Dave Crocker wrote:
On 4/14/2014 3:27 PM, Doug Barton wrote:
What I AM suggesting however, and I realize that this is a hard pill to
swallow for many IETF'ers, is that IN THE GRAND SCHEME OF THINGS mailing
list traffic is inconsequential to large e-mail providers.
That view is popular, but it's quite wrong.
What /is/ true is that mailing list traffic by users of large mailbox
providers, through small, independent mailing list providers, is
probably negligible. That's the category of primary victim of the
recent change.
I'm not sure that's true, Dave.
The lists I run, these days, are for things like community
organizations, parent-teacher groups, churches, and such. What I find
is that over half of my subscribers - both in the high-income city where
I live, and Boston Public Schools (where I used to live) - are coming in
through yahoo and hotmail accounts, followed by a mix of ISP accounts
with broadband providers (Comcast, RCN, Verizon in these climes).
Now an awful lot of these folks ALSO have work email, and a lot of some
other personal email address - so my guess is that:
- folks who don't do a lot of email, sign up for a yahoo or hotmail
account because it's free and easy
- more sophisticated folks, sign up for a free account to segregate
truly personal, and work related email from lists, and commercial sites
This also doesn't seem to be limited to more settled folks - all three
of my college/just-post-college kids have either a hotmail, yahoo, or
gmail account (1 each) - again, probably because it's free. They use
accounts on one of my servers for more official things like job
applications.
Now, given that pretty much every parent with a kid in the local schools
is on a parent-teacher email list; and everyone in the two churches I
support is on their respective email lists; and there are very active
neighborhood level parent and community lists - there are an awful lot
of email list users around here. I expect the same is true elsewhere
(how many people reading this are on a school or church related list,
not to mention various technical lists?). And I note that those lists
are all quite active.
Now, the list activity is still dwarfed by spam - but once you filter
out the spam, and general commercial crap, I expect what's left in most
people's email is a mix of directly personal, work, email lists, and
notifications from social network sites.
I could be wrong on this - but I have a pretty good window into email
use in this corner of the world, and that's what I see.
Cheers,
Miles
--
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is. .... Yogi Berra