How Marketers Ruined Email and Are Now Destroying Mobile Communication

Not many people today remember how email services worked just 20–25 years ago. Here’s a simple example to illustrate the general principles of how the internet operated back then. The SMTP protocol, which is used for exchanging messages both between mail servers and between a server and a client sending a message, originally didn’t require any authentication at all. Any node could connect to any mail server and send an email to anyone, no questions asked. Today, this seems so unbelievable that even those who lived through those times might doubt it really happened.

Just imagine: there’s a mail server handling “club” email for the hypothetical domain kernel.org. A host with an IP address from a dial-up provider connects and says, “Hey, please accept this message for [email protected] from [email protected].” And the kernel.org server would accept the message! It would then personally forward it to mx.supermail.net with best regards. And mx.supermail.net, without any fuss, would drop the message into vasya.pupkin’s inbox. That inbox was just a single folder where everything addressed to “To:” would land, no sorting or filtering.

This was a truly 100% decentralized system, ready to serve anyone who knew how to use it. The entire internet was a world of unspoiled altruists, believing that everything done online was for the good of all.

The Typical Inbox Without Filters

We all know where this trust led. Email, once a decentralized service, has become a semi-closed club where newcomers are barely tolerated and, once admitted, are subjected to all sorts of “initiation.” Major email services only trust each other to a limited extent, and despite all the tightening of security, the reliability of email as a communication tool has dropped through the floor. It’s no surprise when a message doesn’t arrive, even through a well-established “channel,” and any important data sent by email is now always followed up with a confirmation or checked through other means. The mere existence of a “resend” button on many address validation forms speaks volumes about the sorry state of affairs. We’re asked to repeat the same action and seriously hope for a different result!

The result has been a rapid decline in email’s popularity. Ten years ago, you couldn’t do anything online without an email address. Registration on almost any public resource required one. Today, a good 75% of users don’t have an email address at all, or only have one as a byproduct of another service and never use it. Now, the email address has been almost entirely replaced by the mobile phone number, and that’s the saddest part, because it brings the same reliability issues into the world of phone communication—but more on that below.

The Door to the Future

Sure, you can set up your own SMTP server using old-school manuals and immediately start receiving tons of spam. But when it comes to outgoing mail, you’ll run into problems: for the “giants” of public email, your server will likely not even exist. Your messages will be quietly ignored, often without any notification of rejection. If you’re lucky, some emails might end up in the spam folder, but that’s only for the fortunate few.

For a service like gmail.com to accept a message from your server for a registered user like [email protected], you now have to meet a long list of requirements that were unheard of in the freewheeling days of the early internet. Worse, not all of these requirements are even under your control.

I won’t go into the technicalities of setting up TLS or DKIM—this isn’t a specialized article. But if, by chance, you get an IP address with a “tainted” reputation when renting internet access for your SMTP server, you can forget about running your own mail server. It’s impossible to fully “clean” a bad address. You can try to improve its reputation by proving to every blacklist service that you’re not a spammer, but mail systems will still treat you with more suspicion than others. Your emails will be more likely to disappear or end up in spam, and you’ll face stricter limits on outgoing messages. For personal mail, this might not matter much, but for a public project, it’s a dealbreaker.

And these are just a few of the many obstacles you’ll face trying to join the email sender “club.” It’s a far cry from the freedom of the early 2000s.

As a result of spam—and, more importantly, the fight against spam—users have been pushed far away from the principles of email. Now, the aforementioned 75% use tightly centralized messaging services, where you often can’t even start a conversation with someone new without their prior approval. It might seem like this solves the spam problem, but it doesn’t. Annoying authorization requests from obvious marketing profiles are well-known from the days of ICQ. The problem is made worse by the fact that the decision to accept a message is usually based solely on the sender’s profile—“Who are you, anyway?”—with an initial trust level of zero. If your profile isn’t appealing enough, even a long-lost relative might just block you without ever realizing who tried to reach out.

Even at the Bottom of the Sea

But let’s leave text messaging aside. The sad part is that the same people who ruined the most convenient online communication tool are now actively destroying mobile voice communication—using the same methods. The low cost of automated robocalls has removed all barriers for marketers. There’s no need to pay call center workers anymore; just set up an automated system and make a million cold calls a day. The “Center for American English” director in the afterlife must be green with envy. Sometimes, it’s easier to throw away a phone number than to deal with endless spam calls and scams.

One “achievement” of marketers in the phone world is the near-death of the culture of returning missed calls from unknown numbers. Five years ago, you could be 90% sure that a stranger would call you back if they missed your call. Today, only those who are required to return all missed calls will do so. The average person is now 90% likely to ignore a missed call from an unknown number.

What’s Worse Than Regular Spam? Only Phone Spam

But it’s not just missed calls that suffer. After all, if someone really needs to reach you, they’ll call back, and phone service isn’t free. The real problem is that spammers are actively destroying the once-unshakable rule of simply answering incoming calls. As someone involved in online retail, I know this issue all too well. It’s not normal when a customer places an order, but you can’t reach them to confirm details because they’re not used to answering calls from unknown numbers. The percentage of such “paranoid” users is growing fast: five years ago, this was unheard of, but now it’s so common that it’s not even worth joking about. People don’t expect an online store to call from “Mom” or “Work,” but it happens several times a day.

To fight unwanted calls, the main method offered is blacklisting numbers—eerily similar to how we fight email spam. On one hand, this works for now, but on the other, what happens if you or your kids get a number that’s been “trashed” by spammers? Deactivated numbers don’t just disappear; they can be reassigned just months after being “retired.” Would you want to get a number that’s on every blacklist when you sign up with your favorite carrier?

Still Going Strong

What happens next? I don’t know. As mentioned above, this article isn’t about solving the problem. Even radical measures like a global, centralized phone book (i.e., forced de-anonymization of all phone numbers) won’t help, because “+1234567890” on your screen is no more familiar than “Peter Ivanovich Catlover.” But one thing is certain: we’re living through the destruction of traditional mobile communication. The days when anyone could just call anyone else may soon be gone, just like the era of free email exchange.