Is the "email discussion" over?

[lgnki]

I have been frequenting this forum and site for many years now, and the juxtaposition from when there was tons of daily activity and frequent updates to the current status of the site is pretty striking.

Is it possible that with the advent of Gmail, the email discussion is simply over, that the email problem has been "solved"? What are your thoughts.

[popowich]

What topics are you interested in discussing?

[jarland]

Gmail solves most problems when you and your recipients are on Gmail. For the rest, which still accounts for quite a number of people, Gmail creates a whole new list of discussions. Gmail has dominated e-mail to the point where everyone else follows their standards to ensure successful delivery to their service.

There is still a lot to talk about

[William9]

A good share of the activity here seems to be on the Fastmail forums. There were torrents of activity many years ago when Fastmail's servers were not redundant and long outages occurred. Another example of increased activity was when Fastmail introduced its "new" web interface a few years ago. It became clear that the old, beloved interface was doomed. That really spiked the activity here. I guess things are pretty stable now. I would like to know FM's customer base over time to see if that correlates with activity on these forums. I would also assume that offerings from Google and Microsoft (and others) for your own domain are absorbing some of the banter from these forums.

[Eireannach]

I am relatively new here so I can't speak for how it might have been a couple of years ago.

From my perspective as a newbie most of the discussion here does seem to be dominated by:

• Fastmail - perhaps because they do not have a forum of their own ? I originally arrived here due to issues I had relating to Fastmail and EU data protection regulations.
• Gmail - much of it anti-Google in the way that one comes across a certain anti-Microsoft sentiment elsewhere
• Sundry other threads - Runbox etc

I have wondered though, since email as a technology is relatively stable, how a forum such as this can sustain itself into the future.

[kijinbear]

For me, Gmail created more problems than it solved. FastMail, on the other hand, solved more problems than it created. So I'm happy with FastMail, and won't go back to Gmail even if they paid me.

Email is a stable technology, and the spam problem seems to have been safely contained for the most part. Every now and then, a Silicon Valley startup bravely proclaims that they'll solve some problem they claim email has; but most of the time the problem is an illusion, and their proprietary solution gets no traction. The majority of users don't need their email to double as an instant messenger, social network, to-do list, or anything else. Email is just email. It's a well-established, open protocol. Like good old snail mail, it delivers information from one person to another without either of them having to be a member of any walled garden.

And when it comes to stable technologies, no news is good news. This site gets a lot of activity when a major email service goes down or when people find out that some government agency invaded people's privacy. Neither is good news. When all is well, this site ought to be relatively quiet.

[Gankaku]

I've been around the forum for awhile as well, and I also have thought about the OP's post topic. I also think Gmail put to rest a lot of folk's search for a good, free email solution. Fastmail is an excellent solution (and I'm still a paying user) but Gmail certainly fills the gap with its integrated solutions with its large (and somewhat respectable) company. Even though we all know Google looks at our emails for "marketing purposes" to send us targeted ads, I think a lot of us agree that gmail is a pretty great email solution.

I, for one, kind of stopped looking when I had both Gmail's threaded email, and Fastmail's privacy. Done. My interest in looking at and trying different email solutions died, as did a lot of my free accounts that I was playing with, in the hopes that they might be one of my solutions. None of them were ever up to par as Gmail and Fastmail are for me.

[just1acc]

Originally Posted by Gankaku

I, for one, kind of stopped looking when I had both Gmail's threaded email, and Fastmail's privacy. Done. My interest in looking at and trying different email solutions died, as did a lot of my free accounts that I was playing with, in the hopes that they might be one of my solutions. None of them were ever up to par as Gmail and Fastmail are for me.

Pretty much same. Gmail & Zoho here.

[Chipper]

I used to frequent the Forums and hardly come by. I joined in 2003 and during 2003 through 2006-ish there was a lot of activity. Lots of chatter and interesting threads in the Off Topic Lounge. In addition, people would often include lots of banter/jocularity in the regular email forums and sometimes the threads would veer off topic. In those days it was very social in here.

I have a hunch that Social media such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. have supplanted what used to occur in the forums.

So... it's good news/bad news.
The good news is the forums are primarily being used for their intended purpose. (Email)
The bad news is the forums are primarily being used for their intended purpose. (The camaraderie we used to have is gone)

Added note: The only reason I came across this thread was because I posted a question in the Fastmail forum. Since I was on EMD, I decided to do a quick check on the OTL and this forum. But... while I'm here let me give a shoutout to Gankaku -- GOOD TO SEE YOU LISA!!

[FredOnline]

I guess a lot of people have gotten bored and moved on - at least the site owner and the majority of the nominated moderators appear to have.

For myself, I've been a member here for just over 4 years now, and think that practically everything I've learned about e-mails has come from this site.

But I'm not bored enough to move on yet.

[popowich]

I'm very active on Email Questions. Would you be interested in participating there too?

We're different kinds of sites with different member bases, but it's all email and any discussion related to email is welcome.

By that I mean there isn't an off topic forum on EQ

[gorka]

I've just found out about this forum while searching for a privacy-friendly provider. Maybe that's an interesting topic for a new discussion we can start?

[communicant]

Originally Posted by gorka

I've just found out about this forum while searching for a privacy-friendly provider. Maybe that's an interesting topic for a new discussion we can start?

Welcome to the forum! There are many, many threads in this forum in which this topic has been discussed and continues to be discussed. It might be a bit difficult to search for it in pure form, since the topic often arises as part of another discussion of this or that provider, but a search might nevertheless turn up some interesting past posts for you to read.

[north]

i guess and truly hope that emaildiscussion is not over. in times of massmonitoring(*) of communication in general and email in particular it is important to have a base to discuss email-realted stuff. for me the most important thing here is to get information about save and (maybe?) bulletproof mailproviders.

(*): this is a political topic that sometimes leades to necessary political statements.

[Just Bill]

I still find interesting threads here, just less of them than I used to.