The digital world is moving online and taking our email with it. While most home users have abandoned desktop email clients, most corporate computers are loaded with some desktop email client (almost always Microsoft Outlook), which will keep it alive. Lifehacker posed the question, is Thunderbird and desktop email in general, going extinct?

Here are 3 reasons desktop email will continue to live and why corporate administrators won’t pull the plug.

1. Digital Signatures - Online email simply does not handle digital signatures natively.
2. Control - Carting your email out-of-house puts email in the control of another company completely and is a potential security risk. While I think that eventually you’ll begin to see larger and larger companies getting involved in cloud computing, it won’t kill desktop email.
3. Archiving and Organization - Companies can set up specific folders for critical or legal emails and organize how messages are archived to best fit their environment.

It will be interesting to see when the major web-based email providers will make a real push for the corporate world. Until then, desktop email will continue to live on, in the office at least.

picture: larskflem

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 7th, 2009 at 11:36 am by Anil Polat and is filed under software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.