A plea for Email 2.0 to hurry up and happen

Email is one of the few parts of my professional life that I cannot control. This situation is made worse by the fact that email is also something on which I depend a great deal.

I’m pretty sure that goes for most, or all, of you as well.

Email is important. Indeed, it was the internet’s first real killer app. So how did it come to this? Brought to it’s knees by spam and rendered unreliable by over zealous but very necessary spam filters.

No matter what I do to make my email more manageable something always seems to rear its ugly head to spoil things. My email routine gets more like a game of Wack-a-Mole every day.

My attempts at email management began when I consolidated all my email into one account so that my address was constant and fixed. It doesn’t matter to me whether I am conversing with an Upstart Blogger reader, a Big Arena Records customer or a personal friend, my email address is still ashley@ashleymorgan.com. It always has been and, with any luck, always will be.

Any public facing email aliases all point to that one single address.

Since I make no secret of my email address I am on what seems like every spammers list in existence.

I tried a number of spam filters but found Gmail’s one to be the most accurate, so routing my email through a Gmail account was the next logical step. Gmail makes it easy to use your own address making your Gmail address virtually invisible. It’s a great system and it works really well.

Or it did until recently.

Foreign language spam, particularly symbol based languages such as Chinese, seems to fly straight through the filter. Likewise image based spam. Straight through without a care in the world, appearing in my inbox in all it’s grubby glory. I click the report spam link but it’s a futile exercise. For every pattern the spam filter learns the spammers come up with new and more cunning and devious techniques.

And then there is IMAP.

Sounds like a great idea. And it is I’m sure. But if it is such a wonderful thing then why is it so difficult to get browser based Gmail, two copies of Apple Mail, one on a Powerbook and one on an iMac, and Thunderbird on an Ubuntu powered laptop all synchronized correctly? Wanting my folders to match on all my email clients isn’t too much to ask is it?

And if that wasn’t enough successive governments from all over the world are making it increasingly easy to intercept and store everything that is sent or received.

It’s time for a change.

All I need is a reliable and secure form of online communication. It can’t be that difficult can it?

One things for sure, whoever develops an email system that is secure, free from spam and a pleasure to use will be laughing all the way to the bank.

Email 2.0. Please, someone make it happen before it’s too late.

Ashley Morgan is a UK jazz trumpet player and owner of independent record label 447 Records. Ashley Morgan is the trumpet player with Enormous.