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University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Paul Jones is Strategic Consultant in Informatics at Intrahealth International as well as the director of ibiblio.org (the site formerly known as MetaLab and SunSITE UNC). In addition to speaking and writing engagements all over the world and the internet, Paul teaches at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the School of Information and Library Science and the School of Media and Journalism.
Authored Comments
Of course, no one has ever done "Reply All" to an email list and embarrassed themselves.
"Worked for ages" is properly presented in the past tense when referring to email. email is bloated, creaky and misused.
I expect that a variety of components that can form a reasonable and manageable activity stream of communications is close and will ideally and in the near future be as open and as customizable as email once was.
Gary,
email is only one option and the only option that I am foreswearing. I'm open to any other means of communications.
Addressing only your security concerns as I've written about your other concerns above.
The kind of email that you suggest, encrypted, is rarely done. I haven't received encrypted email but perhaps once in the past decade despite having my public key available for much of that decade.
Skype and some IM services do and increasingly will encrypt the connections. In the case of Skype and a few others, these services do point to point connections.
email is inherently insecure. There is no way around that. To the extent that email feigns security at all, it's been shoehorned into the protocol and services in a clumsy way at best.