Why email will never die

Over the past couple of years, the network has increasingly heard discussions that e-mail, as a communication tool — users among themselves, and customers with companies — is outdated and has a number of drawbacks. Such materials were, including on Habré . On Pechkin's blog, we write a lot about interesting techniques for working with email newsletters , and today we bring to your attention an adapted translation of material from The Atlantic magazine, which is designed to explain why email is the best that is still on the Internet and it will not die. never.

Everyone is trying to kill email.
')

“E-mail is dead - at least that's what Silicon Valley thinks so,” writes Businessweek reporter Ashley Vance.

Justin Rosenstein, co-founder of Asana startup (Justin Rosenstein), believes that e-mail has become "counterproductive."
The creators of Slack, a popular corporate messenger , love to boast that “they saved the world from 70,000,000 emails” (assuming that five messages in Slack replace one email).

So consider not only the companies selling cloud software. Some teenagers (especially those who are younger than “millennials”) also think that email is useless.

For teenagers of generation X who went to college, getting an email address was a ritual of initiation. Now young people are indifferent to poor old e-mail, ignoring the weak and useless technology that only old people use. One American professor claims that for his students, "e-mail has become a relic of the past, as the use of certain words in the works of Cotton Mather and Jonathan Edwards." The vice-chancellor of the University of Exeter stated that "there is no longer any sense in sending emails to students." Young people apparently believe that there are faster and more attractive ways to communicate than stupid email.

In fact, e-mail is a terrific open platform, on the basis of which new innovative technologies are being developed.

Many believe that the end of the e-mail, that it will soon be pushed to the far shelf or shot as a lame horse (underline the necessary), but it still exists.

Email can not be killed! She survives like a cockroach, in the good sense of the word. This is a very useful quality.
“Sending and receiving mail is not very difficult, which is its main advantage,” said Aaron Straup Cope, specialist in digital and new media from the national design museum Cooper-Hewitt. “Next time, when someone tells you that e-mail is“ dead, ”try to imagine how much money was spent on developing a new solution, and how much it would cost to refuse an existing system.”

In fact, email is a huge decentralized open platform, based on which new innovative applications are developed. From this point of view, e-mail is different from the model of a closed ecosystem, which is used during the development of applications for our computers and other devices.

Email is a way to get away from open, interconnected networks. Mail is a representative of the “ network we lost ”. This place is full of freedom, surrounded by social media and instant messengers.

Yes, e-mail is amazing, and you should be glad about it!

* * *

Due to the changes around e-mail, the way it is used has changed. Email does not die - it changes.

Since mail appeared at the time of the birth of the commercial Internet, it was used as a platform for developing many web applications. This supported the popularity of e-mail, but there was also a drawback - all mailboxes created in the second decade of the 21st century were spammed. Simple mail transfer protocols have been assigned too many tasks.

In 2020, the current e-mail will look like a set of random services.

Email was used as a news feed. Increased popularity of news feeds, reminders, messages about discounts and other content that could be sent by mail. This led to the fact that the email client began to use for the dissemination of advertising, and it turned into a news feed.

E-mail was the "passport of the Internet . " Before mail was used to confirm the identity of a user on Facebook, it was only possible to do something serious on the Internet using email. Need to authenticate a bank account? Email. Amazon? Email. Forums? Email. For a while, email was needed even to register on Facebook. First name@Surname.com meant that you had your own domain. A Hotmail account could mean that you are new to the internet. Mail address Well said that you have been using the Internet for a long time. For a while, an account on Gmail was a sign of elitism. Now, the email address doesn’t have many functions, and it means little. There are many new ways to express themselves online.

Email was the main way to communicate online . Only with its help it was possible to send messages. BBS, chat rooms and forums existed just as much as mail, but only with the help of email people could directly, avoiding the attention of others, communicate with each other. It was possible to communicate without the Internet, but with its appearance, the process became easier. Now there are a huge number of ways to connect with someone on the network. Using your phone, Facebook profile, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Qik, WhatsApp account, etc. In the world of mobile technology, application developers need access to the user's contact list, not email.

Email was used to send files . After reducing the popularity of FTP servers, and before the advent of Dropbox and Google Drive, important documents were only sent via email. The ability to attach a document to the letter was needed by all. Try to imagine a modern Internet without such a function. But compared to modern data warehouses, e-mail is far from ideal.

E-mail was the main tool for communication in a team . Most companies would not be able to function normally without the use of email. The exception to the rule is the French company Atos, which was able to ban the use of mail in the workplace.

