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20% of U.S. Population Has Never Used Email
Ezratrumpet writes "A recent PC World article notes that 20 percent of the U.S. population has never sent an email. Does this number over- or underestimate the actual number of people who know nothing of email? What are the implications of this statistic to our society? Or are these people just Luddites who mourned the demise of the telegraph and have also never used a telephone?"
Nielsen isn't responsible for the cancellation of decent television.
The brainless zombies are, because they are in the majority.
The network executives are, because they only look at the bottom line, and the bottom line is brainless zombies.
Lobby your government for a national public broadcaster that has a mandate to inform, educate, and entertain if you want a change.
Sooner rather than later we have to realize that email is broken. SMTP was not designed with the kind of functionality that would deal with that the academics and researchers who conceived it never, perhaps, expected would happen.
Spammers abuse and take advantage of the shortcomings of the protocol to no end.
All the heuristic filters of the world combined with all forms of statistical analysis ( Bayesian filtering, etc) can only do that much and that's not forgetting the false positives that cause email we care about being flagged and discarded as spam.
The right people should design the successor to SMTP taking into account the problems related to spam, worms and whatnot ( security as a whole ), the simplicity of the existing SMTP protocol and start building a new architecture of servers and clients around it. Otherwise its always going to a be miss or hit case ( just like it is with those spam filters ).
Technology ramblings : Simple is Beautiful