gets the data sent to them and can reliably note if it has been read or not. This would be perfect for this sort of scenario. There are still many problems with that though - the largest being that it opens up an avenue for spyware and more ads. Either through unscrupulous companies who want to make (more) money off of it, or through users who mistakenly install the wrong thing (this is actually a very common thing with weather programs).

In the end, as long as email isn't viewed as a perfect system, then you can avoid issues like this. It is when it is assumed to be a reliable delivery method that you run into issues like this.

Posted by Eric at May 2, 2005 10:23 AM | TrackBack