[…] Of course she didn’t even mention email. I talked about it before – my students don’t really use email to communicate with each other. It now seems that IM is heading in the same direction though. Text messaging is quickly replacing it as the primary mode of instant communication. Perhaps rightfully so. Text messages are protocol independent, require no client software, and allow to maintain communication while away from your computer. Not to mention that you can send and receive Facebook updates from just about any phone via text messages. […]

[…] Being blacklisted once is bad enough. Being blacklisted twice indicates that OIT didn’t learn anything from the first incident, and failed to take any preventative actions. I don’t think we can dump this on users alone. After all, every organization, and corporate entity out there has a number of computer illiterate staff members who are likely to fall pray to phishing. And yet they somehow manage to steer clear from these blacklists. User education is important, but it is hard to teach people who hardly ever use email about email security. […]

Btw, is Sea Monkey the actual Mozilla suite, or is it Firefox with integrated Thunderbird and Sunbird?

Yeah I tried that thing but as far as I could tell, it used more memory than FireFox and it crashed all the time. There’s another one out there, Milo, or something like that but I couldn’t get that to compile. SeaMonkey on the other hand is stable and lightweight enough with enough features to make it worthwhile for me.

Some people swear by kazehakase. It’s gecko, and it’s fairly basic and stripped down.

But yeah, there is no such thing as a fast lightweight, full featured browser anymore.

Yarrr! Unfortunately, Firefox that started out because Mozilla was too bloated, is now too bloated and doesn’t run on my system…so I have to go back to Mozilla, now named the Sea Monkey… Irony of ironies

SeaMonkey! I love how Mozilla browsers have evolved to this whole family of friendly animals. Ice Weasel, Ice Ape, Fire Fox, Sun Bird, Thunder Bird, Sea Monkey etc… ;)

Anyway, I’m the same way. I’m torn between 3 machines, and syncing up doesn’t work that well for me. Webmail just works.

The death of the desktop email client? Say it ain’t so. Alas that’s where we seem to be going unless both google and yahoo introduce IMAP that actually works. (Yahoo doesn’t even have that option.) The problem for me as Luke is that I’m always on multiple computers. I check my email at work and then at home and then when I go away. And unless I forget to sync my computers, I end up with lost emails. It’s easier to just fire up the ol’ web browser…

Well, there is Jabber protocol. It’s free, it’s open and Google uses it for GTalk. So any client that supports Jabber can be a GTalk client. Jabber also supports transports – so you could configure your server to route messages to other networks like AIM, MSN or Yahoo. If google would implement and maintain transports we would be able to send basic IM messages across protocols simply by specifying persons screen name and network.

So yeah, it could be done with current technology. Still, it wouldn’t be as open as email considering the immense popularity of the proprietary networks.

I too am an exclusive user of webmail (Gmail now and Fastmail.FM before to be specific). I used to use Outlook Express and then Thunderbird, but I’m not surprised that the next (current?) generation web users never have any need of a desktop email client.

I am surprised by the shunning of email by College students. I was in college only a handful of years ago, and I had no such feeling. The world still seems very much email-driven to me. In fact, it seems email-driven more so than ever. Finally, it is more acceptable to communicate by email than by phone or fax in most situations.

The beauty of email is its universal adoption and interoperability. Every ISP provides customers with email service. Any user of any email service can communicate with any other email user. Any properly configured email client can operate with any properly configured email service. And the POP/IMAP/SMTP protocols are published, standardized, and mature. This is so not the case with next-gen social networks and even more mature IM networks. Maybe one day there’ll be a universal IM/social protocol/network such that I can ask for someone’s screename and message them as naturally as I ask for someone’s email address; today is not that day.