It surprises me how popular e-mail still is after all these years.
Or maybe not.
The e-mail pros:
- workload measured via inbox
- can be shared
- runs on most devices
I’ve been wondering lately if I should offer my next website via e-mail only. Why not? It’s the service most people use. It’s what they know.
I am also writing this as I am preparing a newsletter with selected stories for a company. They don’t run a blog, do not have an RSS feed and the newsletter is their only broader publication next to specific scientific publications. When I showed them a blog solution, they asked for the “subscribe via e-mail” widget.
We’re having March 2011, with Facebook and Twitter already limiting the attention span of most readers, we know that videos with a length of 15-30 seconds are the most popular and yet what matters the most are e-mails that will block your inbox and increase your workload. Amazing.
And all of this while I am forced to work with Office 2007 (because my client also does) which comes with its own MS-Office html rendering engine (instead of using the one that came with MSIE – the only good part about MSIE), while we still haven’t found a solution to the html/txt-only question, while e-mail security is still an unsolved mystery for most users and while there are still too many “standards” (7bit, mime, max mail size and so on).
E-Mail, it seems, is like cockroaches or even morse code. Meant to survive because it’s just damn simple & established.
you said it