[GTALUG] OT: Shots fired - heads up

[Karen Lewellen]

As a counter to this idea I offer up groups.io.
www.groups.io
A location where email not only allows for exchange interaction and 
communication, but   often a great deal of community building as well.
especially for folks who wisely wish to avoid the minefield that is 
Facebook and so forth.
Perhaps?  it is less about how email may be declining generally,  and more 
about how, in your personal experience, email is less important?
I could have listed google groups, and freelists in the place of 
groups.io, with comparative results.
Perhaps its more about the audience?
Cheers,
Karen



On Tue, 10 Sep 2024, Evan Leibovitch via talk wrote:

> 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
>