Email is dead…

Or so the WSJ technology blog would have us believe.

Email has had a good run as king of communications. But its reign is over.
In its place, a new generation of services is starting to take hold—services like Twitter and Facebook and countless others vying for a piece of the new world. And just as email did more than a decade ago, this shift promises to profoundly rewrite the way we communicate—in ways we can only begin to imagine.
We all still use email, of course. But email was better suited to the way we used to use the Internet—logging off and on, checking our messages in bursts.

That really misses the mark, I think. There are a lot of reasons email is more useful for communication than the other technologies mentioned in the article (Twitter and Facebook specifically). Social networking sites are great for quick one offs, really fast questions and organizing get togethers. What they lack is history and permanence.
I have, at my fingertips, email archives going back to 2005. With a little bit of effort I could dig up archives from 1999. It’s history that isn’t as built into social networking. Twitter doesn’t keep more than a certain number of your tweets. I don’t even know if you can search Facebook walls for certain keywords and discussions. It’s the relative permanence of email that keeps users coming back to it.
A number of others have also commented on the WSJ article. FastCompany addresses the value of email and how well it fills its role in communication. They also point out a lot of things that you can’t do in other media that you can do easily in email.

  • You can’t embed a file directly in a Tweet.
  • Would you trust Facebook, with its odd history of rights control, with a corporate Excel file?
  • Legions of gray-surfers have adopted email as a way to keep in touch–they won’t be switching.
  • While email is usually formatted informally, it’s still more formal than social networking norms–important in a business setting.
  • Millions of BlackBerry and iPhone users will testify to mobile email’s convenience.

The Email Service Guide points out other significant differences between social networking and email.

Email is used to contact people other than our friends, to talk about more than what we did for the weekend, and to get real work done in a neutral setting. Facebook and Twitter mix our communication with more people and more play and while that is a fantastic and fun thing, it’s just not a substitute for email.

Long live email.

Related Posts

Links Post

Lifecycle Marketing on Bronto Blog. A good summary of issues in marketing to customers as they move through a relationship with recipients.
Blocked email: why me? on Cloudmark’s blog. A good introduction to blocking issues.
Tamara’s links for 4/16. She’s found a lot of good posts here, including multiple posts about unsubscribes and others on improving your email marketing program.
Speaking of unsubscribes, Loren McDonald discusses how the location of the unsubscribe link can affect reputation and email performance.

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Links for Sept 10, 2009

As everyone else has been announcing, the Tucows FBL is taking applications from the general public. I’ve updated the ISP Information page to link to the signup as well.
Loren McDonald has a blog up at MediaPost talking about how the language marketers use (Blast!) affects how they are perceived in the industry. I think he’s quite correct. Many people on the senders side hear thing things marketers say and judge that the markters are contemptuous of not only the ISPs but also the recipients. Language matters!
Pivotal Veracity announced MailboxIQ this week. This technology allows senders to track what individual users do to their email. Senders are now able to measure inbox / bulk performance for their whole list, not just seed addresses. The delivery person in me thinks this will help senders make better decisions about engaged recipients and give them more data to send mail that recipients want. The rest of me is a bit unhappy with marketers finding a new way to invade people’s privacy. I’m just glad that I don’t use webmail except for handling client issues.
In other news, Mailchimp has been trolling through their client’s response data and discovered that recipients using gmail.com are more engaged and responsive than users at other domains.

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Blocked for phishing

A couple clients recently have had bounces from different places indicating that their mails were caught by the recipients’ anti-virus filter. These are some of my better clients sending out daily newsletters. They’ve been mailing for years and I know that they are not phishing. They asked me to investigate the bounce messages.
The information I had to work with was minimal. One bounce said:

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