why business email is doomed

malware, ransomware, phishing and other hacker tools will make email obsolete.

by frank stitely
the relentless cpa

last year, the ceo of slack predicted the demise of business email in five years. i think he’s wrong. i think business email maybe has another two years. there are two obvious reasons why email has a foot in the technological grave.

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first, spam killed the efficiency of email. how much time do you spend each day deleting spam? you can train your spam blocker, but professional spammers get through using variable email addresses and agreements with internet routing companies.

you know who these professional spammers are. you probably use one to send e-blasts or client surveys. if i mention them by name, you’ll soon hear about my mysterious suicide. my name’s not epstein.

if you used your company exchange server to send the volume of emails that these companies do, servers around the world would begin blocking your messages in a day. in fact, your email volume doesn’t get very high before this blocking happens. soon very few of your messages, marketing or otherwise, reach their destinations.

ask me how i know. i learned about pay-to-play in the spam world.

during our first foray into sending e-blasts to clients, we sent them directly from our server. a german routing company began blocking our messages almost right away. we weren’t sending millions of messages. we were sending a couple hundred to existing clients. soon they were blocking all our messages, even the routine ones. to get unblocked, we could apply to the german company and wait two to four weeks for processing or send them $600 for expedited service. you thought the nazis were gone? now they run internet routing services.

professional spammers pay routing companies not to block their messages.

as a result, you still get hundreds of junk messages each day despite your spam blocker. deleting these messages robs you of productive time. thus, email has lost its efficiency as a mode of communication.

second, email is dangerous. last tax season, we got at least a dozen infected messages every day. the criminals are getting good. sometimes they pose as prospective clients. sometimes they spoof existing clients.

ransomware is the scariest of the dangers. ask the city of baltimore. how long did it take the city to recover from its may 2019 attack? they were reduced to carrying out most government functions on paper. they refused to pay the cybercriminals. do you think they should have? well – if you can’t trust cybercriminals, who can you trust?

if you accept enough email attachments in your firm, you will eventually succumb to malware of some sort. some late night in march, a tax preparer will click on that attachment she didn’t know was coming from a client to see what it is. then you are done.

what’s the electronic alternative to email?

first, you must be able to communicate with clients behind a firewall with no outside intruders. the danger with email is that anyone can enter your inbox. you need a system where you know the identities of the participants.

finally, you need alerts when clients are trying to reach you. i wrote about prioritizing electronic communications. a communications system is worthless if you can’t quickly respond to clients. i like alerts in a dashboard where i can prioritize responding to the $10,000 client over the $500 client. the key is that you can choose to be responsive and to whom you will respond. you are in control.

posted on september 21, 2023