Bracing Against the Email Demons

I am a pretty careful guy when it comes to email. I try and follow all the rules that I wrote about last month. I also worry a lot about whether my email is secure. I have gone to extraordinary ends to make sure that my computer system is safe from the Hackers and Crackers that roam the Internet. I was smug and cocky and as I built my high speed Internet Workstation over the last few years I knew I had created a truly magnificent machine. My email and my various applications like calendars, to do lists, accounting programs and word-processing files are all seamlessly connected and interactive with each other and with the Internet. Much of my information was stored on my Palm Pilot and I have a small email machine from Motorola that keeps me in the loop everywhere. But I just got my comeuppance and the villain was the most reliable part of the whole virtual space I have just described. It was my email server, or to put precisely, four of my email servers.

First, a quick review of the way Internet email works. Your message goes out from your computer to a server that puts a label (called a “header”) on it that states who it is from and where it is going. The server sends that message out over the Internet as a series of tiny electronic packets of information instead of a single message. Those packets get to the destination server by a variety of routes. One may go through Hong Kong and another through Paris but because of the header they all miraculously arrive at the destination server where they are reassembled into the message you sent. In a sense, the process is lot like the old movie trick where a glass is smashed and then returned to its original form by running the film backwards. When your correspondent goes to her server the glass has been reassembled and she is able to download the message you sent. The matter is obviously a whole lot more complex than that but you get the drift.

Now I know that email is risky business. I also know that email is at the core of my business. Without email I am dead in the water, a relic of a long ago past where people wrote with quill pens and ink on hand made parchment. Email is the way I trade information and execute plans. Email is large part of the research I do and the discussions I have with my colleagues. So, when it comes to email, I wear a belt and suspenders. That is how I came to have four email servers. I am, and always have been, a great believer in the value of redundancy. I make copies of things I do not need to copy and store them in a separate place. At Costco I usually buy two each of everything because I know I may need the second at anytime. I have several sets of my email store, now numbering 25,000 messages or more, on different media and different computers just to be safe.

Most folks I know have only one email server and on occasion they cannot send their email. A few of the more careful lawyers I know have two servers just in case. I have four just to be very safe. If one or two of them are down I can still get my mail and send my mail. I count on it. About a month ago one my servers suffered an attack by a Cracker who was able to get onto the server from whence he sent millions of spam messages. There is a group of anti-spammers who shut down spam servers and my server was promptly disabled. I responded by shifting all of messaging over to another server far away from the first. A week later it went down and stayed down for another week. I then shifted my messaging over to my bulletproof DSL server which, lo and behold, crashed about a week later. For almost a month my magnificent virtual office was in shambles. I couldn’t get email, I couldn’t reply to email, I couldn’t forward email and because I was now operating on a laptop computer with a modem I couldn’t send or receive file attachments of any substantial size. My Starnet DSL didn’t work at all and there was nothing that good people at Qwest could do though they tried mightily to get me back in the fast lane. They sent me a new DSL router and talked me through its install but since Starnet wouldn’t even answer the phone there was little they could do. I finally decided to switch everything over to Qwest and I am now backing in the world of the digital living. The folks at Qwest MegaBit Services were just outstanding. They have my eternal gratitude and I feel safe once again. I even canceled two of my servers and my Starnet DSL. I am running a trim and clean program now! But there is a very dark side to this whole experience and it stands as warning to lawyers everywhere.

What I have realized is that during the last month there were many messages, perhaps hundreds, that I never got. There were many messages, perhaps even important ones, that never got to their destination. I always used to get a little miffed when people didn’t acknowledge email, but I now wonder how often that is the result of the failure of the Internet delivery mechanism. I am starting to rethink the entire process of using email as a critical component of my business. If I cannot assume that messages I send will ever get to my clients and associates, I don’t think I can rely on it as a primary mode of communication without taking some protective steps. From the number of bounced messages I get from other servers, I think that I am not alone. Indeed, over the last month I have started to make inquiry among my friends and associates and everybody senses that something is very, very wrong. I am now convinced that we have a huge problem and it is largely going unnoticed because it is hidden away in the black hole of cyberspace. When the email is working well it is wonderful but when it fails we often do not know.

For the moment, my response to the above problem is to use the Options tab in Outlook 2000 to send a return receipt requested message with my email with any significant item.

Many people take offense at the return receipt message so I am careful to use it only when it is critical that I know that recipient has actually seen the message. There are other more bulletproof ways of insuring receipt of electronic mail and if the message was truly important I can pursue options like UPS Document Exchange. What I do know is that we cannot assume that email gets through the way we do with postal mail and that makes an important difference in the way we use electronic mail.

I think that the Internet Email system may be on the verge of collapse. I suspect the problem is overload with spam and unsolicited advertising. Much of the world economy now depends upon email and if that is so then the current decline in reliability is a serious crisis. Indeed, it may be so important that it reaches the level of compelling justification that justifies compromising the protections of the first amendment claimed by the spammers. Surely, the claim of commercial speech protection must fall before the critical prospect of the collapse of the international email system.