Email: An Unsolvable Problem

If you want to communicate something important to someone else on the internet, it’s a pretty safe bet you’re going to use email. Email is a necessity among many people. Companies rely on email for their internal communications, as well as interaction with the outside world and thus their customers. Relatives, separated by huge masses of land, catch up through email. Email is everywhere and used by most people with access to the internet. It has been said to have been dead more times than I care to link here, but nothing has replaced it. It’s still as vital as ever to the daily cohesion of the internet. 

But it’s supposedly a chore. After the acquisition of Sparrow by Google last year, multiple designers, developers and creatives decided that email needed to be thought of differently. It needed to be revolutionised. We saw an influx of ambitious apps for both Mac and iOS take on the chore-ish nature of email and turn it into something that promised to solve your problems with keeping on top of the stream of information flowing into your inbox. 

The first of these apps to launch (by my reckoning, at least) was Mailbox. Mailbox is an interesting take on email, putting the archive and delete functions front and centre and shoehorning a snooze button into the app. People love it. Despite causing much controversy with its long waiting list, it was quickly snapped up by Dropbox in an interesting acquisition (we hadn’t seen Dropbox delve into the issue of email other than providing attachment services for Yahoo! before this acquisition) and the waiting list was abolished. The concept of getting on top of your email here relies on you prioritising certain emails and leaving the rest until later. It’s great for getting to inbox zero, but the problem of keeping up with tasks still remains. Mailbox’s feature set relies on the concept that most email you get is worthless to you. While this may be true for some users, the opposite is true for others. 

.Mail app is a yet-to-launch app that provides users with functionality to choose actionsteps for their emails, effectively turning each email users recieve into a task with quantifiable priority. Again, this is a great concept in terms of difference to the norm, but the real impact of the app on email problems will questionable. Instead of staring at a list of emails, you’d be staring at a list of stuff you need to do first and then second and then third. You still have information overload, you still have to process the information and prioritise it. It’s a tool to help you better deal with your clogged up inbox, but it perhaps isn’t a solution. There’s also the issue of translating these actionsteps accross all platforms and devices: something that will take a lot of work for one development team. Unless you change the standards of email completely, there’s no way to integrate this sort of system natively accross all apps, unless an API is released and subsequently widely adopted. 

Email is undoubtedly a problem. It’s a problem that plagues many people’s schedules.They spend hours and hours of their time dealing with their inbox. But perhaps there isn’t a solution to this problem. Indeed every service or system that makes use of an “inbox” is surely always going to be a victim of information overload and no matter how effective services become at removing the friction of dealing with the email process, the constant information stream isn’t going to change.

Mailbox and .Mail aren’t the only apps trying to solve the problem. I’ve seen multiple other concepts trying to do similar things. They’re not useless. They simply remove friction from the process. 

So use the email apps that promise to revolutionise and reinvent email, but don’t expect them to solve all your worries. At least not permanently.