Reports of email’s demise have been greatly exaggerated

By the end of 2019, it’s estimated there will be more than 2.9 billion email users worldwide and 246 billion emails sent and received per day (up from 205 billion messages in 2015). Since we’re already inundated by daily emails, it’s easy to see this as a prime opportunity for alternative messaging solutions, such as Facebook Messenger, Slack, Yammer, Hipchat, Kik, or Google Hangouts. But with all the speculation about the next “email killer,” the truth is it hasn’t been invented yet — this decades-old form of communication is still relevant.

Email started out as a simple way for people to send messages to each other. But as our inboxes have gotten increasingly cluttered with jokes, work-related emails, and promotions, we’ve become frustrated to the point that “email bankruptcy” has become part of our lexicon, and we boast about hitting “inbox zero.”

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We bemoan that companies such as Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft aren’t doing much to advance email, but the process is more complicated than most people realize. And while we celebrate apps that hit 1 billion monthly active users or extend into new areas of our lives, they are largely tied into our email addresses — that unique identifier that connects us to all of our services — and thus email’s grip on the industry isn’t loosening anytime soon.

The universal identity system

There’s a feeling that email isn’t hip anymore, that it’s an old person’s technology. The results of an online survey last year indicated that 52 percent of respondents between the ages of 21 and 40 talk to friends by email, a number far lower than Facebook usage (69 percent), texting (83 percent), and phone calls (61 percent). However, for those over the age of 41, email was the preferred method of communication, at 91 percent.

It’s true that communication has rapidly evolved away from email to texting and instant messaging. But there are some who strongly believe all the talk about email being dead is blown out of proportion.

“The problem with messaging is that it’s an immature system,” said Jeff Bonforte, Yahoo’s senior vice president for communications products, who joined following the acquisition of his company Xobni in 2013. He oversees the development of not only the email service — made up of 280 million accounts — but also the company’s messaging app. “Your [email] inbox is the only publicly accessible universal identity system that works across all systems and is a database that [people] can take anywhere.”

As one of the oldest platforms in the market today, Yahoo is acutely aware of people’s perceptions of email. For more than 18 years, the company has been working to not only make sure emails are received but to ensure that we’re not inundated by things that don’t matter. Today, inboxes are congested with messages that need our attention, forcing us to spend countless minutes or hours wading through the chaos before we can work on what’s important. “I can understand the pressure, and the feeling that an inbox [is] overwhelming,” Bonforte acknowledged.

He thinks that the inbox is about to undergo a renaissance that revolves around the identity standard Bonforte believes will continue to keep email relevant. Decades ago, our names were the unique identifier for records, but that evolved to include phone numbers. As technology continued to evolve and we saw the introduction of social networks, apps, and other programs, the common denominator has been the email address. With that in mind, Yahoo is using email as the foundation to apply services like anti-spam and anti-phishing technology, identity management, and other useful tools.

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At the same time, email is not without problems, and Bonforte’s team has been working on improvements to Yahoo’s services. He recognizes that a number of issues need to be addressed, such as further reducing spam and greatly improving search capabilities.

“Computers are good at remembering and managing databases, but it’s our job to add to the recall. Don’t tell me I have a flight coming up, but tell me I could get a better seat, there’s a more efficient way, or that my wife is included on the travel plans,” Bonforte said.

In order to adjust to changing customer demands, he said that Yahoo has to be thinking ahead by a year or two: “The inbox is the database to the user. It should know the temperature, location, when you were at a certain place, etc. The inbox should be consuming 10 times the data and context for later recall and rebuilding the moment [the customer] needs. We’re just scratching the surface [in terms of search].”

Searching for context

As our inboxes have become cluttered with messages and files, the key to bringing back some sanity lies with how a provider utilizes search.

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Peter Monaco, Yahoo’s former vice president of engineering, shared a philosophy in which every object in an email is part of a communication graph, allowing individual pieces to be dissected, examined, and parsed. Under his watch, the company shifted away from a vision of mail as a single facet and instead began looking at people, mail, documents, photos, purchases, travel, and other assorted factors in an inbox.

Indexing everything in your inbox is a task easier said than done. Monaco explained that Yahoo’s original goal was to get the message delivered. Now it’s evolving the system to not only comprehend the message but to evaluate all the individual components. Massive amounts of machine learning have gone into determining what can be parsed. The company implemented a data review project to look at statistics across all email addresses to train the system on how to organize things. The size of this contextual information database is currently over 50 petabytes, and Yahoo said it’ll take two more years to complete the project. But Monaco said that some users are already benefiting from the research.

