email-risks-5

email fatigue, email bankruptcy, Flaming

Most business workers today spend from one to two hours of their
working day on email: reading, ordering, sorting, ‘re-contextualizing’
fragmented information, and writing e-mail.
The use of e-mail is increasing due to increasing levels of
globalization—labour division and outsourcing amongst other things.
E-mail can lead to some well-known problems:
email worms problem is most common today on the more popular Microsoft Windows operating system

• Loss of Context: Information in context (as in a newspaper)
  is much easier and faster to understand than unedited and sometimes
  unrelated fragments of information. Communicating in context can only
  be achieved when both parties have a full understanding of the context
  and issue in question.
  
• Antisocial Behaviorisms: Email can be a "get out of jail"
  for those who are nervous or poor articulators in face to face
  situations. This can lead to society becoming less personal with a
  greater number of people being unable to hold conversations face to
  face.
  
• Flaming
  Flaming occurs when one person sends an angry and/or antagonistic
  message. Flaming is assumed to be more common today because of the ease
  and impersonality of e-mail communications: confrontations in person or
  via telephone require direct interaction, where social norms encourage
  civility, whereas typing a message to another person is an indirect
  interaction, so civility may be forgotten. Flaming is generally looked
  down upon by internet communities as it is considered rude and
  non-productive.
  
  
• Information overload: E-mail is a push technology—the sender controls who receives the information. Convenient availability of mailing lists and use of "copy all" can lead to people receiving unwanted or irrelevant information of no use to them.
  
  
• E-mail bankruptcy
  Also known as "email fatigue", e-mail bankruptcy is when a user
  ignores a large number of e-mail messages after falling behind in
  reading and answering them. The reason for falling behind is often due
  to information overload and a general sense there is so much
  information that it is not possible to read it all. As a solution,
  people occasionally send a boilerplate message explaining that the
  email inbox is being cleared out. Stanford University law professor Lawrence Lessig is credited with coining this term, but he may only have popularized it.^[22]
  
  
• Inconsistency: E-mails can duplicate information. This can
  be a problem when a large team is working on documents and information
  while not in constant contact with the other members of their team.
• Spamming and computer viruses

he usefulness of e-mail is being threatened by four phenomena: e-mail bombardment, spamming, phishing, and e-mail worms.


E-mail worms use e-mail as a way of replicating themselves into vulnerable computers. Although the first e-mail worm affected UNIX computers,
the problem is most common today on the more popular Microsoft Windows operating system

• Information not secret nor anonymous
  

1. e-mail messages have to go through intermediate computers before
   reaching their destination, meaning it is relatively easy for others to
   intercept and read messages;
2. many Internet Service Providers (ISP) store copies of your e-mail
   messages on their mail servers before they are delivered. The backups
   of these can remain up to several months on their server, even if you
   delete them in your mailbox;
3. the Received: headers and other information in the e-mail can often identify the sender, preventing anonymous communication.

Despite these disadvantages, email has become the most widely used medium of communication within the business world.
Further reading

• E-mail encryption
• HTML e-mail
• Internet fax
• L-mail
• Push e-mail
  

• Anti-spam techniques (e-mail)
• Computer virus
• E-card
• E-mail art
• E-mail spam
• E-mail spoofing
• Email storm
• Information overload
• Internet humor
• Internet slang
• Netiquette
• Reply All
• Usenet quoting

On Fast Track
with
Dr. Ashok Koparday

Read more On "email-risks-5"!

email-not-secret-therefore-4

E-mail privacy, without some security precautions, can be compromised because:

• e-mail messages are generally not encrypted;
• e-mail messages have to go through intermediate computers before
  reaching their destination, meaning it is relatively easy for others to
  intercept and read messages;
• many Internet Service Providers (ISP) store copies of your e-mail
  messages on their mail servers before they are delivered. The backups
  of these can remain up to several months on their server, even if you
  delete them in your mailbox;
• the Received: headers and other information in the e-mail can often identify the sender, preventing anonymous communication.

There are cryptography applications that can serve as a remedy to one or more of the above. For example, Virtual Private Networks or the Tor anonymity network can be used to encrypt traffic from the user machine to a safer network while GPG, PGP, or S/MIME can be used for end-to-end message encryption, and SMTP STARTTLS or SMTP over Transport Layer Security/Secure Sockets Layer can be used to encrypt communications for a single mail hop between the SMTP client and the SMTP server.

Additionally, many mail user agents do not protect logins and passwords, making them easy to intercept by an attacker. Encrypted authentication schemes such as SASL prevent this.

