[GTALUG] OT: Shots fired - heads up

[Evan Leibovitch]

On Tue, Sep 10, 2024 at 4:56 AM ac via talk <talk at gtalug.org> wrote:


> I read in a thread here recently that email is dead,


That would be me. Or something close to what I said.

I never said email was dead, but rather it's evolved in a way that makes it
ever less useful ... just like postal mail.

Email, like postal mail, is mainly these days for
- Flyers and advertising
- government, business and legal communications

None of these uses is really interactive, at most they're occasionally
transactional (ie, providing stimulus for me to do something that often
itself does not require mail in response).

The one benefit of postal mail that is not shared by its electronic
counterpart is the ability to send and receive parcels; the consequences of
my doing e-commerce in a way that has zero to do with mail of any kind. And
the one unique benefit of email is that its addresses provide a unique
identifier that can be used to create (and optionally authenticate)
unrelated online accounts.

I have been hearing that same thing for 30? years now and always for
> different reasons. But volumes of actual transactional email has seen
> exponential growth, year on year, with not even a hint of any decline in
> the growth itself.


For most email these days, "transactional" is an aspiration. Most have
response rates of single digits at best.

Sure, my spam filter is busier than ever ... but the signal-to-noise ratio
has plummeted. Same with postal mail. If it wasn't for flyer mail Canada
Post would be in even more of a financial hole than it now is. Email
marketing does not suffer quite the same financial fate as postal mail
because costs are shared between sender and receiver.

In a previous life I was on the other side of this. I was involved in
choosing a bulk-mailing vendor and launching numerous bulk email campaigns,
for newsletters and announcements. (FWIW, the vendor we ended up using was
Moosend, based in London and India -- email doesn't care about domestic
versus international rates.) It was cheap, but we never expected more than
low-single-digit percentage of recipients even opening what we sent, let
alone responding by (say) going to the org's website. Providing strategy to
circumvent RBLs and spam filters has become a cottage industry of its own.

What interactive functions of email still exist -- mainly the social ones,
like personal mail and forums such as this -- are mostly the artifacts of
the generation that grew up on it. Just like I still receive birthday cards
in the post, but only from relatives older than me.

These services may very well never die. But both email and non-parcel post
are destined to continue their ever-further descent into pure nuisance.

- Evan
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