The task is made more complicated by the fact that Yahoo isn’t looking just at photos and videos that are included in emails, it is also examining web links, purchases you’ve made, receipts, contacts, messages, and anything else that might be used to surface information at the right time. This isn’t something that any startup can easily launch, either: “You have to be an internet-scale company,” Monaco said, as companies can’t rely on off-the-shelf technology to make this happen. Though excited about the possibility of applying machine learning to email search, Yahoo can also extend this to other connected services, such as Flickr, Dropbox, Google Drive, and Amazon Cloud, eventually indexing all the files and incorporating them into search results to further simplify the discovery process.

Yahoo wants the process to be easy for the user, which means not forcing usage of its advanced search feature. In fact, the company believes that users should be able to find the information they want with just one keyword.

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Competing for your attention

Email is facing an onslaught of services determined to pull you away from your inbox — promising to bring normalcy to your life, while likely chomping at the bit for the treasure chest of data that’ll accompany you. Although email addresses are required to authenticate with these offerings, the activity takes place in an app, accommodating the behaviors we’re now accustomed to.

Stewart Butterfield once acknowledged that “email isn’t going anywhere,” a powerful statement coming from the cofounder and chief executive of Slack, the productivity app that has seen usage explode since its creation in 2013. He even jokingly referred to email as “the cockroach of the internet,” a phrase that Bonforte also used during our interview. But while stipulating that the inbox remains relevant, Slack believes it’s weak when dealing with team communication, an area where Slack intends to (pardon the pun) pick up the slack.

“Companies have a choice now: They don’t have to do the lowest common denominator for their asset, people,” said Slack chief marketing officer Bill Macaitis. “Slack is part of this overall trend, moving away from email to messaging. If you look now, no one under 30 is creating email addresses. They’re on Snapchat, Facebook Messenger, etc.”

Instead of asking people to send emails back and forth, stockpiling replies and cluttering inboxes with one-word statements, memes, GIFs, photos, and videos, Slack thinks it provides a better workflow for managing internal and team communications. Its success centers around the popularity of real-time communication, so you don’t have to sift through emails to find out whether your coworkers want to go to lunch or see what someone said about a project update.

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“Messaging is very elegant and simple, taking away the ‘to’, ‘from’, date stamp, greeting, salutation, and all the other things that takes an extra second to put together,” Macaitis said. “I think there’s a natural evolution or transition. There will be a landscape where email and messaging work harmoniously together.”

A part of Slack’s strategy is integrations with third-party applications — there are currently 280 apps in its directory, accessible to its 2.3 million daily active users. Macaitis views Slack as an operating system for teams, offering best-of-breed apps right within its platform.

“More companies are communicating with each other on Slack. People are creating channels within their Slack teams to communicate with vendors, partners, and employees. They’ve done ad projects where they’re sending feedback, comps, etc. to agencies enabling them to move faster than traditional email. We’re starting to see this use case become prevalent. It’s great for companies because it’s not clogging up inboxes and it’s getting [information] into the right channels to the right people,” Macaitis claimed.

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Peter Martinazzi, Facebook’s director of product management for the social network’s messaging service, sees a similar trend. “When we remove friction to communication, people communicate more,” he said. While he acknowledges that email still sees a lot of interaction, he doesn’t think that it’s the only communication channel companies should avail themselves of. “The current state of the world is that you interact in multiple ways. Even though a certain business takes this multiple channels approach, individuals may bias themselves [in favor of] one. On a relationship basis, there’s a default place to go to communicate, and for a lot of businesses, that may become Facebook Messenger.”

Facebook Messenger now counts more than 1 billion monthly active users, and over the past couple of years, it has expanded from peer-to-peer communication to include business-to-consumer messaging. The company believes that instead of the sluggish response times associated with business email, customers will have better interactions through messaging.

“Overall, people are communicating a lot more because friction is removed,” Martinazzi shared. He cites the changing communication landscape in which phones are no longer attached to a physical location: “With a mobile phone, I’m not calling a location, I’m calling you.”

And he believes the same can be said about an email address. “An email address is not a person,” he said. “When I open up Messenger, I smile because I see faces, and that’s different. Email feels like there’s tasks that you have to complete. It doesn’t have the life and the people view that messaging has.”

Facebook Messenger isn’t alone in its effort to simplify information-sharing, as it has followed WeChat in creating an all-encompassing communication platform, with others — like Kik and Line — joining in as well. Facebook’s two powerhouse messaging apps are now processing more than 60 billion messages a day, which is three times more than SMS.

