The perhaps unsurprising longevity of email

I had reason today to search for some documentation regarding my time living abroad; those reasons being too complicated and silly to describe here. I had a few avenues I could search, but email was the first logical choice to me. Sure enough, buried in archives from 1998, I was able to find a message I’d communicated.

My history with email is unremarkable, but this post gives me an excuse to regail you with it!

My first email account, as I’m sure with many of you who grew up in the 1990s, was from my ISP. Pacific Internet in Singapore had fantastic service, though I missed being able to check email on the computers at school, so got a web-based Hotmail like everyone did. “ruben” was obviously already taken by another clearly smart person who can spell the name correctly, so I concatenated the name Ruben with the word Nerd, and haven’t had the heart to ditch the handle since. I was on Gmail a few years later, then onto self-hosted email which I swore I’d never do again, and since the late 2000s I’ve paid for an email provider and my own domain. I’ve since been convinced by smarter people to take another stab at self-hosting again, though it’s down the life priority queue right now. But I digress.

Each step in that email journey, from Eudora on Windows and classic Mac OS, to the Mozilla Suite, to Thunderbird, has carried forward to the next email client archive. I have every silly email I’ve ever sent and received, which is rarely useful. Though I guess it was useful in this case.

It didn’t strike me until after I forwarded that message from 1998 how stupendous such a feat was. I still have processed photographs in albums from my childhood, and other physical documents from that time that I was able to scan. But the idea of something digital, from that time!? It blew my mind.

We live in an age now where this schmuck’s blog has outlived most digital services; a feat that sounds impressive but really isn’t. Companies, web services, and proprietary applications come and go like clockwork, either when their maintainers pursue other interests, the money runs out, or they’re acquired. My favourite (for want of a better word) was Gowalla, which widely promised in the media a way to export our data, before promptly shutting down and taking everything with it. Thanks, appreciate it.

What makes these shutdowns so catastrophic is the fact they lock our data away in their own formats and protocols. This is why I advocate for not using them, or when you must, making sure you do regular backups of your data. You never know when something can, or should I say will, disappear for good.

When a tool based on an open protocol leaves however, another can take its place. Your data may disappear off a disk or a site, but something with local copies and a distributed protocol can get around this problem, and you can move elsewhere. Hey wait a minute… like email!

Email is fascinating. It pre-dates the World Wide Web, and will likely outlive every attempt to replace it for the foreseeable future. To this day it’s still the method we use for practically all signups, to the point where most websites have eschewed (gesundheit) usernames entirely for email addresses. Like email itself, you could see this as a good or bad thing. It’s either this reassuring presence, or a scourge you can’t stomp out.

But as long as companies try to replace it with their latest proprietary system, email will outlive it. It’s a fact as old as the Internet… and apparently my silly inbox.