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It is time for email communication as a concept to take serious bashing from me. Because of SPAM (and not only because of that) it is quickly becoming unusable to the point that we will be soon required to pay in order to get clean service and by clean I mean "clean" like in cable TV.

Once you start paying for email service you will get the content you paid for (of course, occasionaly you won't get everything shown in TV guide), and you will still get your daily dose of ads but in a somewhat controlled manner.

That probably means that instead of Viagra, Cialis and other Penis Enlargement offers you will probably be reminded to chew the gum because 3 out of 4 dentists (out of 4 they asked for an opinion) say it is good for your teeth.

Moreover, you will be shown the beauty of new and improved (and at the same time extra cancerogene) Ultra Thins with flex-wings because female audience is largely unexploited as an advertising target in the IT industry at the moment. I will let you be the judge whether that would be worth paying for.

But my rant focuses more on a technical implementation of an email concept. Now that practically all servers on the internet are 8-bit capable why email still has to use MIME encoding resulting in 30% larger messages thus wasting valuable bandwidth?

For me it is understandable why ISPs are not keen to change this aged crap and implement something new which would actually conserve bandwidth – after all bandwidth is what they sell so it suits them if you waste more.

But it beats me why all those universities and other science institutions where email (and the whole Internet) as a concept has been conceived do not try to improve the protocols?!? Why we still don't have integrated encryption, binary transfer of the attachments and compression? Seems that I won't get my answers any time soon.