It’s easy to see the appeal of messaging over email: You save the time of having to remember someone’s email address, and sending a message feels more like walking up to someone and talking to them directly. But messaging apps are not without their own issues, such as problems with organization, searching, and the fact that should these services shutter for whatever reason, that history is lost.

Martinazzi admits that messaging is still just scratching the surface in terms of capabilities. He said that providing better tools “means we’re going to communicate more and more. It helps people become better connected. I think we’re just at the beginning and there’s so much more we can do here.”

‘A core part of how companies interact’

Although it seems email is on the defensive, one group that isn’t ready to abandon it is businesses, specifically when it comes to the impact of marketing. In 2014, 55 percent of companies generated more than 10 percent of their sales through email, and brands indicated that this medium was “almost 40 times better at acquiring new customers compared to Twitter and Facebook.”

“Email works,” stated Eric Stahl, Salesforce’s senior vice president of product marketing for Marketing Cloud. This product unit is responsible for giving brands tools to extend their message — including by email — thanks to its acquisition of ExactTarget. “If there’s another channel to measure opens, clicks, purchases, conversions, or better results, people would move. It’s not a question about why [brands] use it. … Customers tell [Salesforce] that email is a critical part of their infrastructure.”

Salesforce straddles both sides of the email debate, offering services around both email and social media. Stahl said the company will “go to any channel our customers want to connect with their customers.” But companies don’t need to choose one or the other, either, as social media targeting and email marketing accomplish different things. Stahl sees particular value in permission-based email marketing.

“We’re 100 percent behind permission-based email marketing. You can’t buy an email list, stick it in our product, and send it out. It’s not compliant with email regulations and what we see is the right tool. We don’t want to inundate people we don’t have permission from…Facebook Messenger is used for a different set of interactions,” he said.

Illustrating the impact of email marketing, Salesforce shared that for last year’s Cyber Monday sales event, more than 2.3 billion emails were distributed through its Marketing Cloud platform, a 44 percent increase from the previous year. Brand customers were also active during Black Friday, sending 191 million emails in just a single hour in 2015. Being able to track analytics is especially important for commerce companies, as it can affect whether a sale is made or not. Social media does provide certain metrics, but Stahl remains adamant that email is a “core part of how companies interact.”

“If you think about a commerce company, you’ll get a non-generic email — it’s personalized based on what you’ve bought in the past. After making a transaction, there’s a follow-up email. You might get updates on shipping, delivery status, and tracking. These are all parts of the ecosystem of how companies are engaging customers,” he explained.

An evolving inbox is not without its challenges

As the volume of email has increased over the past 45 years, service providers are not just adjusting their search strategy but also evolving how the inbox looks. David Robinson, Yahoo’s vice president of design for Flickr, Messaging, and Mail, said user behaviors have changed.

“Where email is interesting right now is in business and spam — not spam like bad emails. When people refer to spam, they refer to excessive [promotional] emails. Behavior today is that [people] get all this stuff in their inbox and try to triage it. There’s an opportunity for Yahoo to look at business mail and reshape the inbox to see what it means. It’s communication between a person and a business, not person-to-person,” Robinson said.

Robinson believes that email is the the primary communication channel between individuals, businesses, and groups. “As messaging busts, it’s the system that remains relevant,” he said.

But he acknowledges that the user experience with email is always changing. This is an area that falls under Robinson’s oversight, along with Yahoo’s own messaging app. To complicate matters more, his team has to deal with how it operates on both the web/desktop and on mobile devices. “Yahoo Mail is the most difficult to change,” he explained. “When designing something, you introduce it to a billion-plus users. Every time you change something, there’s a rabid base of users with an opinion. When you give them something, they learn, and when you change something, they give feedback.” Robinson explained that moving the Send button just six pixels to the right could result in people being unable to find it and complaining.

“If you look at mail, it’s an ancient system, and [people] like it. When you fix something in the interface that’s broken, you’ve ‘broken’ it for the user, as they’ve come to expect it. When users revolt, you’ll have to communicate to the user base why this was changed,” he added.

Improving email clients requires more meticulous effort than updating messaging apps because the changes have far-reaching implications that can’t easily be solved. “You have to take into account the context, such as the message type (e.g. what are you doing?), the location (e.g. where are you?), and how you’re reading the message. It introduces complexity of design that’s crazy,” he explained.

