Re: [GTALUG] OT: Shots fired - heads up
On Tue, Sep 10, 2024 at 4:56 AM ac via talk <talk@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
On Tue, 10 Sep 2024 06:52:41 -0400 Evan Leibovitch <evan@telly.org> wrote: <snip snip>
For most email these days, "transactional" is an aspiration. Most have response rates of single digits at best.
key word : deliverabilty IF, marketing would have the ability to be delivered in main inbox, response rates could in fact be in double digits. Most people (yes, even gen z) really do actually read email in main inbox and do so quite attentively, like you are doing right now :) but, the way this works has changed dramatically and the skills to effect this has become, quite unexpectedly, rare. I think that the people that know how to achieve this are not doing tiktoks or publishing on youtube. They are not even writing blogs and it is really not fully explained on google :) there are so many factors but one of the super obvious factors are: recipients would have to want to receive the specific marketing - for example, if you are currently wanting to employ an au pair, you would not frown too much if you received a cv in main inbox from an actual au pair. anyway, like I mentioned, emails in main inbox are read and I have personal experience of 100% read rates :)
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
Not the same at all? On half of planet earth postal mail has died already. Also, the majority of post offices globally have already closed down. But, email use has been growing and the number of independent email servers has more than doubled the past 24 months - even as seen on abuse data (btw many agencies are now releasing much more data. but services like spamcop has always made some of the data available even in public, here for example: https://www.spamcop.net/spamstats.shtml ) so even though specific agency reports may be up or may be down, I base my opinions on cross sections of data from many different agencies and many hard sources
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.
Yes, and all the above does not work. There is no way to circumvent 2024 abuse systems. (This does not stop even the 2 largest large players, from trying though) Either way, the above has, like you said already, less than even tiny fractions of one hundredth of one percent of recipients even knowing about what was sent as 90+% will never even receive it and the rest maybe to spam box, best case scenario. Heck, if you are sending a real transactional email from Google it may not even hit my inbox at this moment.
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.
agreed, this has changed a lot
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.
wow, there are vast differences between non-parcel post and email :) I hope you stop getting flyers soon! - When I got flyers I used them as firestarters, so I kinda miss getting flyers as buying newspapers has become a challenge in itself and the oil based fire starters just suck on principle :( and, you are reading this email and it is pure nuisance, just hit unsubscribe or add me to your twit filter :) if you cannot manage your incoming spam lets talk about that?
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@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
I scanned through the groups in groups.io. Many are more than 20 years old. There is no smartphone app. It costs money to start a group of more than 100 people, and the more successful it is the more you need to pay. I understand the business model but from the point of view of a group creator this is crazy next to the free-of-cost alternatives. When creating a group, don't you want to be where the users are, rather than force them to create an account on yet another platform? WhatsApp has two billion users Reddit has 430 million Discord has about 20 million Groups.io and Google Groups do not publish user statistics. I don't use groups.io but I do use Google Groups. I have been in and created groups in it, in all the platforms mentioned above, as well as Signal and Telegram which have group functionality. All of these platforms can handle small groups, like the Discord server for GTALUG. I have a personal Discord area with fewer than 12 members. They are all pretty straightforward to set up, especially if you're familiar with them. But how well can they scale? The largest group in groups.io has 15,000 members. The popular groups in Reddit have tens of millions of members. The larger Discord servers have a few million members each, though one -- for users of the Midjourney AI system -- has about 20 million members. I see nothing in email (whether in Google Groups, groups.io or a conventional list like GTALUG's) that isn't functionally done better on Reddit (which allows people to "upvote" the most useful contributions) or Discord (which includes streaming and virtual ad-hoc meetings) or WhatsApp (which is super simple and most people have it anyway). All three of these are free of cost to join or start a group of as many people as you can gather. Discord also supports Markdown formatting which is easier to do than the HTML in most emails. You're right, it is about the audience. As I said, this is a generational issue. Email works great for people over 40, because it's comfortable and they grew up with it. For younger people who grew up with smartphones and apps it's a very different story. - Evan On Tue, Sep 10, 2024 at 11:44 AM Karen Lewellen <klewellen@shellworld.net> wrote:
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@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
-- Evan Leibovitch, Toronto Canada @evanleibovitch / @el56
On Tue, 10 Sep 2024 13:40:23 -0400 Evan Leibovitch via talk <talk@gtalug.org> wrote: <snip>
I see nothing in email (whether in Google Groups, groups.io or a conventional list like GTALUG's) that isn't functionally done better on Reddit (which allows people to "upvote" the most useful contributions) or Discord (which includes streaming and virtual ad-hoc meetings) or WhatsApp (which is super simple and most people have it anyway). All three of these are free of cost to join or start a group of as many people as you can gather. Discord also supports Markdown formatting which is easier to do than the HTML in most emails.
You're right, it is about the audience.
I am over 40 and I use discord and read reddit each and every day... BUT, in the groups, specially the larger one's it is not easy to read/scan each and every post, more so, when, like in email, the thread devolves from Google being listed for abuse TO where do I think Glug chat should migrate to... I usually avoid even reading threads with many replies as I have no clue who would post anything useful, where in each reply (what I would find useful, not the 'crowd' - I read upvoted drivel many times each day and every times this happens I am sure I lose a braincell and seriously consider leaving whatever platform. In fact, if I had no interest in spam/abuse and email and only scanned the first post in this thread, I would not be even reading any of this on other platforms. I have also had this same discussion, in a few formats and it always ends the same way... (with everyone doing whatever they want to do :) )
As I said, this is a generational issue.
hmm, maybe you are right, but maybe not for the reasons you think? I recall my first 'smartphone' a Nokia brick, but I could ssh into my servers (the Nokia had a shell) I could do IRC and so many things mobile. I also recall using my own first self written App, 2008? (three years after selling the Linux distro I made) App's were so cool, and surely now email would become useless. Point I am trying to make is that I used to be one of the charge leaders on 'email is now finally dead' :)
Email works great for people over 40, because it's comfortable and they grew up with it.
