On Fri, Aug 27, 2021 at 05:34:26PM +1000, Tim Cross wrote: [...] > Yep, that mirrors what I'm seeing as well. Many younger users really use > it primarily to provide a unique identifier (login) and for when they > have to deal with institutions that don't provide other alternatives. I think part of the rush is nudge pressure applied by the Big Ones. It's not possible to monetise mail in the same way as it is possible to do with whatsapp, tiktok, twitter and the uncountable more or less "secure" messengers popping up here and there. The nice thing about those communications platforms (nice from the perspective of the venture capitalist) is that there's no separation of platform and UI, so they get direct control of the user's perception. I opt out of that. Count me in whenever there is a platform which separates transport and clients the way mail does and has at least some choice of client applications with a perspective of diversity. > The other interesting trend I'm seeing is with many companies now > working to minimise email as part of their internal/external workflows. > Many companies are finding it a huge resource sink, cause of unnecessary > stress/pressure on staff, source of significant security concerns and a > real problem for records management. I have watched this process around the 2010s in one company. The decision was made at top level (they were convinced by some Microsoft salesperson [1] to switch to Office 365 instead of mail, because... mail is old). Today, they still use mail, but have outsourced their whole communications infrastructure to Microsoft, GDPR be dammed. The resource sink, stress and pressure stemmed rather from that change, for those who had to use that "new" platform (not to talk about staff layoffs for the old sysadmins, but I disgress). Those having taken the decisions didn't have to use O365, they have secretaries. For them, it was success. This may sound like an off-topic rant, but I'm serious. Not all of this "mail is old" meme is for real. Some of it is propaganda (I emphasise: /some/ of it). So we should take each critique and address it one by one. To put it in other words: I won't pay a wholesale-ish "mail is old" argument. I want to have more solid stuff. Cheers [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gr%C3%ADma - t