Email is dead; long live email
My clients, friends and family probably all know that email is my favorite medium for long-distance communication. Unlike the telephone, it’s asynchronous, meaning we don’t have to be present at the same time to have a conversation. Unlike instant messages, it lends itself to one-line confirmations or detailed plans equally well. Unlike social networking platforms like Facebook or Twitter, my email software retains messages for as long as I want, so my inbox can act as a personal organizer or to do list. And unlike all of these formats, my sent messages are retained, providing an automatic archive of my outgoing messages. I can check email from my own computer, another computer or a smartphone. It’s perfect!
Well, almost. Over the last few years I’ve seen poor old email getting battered from a few different directions, and I’ve often wondered if it will survive. Here are the challenges I see, with ideas for reviving this essential tool:
- Spam. After using some addresses for almost 15 years, my spam to real mail ratio is about 10 to 1. I have good spam filters that bring this down to 1 to 1 or less, but that’s still a lot of spam. More importantly, I always have to remember that my own messages might not reach their destinations because of the recipients’ spam filters. If this doesn’t improve, I’d expect more people to start missing the messages that do get through, or giving up reading their email completely. Solutions? Check your Spam folder, and if your spam filter is marking good mail as spam, you can adjust its settings or replace it with a better one. And if you receive legitimate but unwanted messages (such as mailing lists you signed up for, or marketing messages from companies you’ve ordered from) you can unsubscribe, rather than marking those as spam, which confuses the filters. Beyond that, some of the biggest email providers, like Microsoft and Yahoo, have proposed charging a small fee to send a message. While it seems like a money grab at first, it makes sense: you wouldn’t notice a fee of $.01 or less for each of the legitimate messages you send, but the cost/benefit ratio of spammers who send millions of messages at a time would change dramatically. My dream scenario? The U.S. Postal Service, currently facing an increasingly doubtful future, implements a secure email system and jumps from the dying gasps of paper mail to the leading edge of electronic communication.
- Private networks. Perhaps because of spam, or easy media sharing features, or just because “everyone is doing it,” many people use social networking platforms instead of email now. I routinely receive messages through my Facebook, YouTube or MySpace accounts even though my direct email addresses are readily available. Although these accounts are mostly spam-free (actually, YouTube is pretty bad), a message received through these services misses some of the advantages of direct email, like control over the software I use to compose messages and the amount of mail I want to archive. Solutions? I usually either send my direct email address in the reply, or reply directly to the recipient if I already know his or her address, to move the conversation from a proprietary platform back to the standard Internet.
- Smartphones. Looking at a smartphone for a quick email update is convenient, but replying from a smartphone leaves a lot to be desired. I sometimes send a detailed message containing several questions, only to receive a one-line message that only answers one of the questions. One of the great advantages of email is that it can handle the dense communication required for large projects, but if you squeeze that density through the tiny screen and keyboard of a smartphone, most of it tends to get lost. Solutions? Users just have to think twice before replying. In most cases, it’s better to wait until you’re back at your desk and can send a thoughtful and thorough reply than to send an immediate one-liner from the grocery store line. I’m not sure about other smartphones, but my iPhone lets me read a message, then mark it as unread, so it shows up again on my desktop for further consideration.
So there it is. The good news is that while writing this, I found other articles warning about the death of email from 6 or 8 years ago, and it hasn’t happened yet. I’m personally keeping it alive for everyone I correspond with! And those proprietary communication platforms tend to turn over every couple of years. Hopefully email will prove itself as the “old faithful” of online messaging after all.