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Only 1% of malicious emails that reach inboxes deliver malware - Help Net Security
(www.helpnetsecurity.com)
I keep wondering lately if email isn't borderline useless for a lot of people anyway when it comes to communication with actual people (specifically outside of a business context).
Aren't many of the legitimate emails we receive today from systems where we already have an account and could be replaced by some sort of system of web hooks with service specific auth tokens? Potentially the messages there could be partially machine readable too (e.g. JSON) since most fall into similar categories (invoices, delivery announcements, password resets, calendar invites and/or reminders, bank account or other payment provider transactions or transaction logs for entire months, notifications about direct messages or other events received on some web application or game,...). This might also make it easier to process these automatically (e.g. let the user tell the system to automatically save all bank statements to a specific hard drive folder instead of manually logging in to download them each month after a reminder mail).