Back to the Future Email

It's an interesting concept, to be able to send yourself an email that wont be delivered for another 30 years. As history has shown the world of technology is very adept and making itself obsolete every few decades. Who the heck has a turntable any more, let alone a tape deck other than in their car? VCRs are just about becoming obsolete, and its a miracle that CDs still work. In many countries regular TVs are being phased out for glorified digital receivers, and regular radios are being out marketed by satellite and fancy digital broadcast systems.

At the Internet level the core protocols and some of the higher ones like FTP and Telnet have stood the test of time, but I can remember how Internet email addressing was decidedly different less than twenty years ago. Pesonally I give the old http:// thang only ten more years before it becomes obsolete, and email addresses probably about the same longevity. I suspect there is a good chance that large corporations like Google and Microsoft will start to define their own naming schemes and addressing protocols. Instead of john.doe@gmail.com or jane.doe@msn.com it will be goggle:john.doe and microsoft:jane.doe or even walmart:john.doe.

I mean if you shop at Walmart, work at Walmart why not get your email there, see all your web pages filtered by WalMart, get all your mail and messages from WalMart? Anything outside, well, its just not worth seeing. And because all these big corporations really deep down just can't agree on technological standards you wont be able to receive email from anyone else anyway. Why should Google support Microsoft web standards, or Microsoft support Adobe's standards? Why should a Google person be able to email a Microsoft person? You're either with the Googleplex or against us... And so it may become - that at least is one way all these standards could go to hell in a handbasket and break email thirty years from now.

Actually when I originally started writing this email I was actually thinking what a fun prank it would be to create a web site that would allow someone else to fake an email from the future. I mean get all the headers and everything right. I get spam from 1969 all the time when people set date headers incorrectly, so why not get some from 2050 or beyond? You could provide tools to take a photo and age it, to suggest crazy tales of the person's future life with kids names, adventures and such. It would be fun and given the gulibility of people (yes, some people actually respond to spam, Nigerian emails and forward urban legends) quite likely to succeed.