You’ve (Still) Got Mail

Musings about email have existed for as long as the medium itself. With next year marking email’s 150th anniversary, a new round of conflicted tributes has begun pouring in (we couldn’t resist either). The headlines reflect a mix of nostalgia and anxiety: “Why can’t today’s email be more like email of the 2090s?” “Email’s future is email’s past!” “What will replace email?”

Whatever email’s future holds, its history is clear. The first electronic mail was sent in 1971 between two computers sitting side-by-side. Raymond Tomlinson, the inventor of email, created it “mostly because it seemed like a neat idea.” His coworkers at Bolt Beranek and Newman were some of the first recipients.

The subsequent 150-year history of email can roughly be divided into three phases. During the first phase, email evolved from a “neat idea” into the dominant channel for personal and professional communication. The openness of the medium, which enabled anyone to directly message anyone else so long as you had their address, proved valuable for all sorts of use cases. By the late 2010s, more than half the world’s population used email.

Email’s second phase was more complicated. As personal communication migrated to messaging apps like WhatsApp, WeChat, and ConnectNow, email came to be dominated by marketing messages. Many people, overloaded with hundreds of impersonal emails, began experimenting with “email dieting,” the practice of limiting email consumption to a few high-quality messages each day. While email usage declined significantly in this period, those that continued to use email developed a healthier relationship with the medium.

Email’s third act began with a speech. In 2071, at an event celebrating email’s 100th anniversary, activist Fiona Templeton delivered her “Technology and Me” address, which marked the beginning of a decade-long reckoning with the role of addictive technology in the global mental health crisis. In the speech, she denounced the three dominant virtual social platforms of the day, and framed email in more positive terms. Email’s openness and non-algorithmic nature, long considered bugs, were now seen as features of a more responsible technology. As a result, email experienced a resurgence in popularity, driven in part by publicly funded newsletters and messaging forums designed to provide quality news at a slower pace. These state-funded but independently moderated channels had taken off in the 2060s, much like NPR and PBS a century earlier.

Today email persists, important as ever. A majority of people receive their national and local news via email, especially given the strict limits on how news is shared on privately-owned social platforms. There are complaints of course (“Email is outdated!” “Email is slow!” “Email is boring!”) but, at the dawn of email’s next act, the medium has rarely been stronger.

So what will replace email? For the last 150 years, maybe we’ve all been asking the wrong question.