“Email Virus: Why Don't People Switch Clients?”

Jim Roepcke says:

IMHO, any technology-savvy person who has been paying attention to current events for the last few years, but continues to use Outlook Express for their email client, deserves to get hundreds of viruses in their mailbox every day.

Why do you think virus writers target email like this? Because there are so many nincompoops that beg for it by running software that has been known to be a virus sieve for years!

I'd like to agree with him. It would be wonderful to see a balanced market for commercial email clients. A dozen established applications with entirely different codebases (so none of them are vulnerable to the same attacks) that roughly split up the Windows market. They could compete with features, marketing, price, and synergistic deals with hardware vendors. They could even be bundled with Windows, as long as Microsoft had to bundle all of them, or at least more than one. MS could even bundle different groups of email clients with different types of Windows: some for business, some for schools, some for home, etc.

An open, free market sounds like a pretty normal idea for this country, doesn't it? Unfortunately, Outlook is free, and comes with Windows. There are lots of commercial email clients out there, but all of them added together don't have anywhere near the installed base of Outlook (and variants).

That's not the only problem.

When's the last time you heard/saw/read a major news organization do a balanced report on an email virus?

This afternoon I was sitting in a waiting room while the dealer changed my truck's oil. CNN was on the television. They reported on the virus... but they referred to it only as an "email virus."

They didn't mention that this is "email virus" is really an "Outlook virus," because it only affects Outlook users. They didn't mention that it only infects Outlook on Windows.

They didn't mention that there are alternatives to Outlook.

Most people don't read Jim's site. Or mine. Or any other site that talks about technology-related issues. If the major news organizations don't tell them why they should consider alternatives to Outlook, they'll never find out about it.

I know some very smart people who use computers all day, who (until I said something) didn't even know there was an alternative to Outlook. To them, Outlook equals email, and email equals Outlook. The viruses are just a way of life, like viruses in real life.

As I mentioned yesterday, I'm being forced to think about the internet "layman" an awful lot right now as I right some documentation. It's surprising, even shocking, how little they know about something they use every day, but it's not just what they don't know, but what they know 'wrongly'. Just as most think a URL begins with "www" (or even starts after the www, now that nobody says "www dot ..." on tv or the radio any more), most people think email is "what you get in Outlook." Heck, a lot of people think the internet is "inside" their computer somehow.

Unfortunately, I can't even suggest a solution. We're never going to have a balanced market for email clients or web browsers, and the general public is never going to understand the first thing about computers or the internet. The best we can do is help one person at a time.

Note that I think the same is true about most things: the majority is usually wrong, or at least uninformed, about religion, politics, technology, etc., etc., etc. It's nobody's fault, it just seems to be the nature of life.

(Quote from Samuel Clemens about being on the side of the majority and needing to reform... withheld due to overkill. ;-)