With all of the spam out there and the increasing amount of malice that comes with it, it’s easy to look at the situation and think that email must be dying. Combine the overwhelming amounts of inbox spam and the ever-increasing popularity of communication tools like Twitter and Facebook, and you may ask yourself why you even need email.
Well, I’ve got ten answers for you here.
Don’t get me wrong. Email will evolve. In fact, it’s already begun to. But email as a utility is currently in no danger of going away. This is a view that Pro Blogger Darren Rowse appears to have in common with me, as he implied in a recent interview with murdok.
Rowse notes that email is simply a familiar way to get information, and it’s still one of the most popular ways. He offers his blog content via email as a weekly newsletter, and it gets twice as many subscribers as his RSS feeds do. Furthermore, the people getting those email newsletters are even clicking on the ads.
As Rowse says, people rely on email. That’s not just the old folk either. A recent study found that people between 18 and 24 years of age would rather give up social networks than email. In fact, according to that study, they’d be more likely to give up television.
For all of the unwanted marketing messages and spam out there flooding inboxes, email is still the preferred channel of communication by consumers for receiving marketing messages, according to a different survey.
Spam is going to flood every channel that achieves the usage of the masses. It’s been going on longer than we’ve had a name for it. As long as I’ve been alive, I’ve been forced to sit through commercials I had no interest in seeing, while trying to watch television. Granted, they couldn’t give my television a virus, but they have always been intrusive to some extent.
Now that social networks are rising to popularity, the spam is sure following there. It’s unavoidable. People will spam you no matter what you’re using. But you’ll still use it.
Related Articles:
> Spam is Getting More Malicious
> 10 Reasons Social Media isn’t Replacing Email
> People 18-24 Would Rather Give Up Social Networks Than Email
