On Wed, Sep 17, 2014 at 12:24:31PM -0500, Derek Martin wrote: > On Tue, Sep 16, 2014 at 03:36:26PM -0400, Patrice Levesque wrote:
> > E-mail has become as popular as car driving. > > But learning how it works fundamentally hasn't. That's why the vast > majority of e-mail users use either Outlook or Firefox. It does what > they need and they don't have to care about the details; the learning > curve is not steep and requires nearly zero specialized knowledge. > They know they need e-mail, and they DO NOT CARE how it works. Nor > should they. Correspondence is a simple, every-day part of life, and > sending e-mail should be as easy as writing your message on paper. I think also, even though most people have email, and use it for receiving bills, automated notifications, etc., and possibly for work communications, email is becoming less valued for personal correspondence. I send and receive fewer and fewer non-work related emails, largely because most of my friends and family prefer to communicate by text message, IM, Facebook, etc. And while there are still some mailing lists around, a lot of online discussion has moved from email and USENET to web-based forums, or hybrid systems like Google Groups. While I have some reservations about these other modes of communication in many cases, the most important thing is being able to communicate with the people you care about - the exact mode of communication, or whether that person formats things correctly, are largely secondary. In any event, *having* an email address is very common, but I think there's actually some movement away from it in terms of people actually writing email messages. w
