My crystal ball on email

Imagine a world where anyone can send you a message about anything at any time for free.

Imagine that you have a gatekeeper who knows exactly what you want to know about and what you don’t and only allows those messages you care about to get to you.

This imaginary world is the future of email.

Frankly, we are almost there.

The first world has been around for a while now and the downside of that world is known as spam.

The second world is emerging. The gatekeeper is known as a spam filter. The spam filtering technology that currently exists is a crude approximation of what we will eventually have.

Technology is an amazing thing. It evolves, gets better, cheaper, more efficient every day. And so it is with spam filters.

Soon they’ll know exactly what you want to get and what you don’t. As your tastes change, they’ll know that too. They’ll tell the emailers what you want, what you don’t, how often is too much, how often is too little. They’ll be your filter to the world.

Get used to the idea. It’s coming fast.