Email Is Dead. Long Live Email!

A conundrum of modern communication

My inbox has been much worse than this before. Much, much worse.

Lately, my personal email inbox has gotten out of control. In the best of times it’s hard to keep up with it; the minute I get a bit busier, all bets are off.

Email hounds us, interrupts us, overwhelms us. Most of us are inundated with emails. This highly flawed method of communication has become “a source of fear and loathing” — yet we can’t seem to give it up. What gives?

How did we get here?

I first heard the term email in late 1985, when I started working at the Regional Administrator’s office of the EPA in San Francisco. I thought it was one more bit of annoying government jargon that no one else would ever use.

My clerical job at the EPA consisted entirely of tedious tasks that would make a clock-watcher out of anyone. One of these was handling incoming email. The emails we received were all from other government offices on a common network — likely other EPA offices, though I can’t recall. Every day I’d hook up the modem and download all the incoming emails. I would then print them all out and hand-deliver each one to its intended recipient. I am not making this up.

Even in those early days of email, the printing out part seemed to defeat the purpose.

If you’re feeling nostalgic for that time, here’s the sound of a dial-up modem connecting to the internet:

This was not my first email rodeo, though it was the first time I’d heard that term. I was emailing by a different name in 1978–79, during my senior year of high school. That was an isolated experience that could only be had within a specific computer network, and the same was true at the EPA.

Email’s fast evolution

But email evolved quickly. By the time I worked at HarperSanFrancisco, starting in 1992, we regularly used email to correspond with people inside and outside the company. The word was hyphenated back then, and the World Wide Web, as we called it at the time, was capitalized. Working in publishing made us all the more aware of these important rules.

Email was still imperfect. Although we were editing books online, it was almost impossible to attach a file to an email, let alone multiple files. So we printed out manuscripts and FedExed or messengered them to editors, proofreaders, and authors. (The “paperless office” we were hearing about so much at the time is now closer to reality, but back then we were using more paper than ever.) The girlfriend of a co-worker got mad at him because he didn’t respond to an email — but he’d never received it. For some time, it was common for random emails to just not go through. We were living on the edge!

Even with these glitches, email had its advantages. You could communicate asynchronously. You could correspond with one person at a time or with a large group. You could schedule a meeting without making a million phone calls to find a time that worked for everyone. And of course, you could send jokes to co-workers instead of printing them out and routing them around people’s desks. That was a primary use of email in those early days. And writing limericks.

I don’t recall when I first got a personal email account, but it would have been sometime in the 1990s. My address was rosana@sirius.com, an indication that there wasn’t much competition for usernames.

Whether used for work or home, email began as another way to write letters and memos. Other than its quick delivery and the fact that it was online, email wasn’t that different from the ways we were already communicating. Even the word we used for email and the logos we chose for it reflected that we thought of it as another kind of letter.

In those early days, email seemed like a handy way to keep in touch with people near and far. I still regularly called friends and family on the East Coast, but we could also email. In times of crisis and sickness, you could email everyone updates all at once. When I went out with a guy who took a long trip to Ecuador on a ship, we could still stay in touch (there was no texting or WhatsApp back then!).

Email kept evolving, soon allowing us to attach files and add images. And of course, the jokes kept coming.

From tool to nuisance

Somewhere along the way, though, email transformed from our servant to our master.

Email takes up far too much of our time. In 2021, the average American email user spent 172 minutes a day on personal email and 149 minutes on work email. That’s over five hours a day! A 2019 survey came up with similar numbers. Many people check their work email first thing in the morning.

Apart from the sheer number of hours, all those emails represent constant interruptions and distractions — but we may feel like we have to stay on top of them to ensure our work is on track.

The personal emails pile up, too.

Try as I might to unsubscribe from email lists left and right, I still have trouble keeping up with my inbox. I should say inboxes: I have a personal one, one I use for work, and several others for specific clients.

Why not just delete all incoming emails, or delete your whole account? You probably don’t have that choice at work, and when it comes to personal email, most of us have FOMO. We’re wired to feel drawn to checking our email. You never know when something great will appear in your inbox!

Dear reader, it is not lost on me that this newsletter is delivered via email. I’m grateful to all of you who have allowed me into your inboxes. I sincerely hope my newsletter isn’t making your email load too heavy.

Are we stuck with email?

What’s the cure for our email fatigue? Many have tried to solve it, but none have succeeded. Email management systems promise to help you conquer the beast, but let’s face it — even those require more work than most of us want to put in.

Can we reduce the barrage of emails in the first place? Some applications, like Slack (basically an instant messaging app with lots of features), can help. One of my clients uses Slack more than email, and it helps remote workers like me feel like part of their team. That works only if the whole team uses the tool, as I’ve found in a couple past failed attempts.

But Slack alone can’t solve the email problem. As much as people hate email, we all rely on it for so much that it’s hard to imagine how we’d function without it. Order a product online? You don’t want to be part of that company’s Slack to be notified about where your package is, and you probably don’t want to be interrupted by texts. Want to send a personal message to a friend in a less intrusive way than texting? Email often seems like just the thing.

And email knows no boundaries. To email anyone in the world, you don’t have to be using the same tool or provider. You don’t have to know them, as long as you have their email address. You don’t have to worry that you’ll wake them up in the middle of the night.

Email has become far too ubiquitous to go away anytime soon. And yet, a mere 30 years ago the kinks were still being worked out. Who knows what might take its place in another 30.

I may not be around by then, but I often wonder what new technology I’ll be trying to learn in my 80s. I hope we don’t get to the point of chips embedded in our brains. It would be nice to do away with email, but I’ll take it over implanted chips. Now that I think about it, maybe email isn’t so bad, after all.