Is Email Over Yet? Get Your RSS Mail Ready

Many of us web feed evangelists, including myself, have stated that email isn't going away anytime soon, and that email has its uses. Well, Steve Rubel has a short post (link below - thanks to Brian Clark for the tipoff) about a New York Times article detailing announcements from both AOL and Yahoo! that they plan to charge coin to companies that want preferential treatment for their outgoing email. Otherwse, unpaid emails will be treated as potential spam, and it'll be up to recipients to check the "spam" folder to verify this.

As a person who uses 5 email addresses regularly, and who forwards "webmaster" email for 10 domains to my Yahoo address, I have to say I'm disappointed. Sure, I have to wade through some junk - more so for some of my accounts than others. But Yahoo's spam filters are actually very good, in my experience.

On the other hand, Steve points out a great opportunity for RSS to fill the void. I've only come across a few projects attempting to manage email via web feeds, but no doubt there'll be more projects on the heels of these announcements from Yahoo and AOL.

This negative development made me wonder about how RSS could be harnessed as possible replacement to email. I've got a domain registered (webfeedmail.com) and a project, currently being sketched out, with which I hope to offer a free beta trial of a "virtual" email system using RSS.

Here's what I've sketched out so far. Registered members would be able to both receive and send email via this future browser-based system, and subscribe to RSS and Atom web feeds. What's more, these member email addresses wouldn't actually exist. They'd be virtual.

All mail from outside of the webfeedmail.com domain would go to a single real catch-all address. The way it works is that all emails captured by the catchall account will then be parsed and partitioned so that they end up in Personal Incoming (RSS) Feeds (PIFs) - one per member. Emails sent between two members would be passed directly to the recipient's PIF.

Members would have the choice of using their virtual email address in only one of two ways: publicly or anonymously. Public virtual email addresses (PVEA) could be used like any regular email address, and be published wherever the member wanted.

The anonymous virtual email addresses (AVEAs) would be anonymous in the sense that spammers could not randomly send loads of junk mail to members. Senders would need to be validated somehow.

I haven't quite yet figured out how to configure the AVEAs. One possibility is that the member provide a public key - similar to public key encryption - to those people they are willing to accept email from.

Once the sender has been validated and accepted to the recipient's in-list, the sender's communications will henceforth automatically be added to the personal "incoming" web feed owned by the recipient. (Unless the recipient removes the sender from their in-list.)

Alternately, a first time communication between a private member (recipient) and anyone else (private, public, outside) could be preceded by an system alert message: Hello member so-and-so. You have received a message from the following email address: sender@whatever.com. Would you like to preview the message first, or directly add the sender to your "accept" list? Members could also block emails from all addresses coming from an entire domain.

There are a number of technical issues that need to be worked out. However, with Yahoo and AOL about to charge for safe delivery of email, smaller businesses may want to consider alternatives. RSS virtual email may just be the right alternative.

By the way, if you need a quick refresher on what RSS is, or need to publish one, see Brian's great summary of some of the salient features of RSS., which he allows to be republished.

Links/ Sources: Steve Rubel - Bye Bye Email Marketing, Hello RSS; NYT - Saul Hansell - Postage Is Due for Companies Sending E-Mail; Brian Clark - CopyBlogger - What The Heck Is RSS?

Technorati Tags: rsscases, rss cases, web feeds, virtual mail, feedmail