Maybe you are right. maybe email is also now comfortable for me. I did not grow up with it though. I used IRC way before using email. Email always seemed to 'clunky' and just too much :)
For younger people who grew up with smartphones and apps it's a very different story.
maybe. but it does not mean that technically one should promote mobile tech. we only now know that small kids should not have smartphones. we only now know about myopia and so many many other harmful effects of where tech has taken humanity. We will also still be paying that Invoice. I could also argue that maybe younger people, Gen A for example, is not even going to use discord or reddit. They struggle to focus and/or read anything over 120 characters. (In stating this, I am looking at actual eye tracking data and analytic data) - When comparing data Gen X and Millenials have the longest attention spans. imo, discord users are, on average, younger than reddit users. Much more still needs to be known, but the foundations expose a trend. You should think about what this means? also, to add : The 'upvote' idea, the 'like' idea and the 'herd' has advantages, but as it turns out, has more disadvantages. this email has no "like' 'subscribe' 'upvote' 'downvote' and you have to truly think about who the person is writing whatever and, if you have the attention span, you have to really focus to understand what is being said :) sure, hindsight is perfect. but even in knowing something, like planetary change is going to extinct us faster, this does not change anything. maybe we are evolving ourselves into extinction as we are truly disgusted at our very nature and the herd is just the herd. and, btw, as there are useful things in the bottom post, I have left it intact, for the record, email allows me to reply inline, snip stuff and allsorts of other things which, depending on the platform, is either impossible, or just too much of an effort and just to hard to do...
On Tue, Sep 10, 2024 at 11:44 AM Karen Lewellen <klewellen@shellworld.net> wrote:
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@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.
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
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
And than post
are destined to continue their ever-further descent into pure nuisance.
- Evan
gosh so many comments to choose from. Evan, what I personally prefer, is choice. Indeed when many Yahoo groups moved to groups.io, I created a password there. However, I have never needed to read posts there, or at google groups, or even freelist. Instead, i can subscribe from my inbox, no ads, hackers, passwords, or leading to my next point, lack of innovation required. Reddit recently shut down access by all third party applications. Meaning the command line Linux tools that allowed say a person using a voice browser, or braille display, or who just wanted to cut the ads have no access to the service anymore. In fact, if a reddit post shows up in google searches or duckduckgo..the contents cannot be read. Discord is a fine example of a platform created for other profoundly graphical purposes getting expanded, It is a gamer platform first and foremost. Still, again you must use discord as they define the term..no innovative lower graphics doors allowed. Do I want to be where the people are? sure, but not at the cost of privacy, inclusion, and reading in a way that maximizes real communication..or choice. why is the only door to this table their app and nothing else? I personally like giving a single post my undivided attention, But that is me. what I personally love is a place that lets you choose how you reach the conversation, with the technology you like, the body you have, and the method you prefer. I really miss reading reddit posts, but I never had to join to reach those. Turns out that is a very good thing, because I could not reach my account now, only certain kinds of technology gets there. What value is a place that welcomes millions, if some who do not look like those millions are shut out? Where is the value if creativity, open source program tools have no place there? And as another person said quite brilliantly, little beats a genuine back and forth conversation. Again, I am speaking personally. But I have folders of posts from my many email groups rich with technical ideas, discussions of Charles dickens, and kind notes shared between humans united by a shared interest when one in the list family has lost a loved one. ..and I prefer my phones as dumb as possible thank you very much, smiles. cheers, Karen On Tue, 10 Sep 2024, Evan Leibovitch wrote:
I scanned through the groups in groups.io. Many are more than 20 years old. There is no smartphone app. It costs money to start a group of more than 100 people, and the more successful it is the more you need to pay. I understand the business model but from the point of view of a group creator this is crazy next to the free-of-cost alternatives.
When creating a group, don't you want to be where the users are, rather than force them to create an account on yet another platform? WhatsApp has two billion users Reddit has 430 million Discord has about 20 million Groups.io and Google Groups do not publish user statistics.
I don't use groups.io but I do use Google Groups. I have been in and created groups in it, in all the platforms mentioned above, as well as Signal and Telegram which have group functionality.
All of these platforms can handle small groups, like the Discord server for GTALUG. I have a personal Discord area with fewer than 12 members. They are all pretty straightforward to set up, especially if you're familiar with them. But how well can they scale? The largest group in groups.io has 15,000 members. The popular groups in Reddit have tens of millions of members. The larger Discord servers have a few million members each, though one -- for users of the Midjourney AI system -- has about 20 million members.
I see nothing in email (whether in Google Groups, groups.io or a conventional list like GTALUG's) that isn't functionally done better on Reddit (which allows people to "upvote" the most useful contributions) or Discord (which includes streaming and virtual ad-hoc meetings) or WhatsApp (which is super simple and most people have it anyway). All three of these are free of cost to join or start a group of as many people as you can gather. Discord also supports Markdown formatting which is easier to do than the HTML in most emails.
You're right, it is about the audience. As I said, this is a generational issue. Email works great for people over 40, because it's comfortable and they grew up with it. For younger people who grew up with smartphones and apps it's a very different story.
- Evan
On Tue, Sep 10, 2024 at 11:44 AM Karen Lewellen <klewellen@shellworld.net> wrote:
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@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
-- Evan Leibovitch, Toronto Canada @evanleibovitch / @el56
participants (3)
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ac -
Evan Leibovitch -
Karen Lewellen