Email is one of those universal communication tools. I remember back when I was working at Seagate making hard drives and an internal email system was installed. My boss could now email me instead of calling me or talking to me. Email became a way for people to cover their behinds because they now had a record of what they told someone to do.
Early companies like prodigy and AOL gave people the opportunity to communicate with others users of the same system via email. ISPs like Earthlink, AT&T and Comcast gave their subscribers an email account so the company could communicate with them. When Google hit the scene with gmail, people now had an opportunity to have a personal email that was not dependent on an employer or a cable company. Today there are a handful of email providers but the king is still, by far, Google.
Today I communicate via email with various people and organizations. Mostly email is used for notification and newsletters. My denomination sends out reports via email. Companies will send out new product announcements via email. Personal email still exists, but it is slowly going the way of the Dodo.
On my devices, I am currently using Spark as my email program. Email programs tend to be agnostic. They don’t care who the sender is. This is because email, from a very early time, has subscribed to standards. The two main standards are POP, which is very old. It copies all your email to your device and lets you manage it locally. IMAP is the newest modern standard. IMAP manages the email on the server, so if I make a change on my iPhone, the change is reflected on my iMac. Google invented their own non-standard version of IMAP so companies like Apple have a difficult time with gmail. I use Fastmail.com because it subscribes to the IMAP standard and every modern email programs work with it.
No discussion of email would be complete without a spam discussion. Spam started as an advertising campaign for cut rate pharmaceuticals. When drag prices were skyrocketing in America, India had companies that were cranking out cheaper drugs. Those companies hired Russian programs to market their cut rate drugs and spam was born. At the height of the spam nation, 85 billion spam email messages were sent every day. That was 135 emails messages for every email user, every day, in the world. Fortunately companies like Google and Fastmail built their email around very good spam filters and most spam goes to the bit-bucket. Spam, however takes a great deal of resources and internet space. Most internet traffic is spam and auto-responders, which only serves to slow everything down.
Email has been replaced with SMS and iMessage and Facebook Messenger and Instagram and snapchat. Email is considered too slow for modern conversations. So it has been relegated to notifications and newsletters, which younger people have little interest in. Email still has a place in the corporate world, however. Email will continue as long as there is Google and spam, but its importance in daily life may be shrinking.
Early companies like prodigy and AOL gave people the opportunity to communicate with others users of the same system via email. ISPs like Earthlink, AT&T and Comcast gave their subscribers an email account so the company could communicate with them. When Google hit the scene with gmail, people now had an opportunity to have a personal email that was not dependent on an employer or a cable company. Today there are a handful of email providers but the king is still, by far, Google.
Today I communicate via email with various people and organizations. Mostly email is used for notification and newsletters. My denomination sends out reports via email. Companies will send out new product announcements via email. Personal email still exists, but it is slowly going the way of the Dodo. On my devices, I am currently using Spark as my email program. Email programs tend to be agnostic. They don’t care who the sender is. This is because email, from a very early time, has subscribed to standards. The two main standards are POP, which is very old. It copies all your email to your device and lets you manage it locally. IMAP is the newest modern standard. IMAP manages the email on the server, so if I make a change on my iPhone, the change is reflected on my iMac. Google invented their own non-standard version of IMAP so companies like Apple have a difficult time with gmail. I use Fastmail.com because it subscribes to the IMAP standard and every modern email programs work with it.
No discussion of email would be complete without a spam discussion. Spam started as an advertising campaign for cut rate pharmaceuticals. When drag prices were skyrocketing in America, India had companies that were cranking out cheaper drugs. Those companies hired Russian programs to market their cut rate drugs and spam was born. At the height of the spam nation, 85 billion spam email messages were sent every day. That was 135 emails messages for every email user, every day, in the world. Fortunately companies like Google and Fastmail built their email around very good spam filters and most spam goes to the bit-bucket. Spam, however takes a great deal of resources and internet space. Most internet traffic is spam and auto-responders, which only serves to slow everything down.
Email has been replaced with SMS and iMessage and Facebook Messenger and Instagram and snapchat. Email is considered too slow for modern conversations. So it has been relegated to notifications and newsletters, which younger people have little interest in. Email still has a place in the corporate world, however. Email will continue as long as there is Google and spam, but its importance in daily life may be shrinking.
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