This is exactly the email function that companies want to transform. In 2013, the CEO of HootSuite in an article on the Fast Company website explained that e-mail is counterproductive, incredibly straightforward, does not contribute to social communication and, oddly, leads to the emergence of “warehouses” of data. Besides, who does not want to get some money from the budgets of companies? Start-ups that failed to build a business in a consumer environment need to move a lot.

* * *

Looking at this list of email functions, it becomes obvious that it will lose some of them. Everyone decides for himself whether to use email as the main way to confirm his identity on the network. People will start using other applications to communicate with friends and colleagues. The same thing happens with the transfer of files - for this there are cloud services.

So what will happen to the mail?

I believe that email will be used for what it was originally created for - to receive and send emails.

Journalist Jan Bogost (Ian Bogost) noted that we use the name "mail" as a metaphor, describing the way messages are transmitted between servers. But in reality, e-mail has replaced not ordinary letters, but other ways of exchanging information: telephone calls, direct communication with the person, notes and promotions.

The phrase "e-mail" never fully corresponded to the one for which the email was used. But now it fits like never before. E-mail can be used for those tasks that are now performed by regular mail: letters, invoices, advertising, periodicals.

Services such as Gmail's Priority Inbox, which automatically sorts mail into categories, or Unroll.me, helps users integrate news feeds and ads into one large list, contribute to this change.

This means that our mailboxes are becoming more and more useful. We have powerful tools for managing a continuous stream of letters that past systems were unable to cope with (Recall the huge number of folders that the mail client created).

It is worth noting that thanks to filtering systems, spam, which was filled up with our boxes, became invisible. Yesterday, I received hundreds of such letters, but I didn’t notice one, because Gmail and Atlantic sifted them out and they didn’t get in my inbox. At the same time, spam messages about intimate services can be found all over the Internet. I notice them on all sites, including Facebook and Twitter.

E-mail has become easier and more convenient to use, while it retained open access to information and remained an interoperable system. However, there are no such companies that would advertise email services, so all changes have gone unnoticed.



This used to look like an email (taken from Wikimedia)

Think back to the Hotmail client in 1996 or Microsoft Outlook in 1999, or — I know some of them — hate me for that — Pine, who used Telnet protocols in 1993. Compare them with modern Gmail or Mailbox clients on the iPhone. The process of receiving letters has become much better, clearer and more modern.

And one more thing ... That which the creators of e-mail could not even dream of. Email works great on mobile devices.

Mobile Internet is a dump of unreadable text, broken advertisements and a weird layout of sites. But custom email looks great on phones! Letters weigh a little and therefore quickly loaded with any quality connection. Even on the phones there are built-in tools for sending and reading letters.

In addition, e-mail has a lot of advantages characteristic of the modern network. She looks good, it is convenient to use. To make the constant flow of information easier to perceive, it is processed by various algorithms. Usually, e-mail is suitable for all mobile devices and is displayed correctly on them - this is not always possible for mobile application developers to achieve.

Although the evolution of e-mail is very important for its existence, the fact that it was able to preserve the characteristics of the old network distinguishes it from other similar applications. Email is an open, interoperable data protocol. Someone can use Google services to raise a server, someone can send messages using Microsoft corporate software, but they can all communicate with each other without problems. Some countries have done everything in their power to prevent the use of anonymous email, or even completely destroy it, after what Snowden did. Indeed, because e-mail is the most secure and closed part of the Internet, especially if you have taken additional measures to improve its security.

Finally, it should be noted that Silicon Valley start-ups do their job very well. The secret is that they collect information about us on their server farms. But an example of an email shows that this is completely optional. Progress can move immediately many people and companies. The e-mail protocol is modified based on material provided by the Internet Engineering Council (IETF), rather than guidance from Silicon Valley or New York companies.

It is not the product that should be provided to users that changes, but the ecosystem that provides niches for different types of users.

We may be able to return something from the “old network” that functioned before the advent of Apple, Google, Amazon and Facebook, if we stop creating competitors to these companies and start using e-mail, thereby supporting it.

Email - yes, it is email that is the only way to reduce the amount of advertising on the Internet and create a less centralized network. The great thing about this is that this “social network cockroach” “lives” in every home.
It remains only to convince young people that they need to cope with the pressure of social media not with the help of Snapchat: they need to strengthen themselves in a closed, calm and convenient email shelter.