We use email for a tremendous number of different purposes. Interestingly, we often use email for purposes for which other applications have been explicitly designed - email, even though not purpose- built, often "just works better". Why is this? We have identified 6 key features of sharing that are needed to support secure cooperation, features that enable the users themselves to build networks of access rights that implement the Principle of Least Authority(POLA), thereby maximizing the opportunities for cooperation among participants with limited mutual trust. Systems that do not implement these 6 features will feel rigid and inadequately functional once enough users are involved, forcing the users to seek alternate means to "work around" the limitations in those applications. Email is almost the only application on the Web that implements all six features, making it the natural fall-back application. We use email for everything because email is the only thing that works for everything. Here we describe the six features, highlight some of the consequences when the six features are not integrated, and look at the results when an application is built specifically to support the whole set in a "rich sharing" system.
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