Nigel Pepper // his place on our web

Why do we send emails? A simple means of passing information between one another; a proven, simple, understood means of information transfer. I guess email is so good at doing what to does, we begin to extend and use it in ways it wasn't intended. File storage, file transfer, lightweight identity handle, the list is near endless. It would be nice to extend this a step further, and be able to refer to an email by way of a URI.

"Hey Joe, you remember that email i sent you?..." "...er no" "...this one http://mycorp.com/mail/2008/02/joe_at_hisdomain.com/122". That would be handy. Sure you need security wrap around that but thats not a killer.

But then, not all people think this way.

Some would have you believe, that email should never occupy more than half of your mailbox. Some would like you to take extraordinary measures to prevent losing attachments or old mails. Some would have you believe they're "helping" you by moving your mail to an archive such that you're only able to retrieve the first 256 characters of the mail, and completely losing attachments.

Some people, friends, are idiots.

I would add, a caveat to this could be a poor implementation of this product.

A free, simple solution to personal email is offered by google. As many of you will know, their Gmail service, offers 6+GB of mail storage, all indexed, optional mail tagging available, which mean you practically never have to lose your email.

So why is this such a difficult problem for the enterprise? Sure, it can be expensive to offer each employee this volume of storage, esp. if you have to host the email data on your own servers. Even still, this is a solved problem, and for the majority of businesses, utility computing makes disk almost free. Services like Amazon's awesome S3 service for example.

Lets see the enterprise take a new stance on this and figure it out.

Email and the enterprise (vault)

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