Thomas Cameron wrote:
<Insert obligatory "old man shouting at cloud" meme here>
Well said. I'm in full agreement.
I see a possibly related condition that also irritates me. The Balkanization of "email" (quotes deliberate). You want to send an email message to some company but you don't know their address. You check their web site and find a page, "send us email". But it doesn't give you an address, just a web form. You have no easy way to keep a copy of your message. If they reply, you have to go back to their web site to read it. In many cases, that means you have to log in before you can read a reply, or even to send the message initially. This is NOT email, folks.
To me the analogy is, in the olden days, a company sending you postal mail in care of the local post office, the PO sending you a post card that something has arrived, and you having to go to the PO and show your identification to retrieve the item. No one would have tolerated that situation; why do we tolerate it on the Internet?
I get that the design of Internet email was not well done initially. Designers had no thought of future integrity or security problems. Solutions to those problems have been developed but require users to be at least semi-intelligent. Since people read email using a web interface that hides much of the information useful for identifying spam, it seems to me that those web systems should make the use of proper encryption techniques to identify senders and recipients easy when that is appropriate.