Why email is still the best thing on the Internet

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

For business - project management systems, for communication - messengers and social networks. Many people think that email is an archaism that will soon sink into oblivion. But is it really so? Let's think together.

Voices are heard from all sides: e-mail is a corpse. For example, the business magazine BusinessWeek recently: "Email is dead, at least that's what they say in Silicon Valley." Co-founder of Asana project management system Justin Rosenstein also considers email to be "counterproductive." And the creators of the Slack service, positioned as a replacement for instant messengers and e-mail, boast that they "saved the world from 70 million emails."

Not only e-entrepreneurs but also many millennials consider e-mail to be archaic. For them, email correspondence is a pain.

At least that's what The Atlantic columnist Alexis Madrigal thinks. Now, when we say "email", we mean too much. Email at some stage in its evolution has replaced phone calls, face-to-face meetings, marketing messages, and much more. But the time has come, says Madrigal, when the second word will become the key in the expression "email". What is delivered by mail? Correct: letters, invoices, advertising brochures, newspapers and magazines. This is the kind of content that your inbox will make up in the near future.

This is facilitated by the email services themselves. So, Gmail Priority Inbox automatically sorts messages (not spam) into important and not so important, and Unroll.me allows you to unsubscribe from unnecessary mailings in a semi-automatic mode. In other words, the times when letters poured on you in a stream and you had to clean up the blockages in the mail for hours are over - email is getting smarter.

Even annoying spam is almost invisible thanks to the filters used by email services. But in other parts of the Internet there is more and more "garbage": advertising comments on articles, pages on social networks.

Plus, the process of receiving emails has become much friendlier. Compare the work of MS Outlook and the modern web interface Gmail and you will understand what it is about.

And the last thing. While the mobile versions of many sites are a mix of crooked templates, floating banners and unreadable text, working with e-mail via mobile devices is easy and enjoyable.

Output

Email, being a representative of the good old Web, absorbs the best features of the 2.0 era. Modern email is fast and convenient; its algorithms process the source code, simplifying the incoming flow of information; it renders beautifully on mobile devices. Is this not what all IT companies are striving for?

But the main thing about email is an open protocol. Email, for all its availability, is one of the most secure popular communication channels (especially if you are willing to take additional security steps). According to Madrigal, in the "post-Snowden era," governments are hostile to anonymous communication channels, and the logic of email is clear and accessible to everyone.

Email is the gateway to a less commercialized and less centralized Internet. It is good that this wonderful "cockroach" of the World Wide Web already lives in all our homes. Alexis Madrigal