>And what percent of users use iCal, carddav and imap?

Thunderbird users? I'd say ~100% of them use imap, probably ~75% of them use calendaring. I don't know whether Thunderbird uses ical or imap-type calendars behind the scenes but it works with gmail, zimbra and apple type shared/hosted calendars which account for basically ~100% of the non-exchange type calendars in common use. It probably supports exchange-type calendars too though I've never tried that.

I'd wager less than ~2% of TB users use a non-slack non-discord non-irc chat.

I use only SMTP and POP3, no calendar. Chat: Slack (work) and WhatsApp plus Telegram.

I think that TLS is the only new protocol level feature I'm using compared to 30 years ago. Anything else is in the UI and keeping the software compatible with new versions of the OS.

What was I using back then? Some emacs mail client with filters I wrote in elisp. I got my current folder structure started in emacs (roughly one folder per person and customer) and kept it through all the moves to Eudora, Netscape's mail client and Exchange Express until I landed to Thunderbird (desktop) and K9 (phone, much later on.) Work email was on Exchange when I was an employee, always separated from personal email.

>POP3

Which works so well across multiple devices, which is a very very common use-case for email. Either you have some homebrew sync going on or you have a very simple email use-case.

I check mail on my phone with K9 (configured to leave messages on server,) possibly answer BCCing myself and eventually download mail forever on my laptop and remove from server.

My 35 years experience with email: I don't need to read old messages when I'm not at my computer. I never did before 2011 (first Android phone) and nothing changed after then. I can easily figure jobs that need constant access to the complete email archive. Not my one.

And I don't need mail on tablets and my old phone. I've got my main phone always with me, but the setup would be the same.

One reason it works for me could be that communication moved increasingly from email to messaging platforms and those are on my phone, except Slack which is confined to work boundaries. However I feel like I can lose all of WhatsApp and Telegram messages with no harm. I already lost a few years of WhatsApp and nothing happened. Who cares about conversations of 3 years or 3 days ago. It's mostly nearly unsearchable trash. And everybody else and I never had a verbatim trace of any IRL conversations for million of years, so they could be nice to have feature but not an important one.

But I'm doing my best not to lose mail. The long term important messages are in there.

I dont want my mail client eating 4GB of ram just to get chat notifications.. Thank you thunderbird!

> Matrix is the most popular open chat protocol

[citation needed]

Maybe I’m in living in the past but I would’ve thought it was IRC

I just looked up Matrix and IRC in Wikipedia. One was 28 million (and those are only the servers that opt in to reporting), and one was 371,000.

Maybe Jabber has more? But I doubt it.

Matrix doesn’t report daily active users. IRC only reports people who are connected right this moment. Those are two entirely different numbers.

> Matrix doesn’t report daily active users

It does, if you opt in.

Can you show me where to opt in, and where this is documented? The only stats I can find that are close to the number provided are for total registered users.

I'd guess that many of those irc users connect through a matrix service these days

I wouldn't be so sure. If you create a Matrix account and join an IRC channel, your username[m] will never leave the channel, even if you never use Matrix again. I made a few test accounts and it was rather difficult to figure out how leave IRC channels properly if you decide not to use Matrix anymore.

If you part the matrix room, you’ll part the IRC channel.

You can also disconnect from IRC entirely from the bridge admin room.

Finally, if someone joins a channel via Matrix and then disappears without parting or disconnecting, then after 30d we’ll boot them off IRC anyway.

IRC was 28 million, I take it?

Nope, it's Matrix. IRC is dying.

> Matrix is the most popular open chat protocol.

[[Citation needed]]

Why do we even need chat in an email app? It just adds bloat and slowness for not discernible reason. This is why I WONT be using apps like Thunderbird any time soon.