Despite walled garden (and open) social media, e-mail is still King, and growing in use more than any social media platform
According to Statista, as seen in the graph above, Email is clearly not dying; instead it is flourishing. Its growth from 2017 to 2022 is about 15%, reaching up to 4.6 Billion people in 2025! According to Hubspot, 4.2 Billion people check email daily. 78% of millennials prefer communications and alerts from businesses to come via email. More than 306 Billion emails are sent and received each day.
I was just reading this linked article about “GMail is dead” and it got me to thinking about how many people rely a lot still on Gmail for all their daily messaging, password resets, and a lot more. The history of their correspondence is all in there… so what happens if you get locked out of your Google account? Well that’s all gone.
I do still use GMail, although I’ve been gradually migrating across to Proton Mail, because I have accounts and friends going back to the start of GMail, and it’s a very long process to migrate fully off an e- mail platform you’ve been using fro so long. But yes there is a good reason why GMail has no encryption, as it is all scanned “for your convenience”, and yes clouds get hacked, and Google does ban users.
So I run Thunderbird e-mail client on my desktop and regularly sync all my GMail to offline storage.
But yes e-mail still thrives even though it is the least secure means of communication we know today, mainly because it is thoroughly standard across all different e-mail providers and e-mail addresses. It can be secure actually (even GMail) if you added OpenPGP or similar encryption BUT the real challenge is that the other person must also have a similar encryption to decrypt it. And very sad to say, but easily more than 95% of e-mail users have no clue how to install the encryption, and even if they do so, all their friends need to have it installed too.
Proton Mail does try to make this easier and more transparent so all mail between Proton Mail users is encrypted, and mail sent to another e-mail user with PGP encryption can receive and decrypt the mail (if keys have been trusted), and you can even send an encrypted mail to any other e-mail user, but they will need to view it via a web interface with a password on Proton Mail’s servers. Businesses don’t like that form of correspondence though as they then have no copy to file on their side.
So what’s the solution? Well, it’s easy (technically)… we should all actually have encryption enabled e-mail. That can be free of cost, but does require some savvy to just set up. Or you can do it very easily by transferring all your GMail to Proton Mail, but that comes with a cost as the storage would exceed the free usage tier. So I suppose really it is us as humans holding the whole encrypted e-mail progression up, as the free tech has long been ready
See https://medium.com/illumination/gmail-is-dead-and-something-new-is-replacing-it-bc3623a11fbe
#technology #GMail #email #privacy #encryption
source https://gadgeteer.co.za/despite-walled-garden-and-open-social-media-e-mail-is-still-king-and-growing-in-use-more-than-any-social-media-platform/
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