The Future of Email: Evolve or Die?

Once upon a time email was novel. People were happy to get email, it was easy to deal with, and it was convenient. It was the wave of the future and it was going to make us more productive. Why ever call someone when you can just email?

You're in the middle of a project and, ping, you get an email. There's a little popup that begs you to go check your email, teasing you with first line or so. By the time you've finished answering you've forgotten where you were in your project and have to start over, only to get interrupted by another email. Seems terribly unproductive, doesn't it? Well according to a Lifehacker poll, 50% of their users handle their email this way (me included). It's why in Tim Ferriss's ever so popular 4-Hour Workweek he suggests hiring an assistant to do your email, thereby freeing yourself up from the email daily grind.

This has caused some to turn away from email instead turning to Web 2.0 apps like Facebook and Twitter. I use my email much more often as a notification system for Facebook, than as an actual email service. Only approved friends can contact you (depending on settings). In essence it's a way to gain access to a filtered version of email, allowing you to safely ignore most of your regular email. However, you could certainly argue that Facebook and Twitter only make our ADD tendencies worse with constant micro updates that call your attention (Do I really need to know your plane just landed in Chicago?).

And truthfully, can we really afford to ignore email? Well it depends who you are, but probably not. In the company where I work, we got an important email from a Fortune 100 company through a product feedback form, and, if we had de-prioritized email, their correspondence could very well have slipped through the cracks.

A trend on the other extreme is ultra email organization via an empty inbox. If you manage your email correctly, your inbox will be empty because email gets deleted or moved to folders once dealt with. As soon as email is dealt with it gets moved away, to another folder or to the trash can. Boing Boing has an inbox victory page where people (cornily) celebrate their email-less inboxes. There's a Google Tech talk by Merlin Mann endorsing the freedom and productivity an empty inbox creates.

Meanwhile, Gmail seems to be aiming to integrate all our correspondence desires in one place. Gmail chat is getting easier (and more people are using it) and now they've integrated AIM as well. They have so many updates going up, they have a blog devoted to the purpose. One of their new Gmail Lab features is "Email Addict," which sets up a 15 minute break from your email, where you are signed out of chat and you cannot see your new email. Pretty soon Gmail's going to seem like far too confining a name.

This summer email is on my mind because I'm working on a hot new Web 2.0 product called Email Center Pro. We're used to thinking of inboxes as belonging to just one person, I answer my mail, you answer yours, let's not get anyone else involved. Well, that doesn't work so well when you start dealing with company emails such as [e-mail]. Email Center Pro allows collaboration of email inboxes, changing what would be a daunting task for one person into an easily divisible team effort. At the end of the day the collaboration hopefully gets you an empty inbox -- something that management can easily check up on to ensure everyone's doing their job. Big businesses can afford management solutions that cost tens of thousands of dollars, but this is the first solution truly accessible to the small business.

The future of email is anybody's guess. But I wouldn't be shocked to come back here next summer and find a Google sign on the door I walk through. But let me also ask you -- what's the next evolution of email?

Comments

[Rule Of Law]

Evolve? Perhaps were waiting or an "intelligent design." :)

[Paul]

We have an automatic spam filter that deletes most of the really egregious stuff. I also download company e-mail myself every 20 or 30 minutes instead of automatically.

I don't understand why anyone would bring e-mail into their PC at all. There are plenty of free on-line e-mail services with lots of features. No reason to risk a virus or bog down in Outlook.

With all its problems I still like e-mail a lot.

[pbcrunch]

AIM has been integrated into Gmail chat for a while now.

[fairwitness]

Just like the cell phone, email is a monster that will eat your life in little chunks before you are aware of how insidious and wasteful it really can be. Add commuting and cable tv and you are effectively absent from your life.

Progress? No. But at some point, maybe, one wakes up and notices what's been lost (if the memory isn't in the "deleted" folder already). Modern life appears to be essentially the cycle of shopping for, learning how to operate, debugging, working under, servicing and urgent replacement of personal electronics.

We are Borg.

[unitron]

E-mail needs to be "sender pays". ISPs could include "x" amount of "free" outgoing e-mail in everyone's "all you can eat internet for whatever per month" accounts and charge for anything above "x". This would cover the average user but make spamming cost-inefficient, and if your computer had gotten "pwned" and was being used as a spam relay, you'd quickly discover this when your ISP alerted you to your way above the limit outgoing mail.

[Megan Berry - Huffpost Blogger]

Interesting idea, unitron, and it would probably help. but snail mail and phones are sender pays and we still get plenty of junk mail and unsolicited calls

[KillTheMessenger]

If you make email "sender pays" (which is an ancient idea that has never caught on), the result would add insult to injury. Most spam is sent from machines that have been hacked into by worms and viruses. So not only will your PC send ten thousand emails in ten minutes, you will also be charged $100 by your service provider for having been violated by a hacker. And by the end of the month you could owe thousands and not know how to pay for legal defense. I certainly would not trust most large providers to alert you and then stop the flood. But I will trust that they will skin you alive after the event. Do you really want to go there?