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Is Your (Cloud) Email Safe?
If the question surprises you, you’re in good company. We moved email (and a lot of other stuff) to the cloud 10+ years ago, assuming — and expecting — to be done worrying. Why does the question continue to pop up? Should we be worried?
I’ve been shrugging off the question for a long time. ‘Safe email’ — what does it even mean? We need to be more specific in order to have a meaningful discussion. Then I ended up in a discussion anyway, and found that I’d been too technical. To most people, ‘safe email’ is very real: ‘Just works, always’. Which means that the honest answer is NO. How can that be? Doesn’t ‘cloud’ imply ‘safe’ in a very general sense?
Most people think so, myself included — for a while — when the cloud was young and driven by Amazon, Google and a few other big ones. With huge datacenters and huge businesses to support, they were the ultimate professionals. At the time, I had been managing email-servers on and off for 30 years and I was fed up. With the users, the software (agents, exchangers, forwarders, proxies, handlers, …), protocols, security mechanisms, backup and ballooning complexity. From being extremely simple and efficient in the 80s, email had turned into a complex monster. And a universal communicator that regular users and businesses alike were taking for granted. Always available, immediate delivery, reliable. Except when it wasn’t.
Long story short — letting the Internet Service Providers or the big guys like Google, Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo, etc. take over was a relief. In addition to being big and professional, they all — the global ones in particular — needed to build an image of responsibility and reliability in the minds of users. Trustbuilding. The free services were bait to get us all into the platforms they were developing, 10 or 15 years ago. Capability, motive, resources.
It worked. While competing messaging platforms kept popping up left and right and email’s demise was predicted again and again, growth continued. To an estimated 350 billion messages per day in 2023, a 5% increase from the previous year (you’ll find a short and very interesting history of email here). That’s 350 billion per day!
The competing channels — mostly associated with social media — grew (and keep growing) faster and alleviated some of the pressure, but didn’t…
