Email vs. Gmail

Yesterday, our young adult bible study group was meeting, and I remember there was some discussion that it may have been at a different place than normal. Shortly before going, I dug through my email (where the discussion took place) but couldn’t authoritatively determine what consensus as to a location had been reached. So, I ended up calling the location where it usually was to determine that it had, in fact, been moved.

When chatting about this once we had arrived, I mentioned to someone that part of my difficulty in finding the email was that none of the emails in the discussion had subject lines, which had made it a bit tougher to try to find. Her response was, “Well, that’s because you’re not using Gmail.”

That response just blew me away. Do Gmail users often not bother putting subject lines on their messages, because the searching is just so good? Is the world starting to divide into Gmail users and non-Gmail users, where the customs of using their systems are different (even though there’s interoperability)? Am I the only person left in the non-Gmail camp?

It seems so strange to me that there are so many people who have never used email that wasn’t a webmail-only-based system. Is there really no room for Internet applications that aren’t web-based anymore?