Email is dead. Long live email.

It's an annoying and insecure way to communicate. But it's still better than stashing nuclear secrets next to your toilet.

Norwegian blue — lovely plumage. Source: Monty Python wiki.

I have a rather conflicted relationship with email.

Roughly 15 years ago I predicted that email was dying and would soon be kaput. Stone dead. Shuffling off its mortal coil, pushing up daisies, joining the choir invisible.

My reason for thinking this was that spam had become so pernicious that the usefulness of email had peaked and we would all eventually drown in a sea of ads for cheap Viagra, deposed Nigerian state officials looking to offload $35 million, phishing scams, and mail order brides looking for husbands.

(On the other hand, where else would I get messages from the fetching Marinka from Kazakhstan, a "36y.o dentist dreaming about deep relationship with gentle and deep-browed person"? [1])

Meet Dr. Marinka, DDS. Apparently, forests in Kazakhstan prohibit the wearing of stilettos. Probably a good idea.

In this, as in nearly every other prediction I have ever made, I was completely and irrevocably wrong. [2]

Every day, between 300 billion and 400 billion emails are sent, and an estimated 60 to 100 billion of them spam. More than 90 percent of malware is distributed via email, and it's the leading vector (as security geeks like to say, because it sounds cool) of ransomware attacks, which cost each victim more than $9 million on average last year.

In other words, email still sucks. But we've just learned to live with it, just as we've learned to live with those robo-calls, robo-texts, Instagram and Twitter direct messages hawking cryptocurrency, and all the other annoying detritus of modern communications.

In fact, odds are pretty good you're inside your email inbox right now, reading this post. The sudden popularity of digital newsletters, like those published via Substack and other platforms, are giving renewed life to email. For better and for worse.

The wrong arm of the law

The other thing about email, which can be good or bad depending on which side of the docket you're on, is that it has become Exhibit No. 1 in thousands of criminal and civil lawsuits. There are really too many cases to count. E-discovery services generated $11 billion+ in revenue in 2022, and are growing at nearly 10 percent per year.

There is one glaring exception to this rule, and it's something that is probably on a lot of Americans' minds at this moment in history. Among all the talk of highly sensitive classified documents found in bathrooms, ballrooms, basements, and strewn across the carpet like empty beer cans and Doritos after a frat party, the one thing we're not hearing about is email. Because he never used it. He'd tweet whatever random shit passed momentarily through his rapidly shrinking cerebral cortex, but there are no secret digital paper trails for that guy.

You know who else never used email? Tony Soprano. When he needed to have a quiet conversation with one of his capos, he went down to the laundry room in his North Jersey McMansion so the feds couldn't hear them. [3]

Once a mobster, always a mobster.

Butter emails

It's instructive to contrast this with someone who used email — a lot — and caught hell for it. A lot of Republicans are complaining that the Department of Justice is treating the 45th President of the United States far more roughly than it treated the 67th Secretary of State.

Well, yeah, it is. And for good reason. They are two very different sets of circumstances. One person was clueless, the other criminal. One shared information electronically as part of her professional duties, with others who presumably had similar security clearances, that should have been (but wasn't) marked as classified. [4]

The other hoarded highly sensitive documents he had no right to have, after he left his job, lied about it when asked, instructed his lawyers to lie about it, attempted to hide them by stashing them in odd places, and then showed them off to randos who visited his country club.

For $32 you can get one, too. Proceeds benefit HRC's Onward Together pro-democracy organization.

Per then-FBI Director James Comey's scathing summary of the bureau's years-long investigation into Hillary's emails:

In looking back at our investigations into mishandling or removal of classified information, we cannot find a case that would support bringing criminal charges on these facts. All the cases prosecuted involved some combination of: clearly intentional and willful mishandling of classified information; or vast quantities of materials exposed in such a way as to support an inference of intentional misconduct; or indications of disloyalty to the United States; or efforts to obstruct justice. We do not see those things here.

Hillary gets roasted because she maintained a private email server in her home which could, theoretically, have been hacked by a foreign power. Again, per Comey:

None of these e-mails should have been on any kind of unclassified system, but their presence is especially concerning because all of these e-mails were housed on unclassified personal servers not even supported by full-time security staff, like those found at Departments and Agencies of the U.S. Government—or even with a commercial service like Gmail.

You know whose email servers actually did get hacked by a foreign power, a couple of years after Hillary resigned? Her former employer's. Russian agents gained access to State Department email servers in November 2014, an attack that was called "the worst ever" on a US government system by a foreign adversary. [5]

By the way, 45's State Department conducted two additional investigations into 'emailgate'. Though they also faulted Clinton for maintaining private servers, "There was no persuasive evidence of systemic, deliberate mishandling of classified information."

So were Hillary's private email servers really a greater threat to national security than the State Department's? I think we can all agree they were certainly not a greater threat than leaving nuclear secrets in a box next to the crapper and copies of Uncle John's Bathroom Reader.

What kind of highly secret documents do you store in your shower? Show us your (redacted) versions in the comments below. And feel to share this post with any foreign adversaries who might be interested.

[1] The brows I've got covered. Maybe it's time to stop trimming them.

[2] One prediction where I was unfortunately correct: That a certain orange-tinted politician would refuse to leave his temporary live/work space after being summarily fired by the American public.

[3] Someone else who never uses email: Tom, my accountant. It's all voice mail, snail mail, and faxes for that guy, and presumably for the same reasons. I don't know if Tom is laundering money for the mob, but I certainly hope so. I would feel so much cooler that way.

[4] In 2016 Politico's Garrett Graff published an exhaustive account of what really happened, in which HRC comes off as your average techno-phobic grandma looking for the "any" key on her laptop.

[5] At least until the Chinese hacked the US Office of Personnel Management computers a year later, exposing the personal details of more than 20 million current and former government employees. If your long-term goal is to gain access to sensitive information from a geopolitical foe by pretending to be one of its legitimate government employees, that's an excellent way to do that.