Blogs and email

[wabson]

It's been a few weeks since I last blogged. Since then, we've launched Alfresco Blogs and it's podcast-touting sibling Open Source Talk.

Meanwhile over in California, Esther Dyson has some dangerous ideas about the future of email. Trying to be pragmatic about the whole pay-to-send email debate and not subscribing to the idealist kind of beliefs that Esther claims everyone against the idea holds, I still find it difficult to believe how such a scheme could actually work.

Email systems are already complex enough, without adding another layer of complexity into the mix. We now have server blacklists, spam filters and sender authentication schemes bolted on top of the original SMTP standards but the only technology that's made a difference to me lately has been Google's Gmail service.

Just like they did in the search field, Google have done some really innovative stuff with email and the results are amazing. Now I rarely ever see a spam message in my inbox even though around half of the messages coming into the account are junk.

So perhaps if AOL and their like put some effort into making progress like this, rather than demanding money off people who mostly have no interest in paying for something they've had for free for years then we might make some progress here :-)