Email is still Useful

created Apr 1, 2017

This is not an April Fool's joke. Email is still useful in 2017, despite the claims around 2005 that email was dead and useless.

The problem is that email was and is misused. Less so today with the numerous messaging and collaboration apps/websites that exist today.

Email is not meant to be used as a knowledge management system. It's not a good collaboration system, specially when documents are involved. It's hard to give new people unwieldy large email threads to inform the person about the project or the company.

Wikis, forums, and other web-based systems are better for document management, project management, and collaborative discussions.

Email is great at notifications and simple communications. It's lightweight and decentralized. It's simple to learn the basics. Yet most email clients provide optional advanced features.

My other posts:

• Email vs Apps for Information Distribution
• Email Newsletters vs RSS Feeds
• Blogging and Email are Still Alive in 2017

This decade has seen the growth of the email newsletter by non-profits, businesses, and media orgs.

March 2017 - Media Shift - How Personalization Can Rebuild Trust in Media

The email newsletter in 2017 is a core product for national newspapers, digital media brands, platforms, and local news because it%u2019s simply the best available channel to directly reach users on a daily basis.

February 2018

Feb 2018 medium.com post

Compare the problem of Twitter spam to the problem of email spam. Since Twitter closed their network to 3rd-party developers, the only company working on Twitter spam has been Twitter itself. By contrast, there were hundreds of companies that tried to fight email spam, financed by billions of dollars in venture capital and corporate funding. Email spam isn%u2019t solved, but it%u2019s a lot better now, because 3rd parties knew that the email protocol was decentralized, so they could build businesses on top of it without worrying about the rules of the game changing later on.