Fred Wilson wrote a great post about email few days ago -

In this day and age of social media and an ever expanding set of communication tools (SMS, IM, Twitter, Facebook, blog comments, etc) it is easy to forget about email. But that would be a big mistake. 
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If you are building a web service, you should most certainly build regular email communication with your users/members as one of the key features of your service.

Fred Wilson, “Don’t Forget About Email”

We couldn’t agree more with Fred, because email is the core of Topify. But having a regular email communication with your users isn’t just enough. You need to make your email communication effective and useful to the users.

We started Topify because most web services while having email communication with their users, have very un-useful emails, which are more burden to the user than use. The first use case that we decided to try out and improve was Twitter’s email notifications.

Some of the non-usefulness of the emails web services send this days, comes from their intent to use the emails to bring traffic to the website. But it’s a mistake, because too shallow emails are being left unread in the inbox and become a burden to the user. Instead of that, good (useful) emails while don’t generate traffic to the website (coming directly from the email) can increase the overall interaction with the site. And after all, interaction with the service is the goal.

That’s our $0.2 on the topic. Would love to hear your opinion on that too.