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Because Stan Veit is a well known name in personal computing and I have been around a long time, I get hundreds of e-mail messages each day. Whereas my e-mail addresses used to be the channel where I maintained communication with friends and family, they are now a vast catch basin for spam. Some of the messages are even interesting including notices from my Elks lodge or my church, but 98% are either trying to sell me something, commercial or political. Then there are my “forwarding friends” who believe that forwarding everything they come across on the Internet is essential to my well being. I have sent them all messages saying that, while I am interested in personal information about them, I will block any forwarded messages. This has made several people angry and they deleted me from their lists. This accomplished what I set out to do.

Since I am not alone in this problem, it is obvious that the social networks have now become the major channels for personal communication, I find news of my friends and family on Facebook and Twitter and their messages are concise and informative. It is

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The Death of Personal E-Mail by Stan Veit

also possible to only communicate with those whom I want to exchange messages.

While I still use e-mail for the transmission of lengthy files and documents, I routinely delete the spam without opening it. A practice I learned after being hit with malware on several occasions this may take time, but much less than trying to fix the problems caused by virus. My messages and contacts on the social networks have so far been virus free and only suffered from often being pointless. I can put up with that.

Advertisers have also moved their copy to the social networks, but before they can feed me their messages I have to be persuaded to click on them and read them. This is a far cry from the shotgun approach on e-mail. The companies that own the social network fully realize that they have to protect their networks from spam and viruses therefore they are on guard to protect the viewer.

Just as snail mail has become a channel for bills and advertising, so has e-mail, more and more of our bill issuing vendors are trying to persuade us to let them bill us on the Internet. While the postman delivers my bills right to my home, I can never see the sense of spending my time downloading and printing my own bills. In addition they never pass along any of the money they save by avoiding postage.

Meanwhile I and countless others will enjoy contacting new and old friends and my family on Facebook, Twitter and other social networks. I dread the day when I see “Yourinsurance company” wants to be your friend on Facebook.