Comments on: Free email for life… come on, let’s think about that…

By: Rob Irwin

Rob Irwin — Fri, 02 Dec 2005 23:12:33 +0000

Well, they might not use it for bitching to their mates about things, or signing up for pr0n sites, no. But the school will probably incoporate that address into official school communication, or whatever, and also have other things in which it will make the kids use it.

And I mean, if you think that’s a lame reply, OK, you can use the same argument about a blog. The school gives the kids a blog. OK, great. But who’s to say the kids won’t be like, “This sucks, it has hardly any features and I can’t write what I want to write anyway because of school rules… I’m just going to use my WordPress blog at home instead…”?

By: James

James — Fri, 02 Dec 2005 07:27:55 +0000

so you think the kids will use that email rather than their gmail, hotmail, yahoo etc. ?

Am not after the ‘average’ person or citizen & yeh there aren’t that many out there now right now who would be interested… but mark my words these things are the buds of the next email!

By: Rob Irwin

Rob Irwin — Thu, 01 Dec 2005 23:46:34 +0000

But, the thing is, the average person couldn’t give a rats about having a blog.

Schools will actually use their e-mail - the average citizen wouldn’t use a blog.

By: James

James — Tue, 13 Sep 2005 00:00:39 +0000

Well OK, email isn’t a bad thing in itself I just guess that it’s like a restaurant… you wanna choose where you go.

Whereas this would be a bit more like an alottment???

By: Bud Gibson

Bud Gibson — Mon, 12 Sep 2005 13:16:57 +0000

Hi James:

Thanks for the link. Interesting that I come up in the same breath as a rant about the backwardness of email.

I have to say that I do think email is more fundamental than blogging. Email is an infrastructure that is there and works. Thank God for that as we twiddle with figuring out how blog and other collaborative communities should work. How would we talk to each other otherwise?

But, an official email address for life? Would I be held liable for responding to official inquiries by email? Yikes!

By: eckes

eckes — Mon, 12 Sep 2005 09:54:10 +0000

A funny story to this:

in germany you have quite a lot free web mail providers (like gmx.de and web.de). The German Post which was a former governmental company started a email service in 2000. They claimed that with their long history of delivering letters and their trust people place in them, you can get a email address which is stale for or your lifetime. Well, this was in 2000. Since 2005-03-01 the service was shut down, the domain is operated by lycos till 2005-12-31.

Of cause all the freemailers continue to exist, some of them for 10 years and more. Lessons learned? never trust the german post and dont trust the government to handle your communications.

Bernd