Everybody hates email - so why do they still use it?
Email has had more than its share of critics over the years, but if it's so bad, why is it still a core application for just about every business? Stuart Sumner explores the pros and cons and asks if email is set to be replaced in the near future
Imagine a tool that lets you communicate with just about anyone, anywhere in the world. It's free, has minimal hardware requirements and takes up very little disk space. It also syncs across all your devices. Have a conversation with someone from your laptop, and it's right there for you to pick up on your phone when you're on the train a few minutes later.
Sounds pretty good, right? As you may have guessed, it's called "email", and it has been around since the early 1970s (the precise date varies depending on who you believe - various people and bodies claim to have invented it).
But if it sounds so good, why does it get such a bad rep?
Henn Ruukel, former director of engineering at Skype for Business and now co-founder of messenger app Fleep, argues that where email really falls down is in its ability to manage conversations between multiple people.
"Email has never been built to support conversations, especially between a group," says Ruukel. "It's not too bad one-to-one, but when a conversation starts to grow in terms of members, and those members start changing, which is natural in a group conversation, then you get problems. With email it's impossible to leave a conversation. Even if I ask not to be included in future messages, someone can "reply all" to a previous message and I'm back in the thread.
"You get a similar problem with the subject line; topics change as the conversation continues, but the subject line doesn't reflect that."
He adds that these issues can't be described as "flaws in email, because it was designed to work in this way. Email was never built to support multi-way dynamic conversations", Ruukel claims.
"Email is just an electronic form of sending and receiving letters. It was a big leap in the 70s; instead of letters being written and printed, they could be sent overseas via a computer in seconds."
He explains that email "has now become so widespread that its universality is its main value", meaning that because just about everyone - certainly everyone in the business world - has access to an email client, its biggest strength is that you can use it to contact anyone, from the President of the US to a street vendor in Mumbai.
But this very universality is also a potential weakness. Most people need the ability to be able to email anyone, including strangers - whether that's a sales lead, a prospective employer or a plumber. But that also means strangers can email you, and that means spam.
Dave Coplin, chief envisioning officer at Microsoft, identifies two types.
"We're used to spam, but there's spam spam and then there's spam," he begins, channelling a certain Monty Python sketch. "The first is irrelevant stuff you didn't ask for, and the second is something you asked for but you don't have time for it now."
So when you're busy you probably don't really want to see the new line-up for your favourite music festival, but it might make for interesting reading over lunch.
Coplin references Clutter, a Microsoft Office feature that moves what it identifies as low priority - but not junk - messages into a separate folder.
"Clutter looks at your habits, what you read and don't read, and what your social network says about you, and makes judgements like whether a person is important as you always read their mails. It uses that to present email in the way you want to see it."
This issue of email being saturated by junk mail is one which has also been occupying Google. Nina Bjornstad, country manager for UK and Ireland for Google for Work, part of the search giant's business that focuses on the enterprise, explains that her firm came up with "Inbox for Work" to solve the problem.
"It's an acknowledgement that inboxes have dramatically changed, and the amount of email we get is increasing exponentially," says Bjornstad. "It's utterly untenable. There are nuggets of information in there which could be managed in better ways."
She explains that Inbox is designed to focus on what matters to its user, and is based around three concepts: Bundles, Highlights and Reminders.
Bundles, as you might expect, packages certain related messages together. For example, if you get batched sales reports over the course of a day, it will make them all available in one instance. And it learns what you want bundled, adds Bjornstad, giving the user "exponential benefits over time".
Highlights brings the user key information at a glance. "I spend a big chunk of my time on planes," says Bjornstad. "So it batches together my hotel, flights and car information, and puts it front and centre for me, also saying if my flight's on time. So I know where I'm going, what I'm doing, and if there are hiccups along the way."
Reminders is a centralised to-do list, with a dashboard showing alerts relating to the tasks the user believes are most important.
While Google is trying to reinvent email, and innovative bolt-on tools like Fleep are trying to introduce new features to address its weaknesses, Microsoft's Coplin argues that actually email is fine, it's the way we use it that's the problem.
"I've maligned email for the last three years myself, but actually it's time to rekindle love for email, with charity posters, T-shirts. We'll call it the email liberation front," jokes Coplin. "If you have no email that's not productive, but too much email has the same problem. The sweet spot is where you just use it for what you want to use it for; it's the only tool on the planet that can do what it does."
He argues that the issue lies with the way in which most people use email, which is that it becomes the thing you do in any spare moment.
"Email is a bottomless pit, it's infinite," Coplin continues. "You go in and you're there forever. It gives you a false sense of achievement, you see your email inbox decrease, you get a kick of dopamine and you feel great! But you've achieved nothing."
He states that email should be timeboxed, so you'll say to yourself that you have a certain hour of every day devoted to email, and that's it. Then you make a list every day of tasks that need to be done, and that's what you go to in any spare moment, rather than email.
"Email is what I do on a train, for two hours per day at most," says Coplin. "I'm not travelling all the way into my office just to sit in front of a screen, that would be mad!
"We should treat email like social media. Previously we've seen it as a bucket which has to be emptied; and if you don't empty it it overflows. But actually it's more like Twitter; it's there for the moment you're looking at it. If you step away, it's still there. If you miss something you can still search for it, or you'll be contacted a different way."
So it seems that email will be with us for a while longer yet, with Google and Microsoft looking to improve rather than replace it, and even upstarts like Fleep looking to complement existing tools rather than sweep them away.
However, as new and potentially improved approaches and systems come along, one thing can be agreed on - there is a growing need to monitor the various, disparate parts of the systems that facilitate communications.