Finally, attached files share many of the same hazards as those found in peer-to-peer filesharing. Attached files may contain trojans or viruses.
On Fast Track
with
Dr. Ashok Koparday

Read more On "email-not-secret-therefore-4"!

email-risks-3

INFORMATION OVERLOAD

Information overload

A December 2007 New York Times blog post described E-mail as "a $650 Billion Drag on the Economy",
and the New York Times reported in April 2008 that "E-MAIL has become
the bane of some people’s professional lives" due to information
overload, yet "none of [the current wave of high-profile Internet
startups focused on email] really eliminates the problem of e-mail
overload because none helps us prepare replies".

Technology investors reflect similar concerns.

Spamming and computer viruses

The usefulness of e-mail is being threatened by four phenomena: e-mail bombardment, spamming, phishing, and e-mail worms.

Spamming is unsolicited commercial e-mail. Because of the very low
cost of sending e-mail, spammers can send hundreds of millions of
e-mail messages each day over an inexpensive Internet connection.
Hundreds of active spammers sending this volume of mail results in information overload for many computer users who receive voluminous unsolicited email each day.^[27][28]

E-mail worms use e-mail as a way of replicating themselves into vulnerable computers. Although the first e-mail worm affected UNIX computers, the problem is most common today on the more popular Microsoft Windows operating system.

The combination of spam and worm programs results in users receiving
a constant drizzle of junk e-mail, which reduces the usefulness of
e-mail as a practical tool.

A number of anti-spam techniques mitigate the impact of spam. In the United States, U.S. Congress has also passed a law, the Can Spam Act of 2003,
attempting to regulate such e-mail. Australia also has very strict spam
laws restricting the sending of spam from an Australian ISP, but its impact has been minimal since most spam comes from regimes that seem reluctant to regulate the sending of spam.
On Fast Track
with
Dr. Ashok Koparday

Read more On "email-risks-3"!

email-how-it-works-2

When Anita composes a message, HAPPY NEW YEAR,

using her mail user agent (MUA), she types in, or selects from an address book, the e-mail address of her correspondent. She hits the "send" button.

1. Her MUA formats the message in Internet e-mail format and uses the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) to send the message to the local mail transfer agent (MTA), in this case smtp.a.org, run by Anita's Internet Service Provider (ISP).
2. The MTA looks at the destination address provided in the SMTP protocol (not from the message header), in this case adheesh@a.org. An Internet e-mail address is a string of the form localpart@exampledomain.com, which is known as a Fully Qualified Domain Address (FQDA). The part before the @ sign is the local part of the address, often the username of the recipient, and the part after the @ sign is a domain name. The MTA looks up this domain name in the Domain Name System to find the mail exchange servers accepting messages for that domain.
3. The DNS server for the b.org domain, ns.b.org, responds with an MX record listing the mail exchange servers for that domain, in this case mx.b.org, a server run by Adheesh's ISP.
4. smtp.a.org sends the message to mx.b.org using SMTP, which delivers it to the mailbox of the user Adheesh.
5. Adheesh presses the "get mail" button in his MUA, which picks up the message using the Post Office Protocol (POP3).

This sequence of events applies to the majority of e-mail users.
However, there are many alternative possibilities and complications to
the e-mail system:

• Anita or Adheesh may use a client connected to a corporate e-mail system, such as IBM Lotus Notes or Microsoft Exchange.
  These systems often have their own internal e-mail format and their
  clients typically communicate with the e-mail server using a
  vendor-specific, proprietary protocol. The server sends or receives
  e-mail via the Internet through the product's Internet mail gateway
  which also does any necessary reformatting. If Anita and Adheesh work for
  the same company, the entire transaction may happen completely within a
  single corporate e-mail system.
• Anita may not have a MUA on her computer but instead may connect to a webmail service.
• Anita's computer may run its own MTA, so avoiding the transfer at step 1.
• Adheesh may pick up his e-mail in many ways, for example using the Internet Message Access Protocol, by logging into mx.b.org and reading it directly, or by using a webmail service.
• Domains usually have several mail exchange servers so that they can
  continue to accept mail when the main mail exchange server is not
  available.
• E-mail messages are not secure if e-mail encryption is not used correctly.

It used to be the case that many MTAs would accept messages for any
recipient on the Internet and do their best to deliver them. Such MTAs
are called open mail relays.
This was important in the early days of the Internet when network
connections were unreliable. If an MTA couldn't reach the destination,
it could at least deliver it to a relay that was closer to the
destination. The relay would have a better chance of delivering the
message at a later time. However, this mechanism proved to be
exploitable by people sending unsolicited bulk e-mail
and as a consequence very few modern MTAs are open mail relays, and
many MTAs will not accept messages from open mail relays because such
messages are very likely to be spam.

Note that the people, e-mail addresses and domain names in this explanation are fictional: see Anita and Adheesh.
On Fast Track
with
Dr. Ashok Koparday

Read more On "email-how-it-works-2"!