Rethinking EMail. Security and Communications

Correspondent Evan Schuman on rethinking EMail.   It needs it, even when inside the enterprise I dealt with many outside people, and that led to lots of problems managing threads among people I corresponded with.   Most of the solves I have seen so far are only patches at best.   He makes the broad case with an example I know well, from using early systems on the Arpanet. :

" ... Email as we know it has considerable security holes. And of course we’re all sick of the straight-from-Satan’s-lair spam. But let’s not overlook how inherently inefficient it is. Once a boon to businesses, email has developed the annoying habit of burying information. It does this by piling up messages in threads; what you need to find is somewhere among the 30, 40 or 50 threads in a single email file, but who has the time to comb through them all to find that one essential nugget of data? We all know how this happens. Let’s say eight people need to agree on a meeting time. The emails come into the thread one after another as the time is negotiated. In the end, perhaps 97% of the messages are irrelevant, but there they all are.  .. " 

He outlines how a solution called Criptext  is addressing the solution to the security aspects of this, Similar to a solution I have seen for sharing business intelligence data on multiple mobile devices. The text is not sent and stored, only a linked encrypted image.      As he suggests, other fundamental project and communications management issues remain.   Worth a read.