In defense of email

By: Nick Mehta | Posted: 2008-07-07

To paraphrase Benjamin Franklin, a few things seem to happen every year with certainty:

• Taxes
• Brett Favre (un)retirement rumors
• Articles prognosticating the end of email

And while tax codes are silly and Favre is fun, these articles are often downright ridiculous.

Sadly, many of the "email is dead" predictions hope to lure readers into the same false choice that is the hallmark of "provocative" journalism. Is email dead? Yes or no. Is America's economy in trouble? Circle Y or N. Is the world in trouble? If we keep our dialog at this level, it certainly will be.

Let me preface my response by saying that I am biased. I am self-aware and self-described email bigot. I like email and find it (like millions of others) to be very valuable. In fact, I like it so much that I banked my career on it.

But I find it frustrating how predictable these email eulogy articles (which seem to come out every year) have become. The typical one goes something like this:

• Don't you get too much email? [emotional blackmail appeal to reader]
• I get too much email too [I feel your pain and am very important so don't feel bad if you don't hear back from me]
• [x] study reveals people get too much email [like you need a study to prove this]
• The problem is that email is broken - here's why
  • Email is full of spam and viruses
  • Email is used for too many things for which it wasn't intended [cite trite example of editing documents through email]
  • Email is overwhelming
  • Email is irrelevant to teenagers
  • Email is unproductive
• The solution is [insert technology of day - IM, blogs, wikis, twitter]
• And it's all Microsoft's fault

Let's tackle these issues point-by-point:

1. Email is full of spam and viruses.

No one can deny this. Spam creates a chain around our collective, virtual necks in terms of productivity. However, the naivete in this argument is that spam somehow will not follow us into whatever communication medium (e.g., facebook) we use heavily. The fact is that we have zero marginal cost of communicating to the sender (no postage stamp) and a high profit potential for Unwanted Commercial Email (the friendly name for spam). When there is money, our world finds a way. So spam, while an issue that needs to be prosecuted with viglience, is not an email issue - it's a communications issue.

2. Email is used for too many things for which it wasn't intended.

Like spam, this falls into the "victim of its own success" category. Email definitely wasn't designed for large file transfers, group document editing or huge broadcasts. But its universality and flexibility outweigh many of these limitations.

As Andrew Mcafee points out in his 9x email argument, new technologies that are "better" for certain use cases (like document collaboration) have a very high bar in that they have to be way better (9 times as much) to justify switching off of something that works so universally. Andrew rightly points out that these new tools aren't "direct substitutes for email; instead, they're intended to provide capabilities that email can't."

You know what other things are used for applications for which they weren't intended? Radio. Television. Phones. PCs. x86 chips. The Internet. In communications, general-purpose, universal and "good enough" media are often the most effective.

3. Email is overwhelming.

I empathize on this one, because email is hard to deal with. Once you get into the hundreds of messages per day, you are in a different ballgame in terms of time management. I've spent countless hours coaching my various teams on how to best manage and process email.

That being said, email is again being held up as a scapegoat for the larger fact that near-zero-marginal-cost, near-instant communications allow far more connections between people than ever before possible. This is great in many ways but we as a society are being forced to adjust to the consequences and are trying to find the balance.

The only reason email is the obvious poster child is because it is the medium of choice. As with spam, if facebook takes over, we'll start talking about needing therapy for handling our facebook wall messages. Authors, as in the ReadWriteWeb article mentioned above, sometimes try to point out that the email user interface itself is overwhelming:

"The Twitter experience is lighter because of the user interface. With Twitter, we're presented with a scrollable list of messages.With email we need to select the message and drill into it. Traditionally email clients show only the subject line, so even if the message is short, the user needs to click. And all these clicks add up."

The fallacy in this logic is the fact that we are confusing the interface implementation (e.g., Microsoft Outlook email client) with the medium itself (email). As you probably know, anyone can build an email client and thousands exist today. Indeed, many clients (including Microsoft Outlook) include auto-preview functionality that shows the body of the message without a "click."

4. Email is irrelevant to teenagers.

I fully agree with this one, speaking from highly non-scientific, subjective data (nieces, nephews, etc.). As new children learn technology, they aren't bound by the principles and habits of the past, so they latch on to the latest and greatest (e.g., texting or social networks).

However, it will take generations for us email "luddites" to be worked through the system. So to declare defeat for email any time soon is premature.

Indeed, some of the analysis mistakenly attacks the popular implementation of an email client versus the medium itself. For example, this article on cnet talks about the fact that other media are much more available through mobile devices than email is. Any Blackberry user knows that email can be as mobile as anything else out there.

The main fact here is that the very same network effect that makes email so popular in the 30+ crowd (we use email because other people use email) is what limits it for the new generation (many teens don't use email, so therefore many teens don't use email).

However, us 30+ers plan to live for a few years to come.

5. Email is unproductive.

This point is the most relevant to business managers and the most troublesome in my opinion. The argument is that email interrupts your daily flow and makes you less efficient. For example, this study says that 28% of business time goes to "interruptions by things that aren't urgent or important, like unnecessary e-mail messages."

I 100% agree that interruptions (of any form) are killers of effectiveness. Like many, I try to turn off my email client whenever I want to get work done.

However, to say that the email "inbox" somehow is unique in its "interruptive"-ness is logically incorrect.

Our inbox simply represents our spot on the modern assembly line at which we look for new things to do. As anyone who flies a lot and has seen the Blackberries and iPhones pop up religiously as the wheels hit the ground, email is our habitual center and source of truth for what to do next.

If we have an issue with email being unproductive, we really have an issue with the amount of time we spend as workers "reacting" to others' priorities (the queue of email you have is set by others) versus creating based upon our own priorities.

And we also have to admit that the inbox is comforting. It tells you what to do. You can do it often and easily (reply-to-all with a "thanks" for example). And you often get near-instant validation (especially if the recipient is as addicted as you are).

Why do we check email when we wake up, when we go to bed and all throughout the day? Because we're addicted - not to email, but rather to the satisfaction and feedback loop that comes from a pre-defined queue of work.

Respond to others' priorities is easier.

This is definitely a problem, because left to its extreme, we won't create anything.

But eliminating email will simply shift our queue somewhere else (twitter, SMS, etc.)

Indeed, voicemail used to be the old "to do list" and has been written off by many including your's truly, because email is at least easier to manage.

Conclusions

• Clearly we have to learn to use email better.
• And the email clients need to continue to be more usable.
• Spam and viruses are simply the result of email's popularity and will follow to the next communication medium of choice.
• It's been hard to match the universality and flexibility of email - and the bar for new media is much higher.
• In many ways, new communication media are really additions rather than substitutes for email.
• We can switch off of email, but the queue will follow us somewhere...
• ...until we reconcile as businesses and a society how much reacting versus creating we actually want to be doing.
• Teenagers probably will not use email as heavily as we do, but they will still likely have some queue that guides their daily activities.
• So email is still alive and kicking.

Comments welcome. Or you can just email me.