[bradwestness]

From a discoverability standpoint they are. There's not really any way to find like-minded people you don't already know and strike up a conversation with e-mail, because everything is private. Which is kind of the definition of "social".

[bengillies]

Pretty sure that nowhere in the definition of social does it enforce the need to meet or otherwise speak to people that you didn't previously know. Please don't confuse "social" as a general term with "social discovery".

For many people, having something that's pretty easy to use and lets them communicate with people that they already know is a really great thing.

Email really isn't designed as a social discovery tool. There are many other technologies (some of them built on top of email like mailing lists) that _are_ designed for those purposes, and several of them work perfectly well.

If what you're expecting is one tool that both fits and performs well at all possible use cases, then you're going to be severely disappointed.

[alan_cx]

Given the scanning that the likes of google do to gmail, it seems advertisers can "discover" me based on email. Just need to extend that to every one else.

Privacy issues very much accepted.