2024-03-13 What would happen if Google sunset Gmail?

@lrhodes@merveilles.town and @skyfaller@jawns.club where discussing it on fedi and it got me thinking. We all know how Google likes to end services. Would it want to end Gmail? Surely one day Gmail will end. At that point, many people will no longer care.

So I wondered: who cares about email in general or Gmail in particular?

Looking around I sometimes get the feeling that most ordinary people use instant messengers these days. It's only corporations that want to reach people via email, mostly to send notifications about new info being available on their website (banks, insurances). But even in the corporate world, some notifications are moving to instant messenger apps (WhatsApp), or just proprietary apps (again, banks, insurances). Therefore I posit that in a few years, nobody (or "not enough" people) will *need* email.

For too many people, email just means getting bills and spam. Few people *love* email.

getting bills and spam

I'm thinking of the hair dresser who wants appointments via WhatsApp and the caterer for my wife's birthday party who wants to send me messages via WhatsApp. When not at work and still in a commercial setting, people use instant messengers. And my real life friends and family almost never send me email. It is always Threema or Signal.

And conversely, of course, in the corporate context all email I've ever seen is Microsoft Outlook and that's getting emoji reactions and what not, so they are going to turn into a corporate proprietary messaging service (maybe not instant…). What I'm trying to say is that I think the value of Gmail keeps dropping. It's a glorified "forgot my password" service.

Perhaps my problem is that don't see much email communication from customers to business (C2B). The bigger corporations I know use contact forms (again, banks, insurances, retail). The smaller corporations use websites like Facebook, Instagram, TripAdvisor, Booking.com or whatnot to communicate with customers.

The value of email is dropping.

And it makes sense: it can be self-hosted, it can be easy to set up, it's totally federated – of course the big corporations are only interested in extracting all its value. They don't mind leaving behind a hollow husk. They don't mind making it hard to reach their customers inside the Gmail and Outlook silos. As long as the people inside the golden silo feel fine, that's not going to change.

I still think, though:

For B2B communication, Outlook wins.

For C2B communication, WhatsApp, Messenger, Facebook, Instagram, TripAdvisor, Booking.com and the like win

For human interaction, WhatsApp, Messenger, Threema and Signal win

One day, Google will decide that there's no value left for them in email and they'll drop Gmail just like they dropped all the other things.

they dropped all the other things

I happen to really like email, though. I mean… I like the really simple email. I hate email servers like Exim and Postfix and all their weird configuration files and DoveCot and SSL and SASL. Strangely enough, starting up a minimal web server takes me a few minutes to search for the right Python command or shell command, no config necessary, just listen on port 443 and off you go. Where is that all-in-one solution that works for a dozen people? A small club? I don't need a server optimized to serve a whole university campus.

I like reading and writing email on the command line. I guess that within a small circle friends – like that news server I'm running that has some newsgroups that aren't connected to Usenet – like the Tilde servers! – that should work. We can rebuild the kind of Internet we like. Sure, it won't reach millions, but I'll be happy if it reaches the right two dozen people.

​#Mail