On 02.12.2015 at 19:38 Robert J. Hansen wrote: >> this is nonetheless an interesting development. on the one hand I'd >> hate to see Thunderbird lapse and become inconsequential . > > To a large extent it already has. Email usage has been declining for > many years. The largest person-to-person communications medium today is > Facebook Messenger. (Which has all manner of privacy implications, > don't get me wrong; I'm not endorsing this change.) > > Email is a diminishing market, and email clients like Thunderbird are > grabbing a diminishing share of a diminishing market.
I am not aware of any objective way to determine whether e-mail usage has been declining or increasing, and I would take Facebook's claims with a sizable grain of salt. The company's stock price depends on people believing them. E-mail remains the primary form of written communication in business, and I expect it to remain that way for the foreseeable future, given that it still has some semblance of configurability, standardization and decentralization. If anything, it is the market for stand-alone mail clients that is diminishing. Webmail is accessible from any computer with a reasonably modern web-browser. This is probably how a large majority now use e-mail. Most people cannot be bothered with the effort needed to configure a mail user agent. I hope this won't be the ultimate death of Thunderbird. Ms. Baker claims she uses it herself, so that gives me some hope that this won't be the ultimate end of Thunderbird. But it still looks grim. In any event, I still need a reliable and feature-rich mail user agent with good public key encryption support. Best regards Stephen Bosch _______________________________________________ enigmail-users mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe or make changes to your subscription click here: https://admin.hostpoint.ch/mailman/listinfo/enigmail-users_enigmail.net