But he recognizes that the inbox is no longer something that lives in isolation. It needs to blend in with other communication tools, and this is the next challenge Robinson’s team is undertaking at Yahoo. “Imagine a world where messaging and mail converge,” he theorized. “It could be a design challenge…If I’m a business person and use email to communicate, I could pick components off the shelf to make it work for professional life. Messaging, mail, and communication tools would be configurable for a user’s need. A modular aspect for digital products: I think that’s the way to go.”

Love-hate relationship

Communication and productivity app providers often boast about how they’ll make our days more efficient and eliminate the need to send countless emails. While reducing the number of messages that flood our inbox is certainly appealing, at the end of the day, all of these services still rely on your email address.

Take Twitter, for example. It’s a social media platform that appears to be completely based on the web, but it still has an investment in email. In 2013, I spoke with Twitter’s postmaster (something LinkedIn also has), someone dedicated to managing how emails were used with the system, largely through notifications. The man behind this was Josh Aberant, and he described email as being the lifeblood of social networks in that it “reminds, informs, and engages users all at the same time” from beyond the confines of Twitter’s service. The service currently sends at least 22 different email notifications to users, including when you receive a direct message, a reply, a retweet, someone favorites your tweet, follows you, or anything else happens that’s related to what you’ve shared.

Having someone overseeing email deliverability is important because getting into someone’s inbox means engagement can continue even when that person is no longer using the app. It’s the logical step to helping users overcome fear of missing out, or FOMO. So while companies behind apps may be perceived as shunning email, that’s easier said than done.

The truth is that apps, even those that are based around communication, need email because native push notifications aren’t enough. “Mail works with every app, every operating system. It’s completely accessible across all systems,” Bonforte explained.

Another sign that email isn’t dead is that startups continue to try to innovate in the space — just look at Handle, Polymail, Boomerang, Front, and many others. These emerging companies offer interesting takes on the email space, and incumbents (and even those in adjacent areas) have made acquisition bids — e.g., Yahoo-Xobni, LinkedIn-Rapportive, Microsoft-Accompli, and Dropbox-Mailbox.

Evolution of email

“There’s an incredible amount of data in email that’s valuable, but it’s locked down right now,” said Michael Grinich. As the cofounder and chief executive of Nylas, he’s joined the growing list of companies looking to evolve email. “Developers can’t build on top of it, and end users can’t access it,” he said. “The tools you have are 15 years old — they haven’t changed in over a decade.”

That’s why Grinich started Nylas, a platform built around email-powered applications. Think of it like Twilio, but for business email communication. “Email is the hub of your communication,” Grinich stated. Nylas offers an open source desktop mail app called n1 that is an alternative to Outlook, Thunderbird, and Gmail, and can be integrated with third-party extensions. It can be adapted in whatever way administrators feel works best for employees. The company also has a cloud-based offering that Grinich described as the “foundation for a new email experience” and which provides additional flexibility to personalize the email workflow for the entire firm.

He describes this medium as a “universal system,” explaining, “When you reach out to someone, whether it’s a reporter, sales prospect, candidate you want to hire … a partner or vendor, you reach out through email.”

“The frustrations with email are related to the fact that over the past 10 to 15 years, the end user email tools haven’t gotten better like other tools,” he continued. “Email marketing has progressed a great deal [in the same time span], but the same amount of innovation hasn’t happened for the end user, especially in the workplace.”

Like Bonforte, Grinich thinks there’s going to be a renaissance, and he believes Nylas can usher this in by opening email up to developers. “What we’re trying to do is so novel — open-sourcing things, building a platform first, and having a huge audience of developers. If the email space were bigger, people wouldn’t think about us competing with other email products. We never claimed what we’re doing is an email killer or the best thing in the world for everyone or it’s going to be competitive with any of these email systems. What we’re trying to build is a focused version of a product for a subset of users.”

While it’s difficult to offer complete customization to billions of users, it’s an interesting premise to give businesses that capability. Perhaps individuals will eventually be able to really tailor their inbox to their needs. Grinich said that Nylas has considerable traction, with more than 3 million GitHub projects, something he called “unprecedented for a mail app.”

“Incumbents are the ones that reach out to us the most,” he said. “They’re looking for a place to differentiate and provide value to end users. The ones that reach out the most are Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and those that work with them. Folks that aren’t the big mail providers are looking for ways to innovate in the space and partner with [others]. That’s a really exciting opportunity in that you’re not tied with Gmail, Yahoo, or Outlook, but have a platform across all ecosystems.”

“For an interface to customize itself to a user’s need automatically will be an interesting thing for communication,” Robinson concluded.