Quora is an online question and answer service founded by former Facebook employees that has received high marks for overall quality of questions and responses compared to many of its competitors. Quora originally launched as a private beta early in 2010 and opened to the public in July 2010.
The service has since gained several hundred thousand users; although reports vary between 200 and 500 thousand users. Quora also recently experienced significant performance problems. The service has received additional attention due to founders and executives candidly responding to questions about their company or former company on Quora. Here is a brief look at the state of email related questions on Quora.
Top Level Categories for Email on Quora
- Email Etiquette
- Email Protocols
- Email Service Providers
- Mail Transfer Agents
- Email Deliverability
- Webmail
- Email Statistics
- Email Tips
- Email Delivery
Underneath these broad top-level categories, the hierarchy is limited. For example, the only server-based products with their own categories are: Postfix, Qmail, Microsoft Exchange, and Exim. Quora users are free to create their own categories, so the existing ones imply some level of topic interest, at least by users willing and able to create new categories. Some categories such as Email Statistics only have one question. The full hierarchy is available at Email Ontology page on Quora.
Gmail has the largest number of subtopics:
- Google Sync
- Google Buzz
- Gmail Priority Inbox
- Gmail Requested Features
- Gmail Features
- Gmail User FAQs
Each item in Quora is actually represented by a unique name so the URL structure is flat similar to Wikipedia. For example:
The quality of the questions and the quality of answers–for questions that receive answers–varies widely. For example, the question “Is there any Linux email client that will work with Exchange 2010?” received seven answers, most of them brief. A more specific question “Can you create bespoke merge tags in MailChimp or other ESPs?” received slightly more specific answers. On the other hand, the author of the question “What is qmail?” could have easily answered his own question with a single query on Google or even a glance at Wikipedia, which has a healthy Qmail entry. The question still received a reasonable, but brief answer.
In general, Quora seems to not be the best place to answer specific technical questions about email products and services, but it may be worth a quick check. Vendors and service providers may also want to consider responding to questions, although most established products hopefully already have a well-supported forum where users can ask and receive answers to technical problems.
Quora is still young and the developers and community will need to actively work to continue keep the quality of questions and answers high. Hopefully, Quora will also develop a more sophisticated search mechanism with filtering controls. I personally find the combined search and navigation box unnecessarily difficult to work with. The AJAX is too complicated and I have to regularly reload the page in order to clear a result. The way it currently steal mouse focus is annoying. Overall I have found Quora an interesting source and I look forward to watching it develop.