Serious question: I have watched my mother struggle with the internet for years. Latest was gmail: it is completely incomprehensible to an older person: a v complicated UI full of hieroglyphs and complex or unanticipated concepts (threads/conversations), email auto categorised into different folders/tabs (social etc), cc & bcc hidden, replies rendering below the fold, tiny buttons, links hidden in menus that don't look like menus (sign out etc), distracting/confusing links elsewhere (g+).
I often struggle with gmail.... for older people it's near impossible.
I can't wondering if there's a market for a ridiculously simple, clear email interface offering just the basic functions.
As the developer of Red Stamp Mail I can tell you that there is in fact such a market, albeit small (or perhaps I just suck at marketing).
The problems you describe are exactly what I tried to fix, and users seem very happy to have a simple email application that is free from advertisments, and does not get a "face lift" that makes everything worse every few months.
There's also PawPawMail, which is even simpler and caters to users who need a family member to help them (e.g. manage their contacts list).
Well, I made an initial decision to keep Red Stamp Mail very affordable. It wasn't built to make money, but rather to help people. But I did not want to make it totally free for various reasons - I wanted it to at least cover its operational costs.
So the subscription price is very low - $18 per YEAR. This means that most marketing channels are simply too expensive (customer acquisition cost > customer lifetime value).
I gave Google Adwords a very serious try, but the results were unimpressive. Other guerilla-ish marketing attempts also did not succeed.
So basically the most effective channel is ranking high in search results for relevant terms (e.g. "email for seniors").
Something else that bothers me immensely about such interfaces (admittedly i avoid Google mail but i have another paid email service with a similarly misguided modern web UI) is that my browser blocks @font-face CSS directives (security-motivated), and these days the fashion is to load “icons” from external fonts. This leaves me with a Unicode box-character, forcing me to hover over buttons to discover their meaning, or guessing based on their placement. I would go as far as to say that this trend (of fonts-as-resource-repositories) is perhaps my least favourite Web n.0 evolution: most evils (e.g., popups, blinking lights, horrible stylesheets) i can circumvent relatively effectively with NoScript or whatever, but this truly has me stumped.
Needless to say i use a proper email client on my own machine as much as possible, but obviously this isn't an option 100% of the time.
I often struggle with gmail.... for older people it's near impossible.
I can't wondering if there's a market for a ridiculously simple, clear email interface offering just the basic functions.