Is Email Dead

Email is defined as a system for sending messages from one individual to another via telecommunication links between computers or terminals. In 1992 with thanks to NSF’s free thinking management, internet access became offered to the general public for the first time. In 1997 the internet exploded and the number of users was believed to be into the tens of millions. Electronic writing has been increasing for decades, but just because technology is rapidly changing this does not mean people are changing. Email is a highly important aspect of electronic writing because it is one of our main sources of communication. In this essay I will focus on what email is and where email is going to take us in the future.

Email is not limited to messages sent from one inbox to the other. There are two kinds of email; asynchronous and synchronous. Asynchronous messaging applications include fax, voicemail, SMS messages, and RSS feeds. Emails of this kind are 'notifications'. You will not receive an immediate response, if you even receive a response at all. Synchronous response messaging includes instant messaging, telephony, and web-conferencing. These email applications are different because they involve 'interactions'.

Email is electronic messaging. As we expand our definition of email to mean more than just the messages in your inbox, you can start to understand email is going to keep evolving. WDFM’s article on The Future of Email Marketing states that, “Some say social networks such as Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace and Facebook threaten email because of closed-loop structures limiting communication among members. However, our gurus say social networks actually have vital email components.” Being said that IM, Facebook and other social networks are considered a source of email means that email is in the future and only going to expand further. Facebook is one of the largest social networking sites to date. This site offers ways to send email as asynchronously and synchronously.

Seeing as social networking sites are taking over the internet many young people think that email is for ‘old people’. The younger generations do not realize these sites are the future of email. The internet boomed during my era. These youth had to teach the older generation how to use the internet and now the new generation has to teach my era all of the new advancements in technology. This goes to show how fast the internet has grown and we can only imagine the future. Email shows no signs of slowing down.

Email is a great form of communication because most of these social networking sites are safe. You can post as much or as little as you want about yourself, you also have the ability to say yes or no when someone tries to add you as a friend. One of the best features is being able to control who can look at your page, this way you can keep the creepers out of your personal life. There is many other ways to communicate via internet, but email is the safest route to go.

One negative that comes along with the email, IM, Facebook craze is the slang writing. With the future generations growing up with their main source of communication being the internet, they have no need for formal writing. Words like ‘U’, ‘R’, ‘TTYL’, ‘4’, and ‘IDK’ are frequently used when writing an email or message. But this type of language is not acceptable in papers, letters or formal emails to someone of high stature. Actually this type of writing is pretty much never acceptable in school or the work force. Someone does not write ‘r’ instead of are on purpose, it comes naturally because we are so used to typing the letter ‘r’ in our informal writing. Also it is so much easier. In a survey taken by The Pew Internet & American Life Project, it states that just shy of 9 out of 10 teenagers between the ages of 12 and 17 years-old go online regularly, and more than half of them go online every day. This statistic is huge! This means that 9 out of 10 teens are picking up bad writing habits, these habits are hard to break, especially when you have been doing them for 10 years.


Is email already a thing of the past? Email has evolved so fast, but now some would say that email is dead. This is not true. Ventureblog.com states, “While people may debate the death of email, there is no question that many email servers are already overloaded with spam. Current spam solutions are beginning to address the problem, but so far they all suffer from the arms race issue - as fast as we come up with new ways to fight spam, spammers are finding new ways to deliver it to us.” Ventureblog.com wants us to believe because of spam email is going to die. As of right now, the bad guys are winning, but this does not have to be true about our future in electronic writing. Spam is a huge concern in the email world and is turning people off from using email, this is why many people are resorting for other forms of email and starting to use IM and sites like Facebook and Myspace.

Email is not dead yet, many new websites and outlook email sites are coming up with new ways to block spam. Companies now are trying to figure out a way, instead of blocking out junk mail to only let certain websites to send them emails in the first place. Ventureblog.com gives a good example of how this will work in the future:

It follows, then, that if you could remove a great majority of the "good" email
from consideration, the remaining email could be subjected to much more
stringent tests while still maintaining the same low false positive rate. The
new version of Microsoft Outlook applies this logic - it has a spam filter built
in, which includes the option "automatically deliver mail from anybody in my
address book". As soon as they figure it out, Microsoft will extend that to
include more subtle gradations like "anybody I've ever sent mail to is very
likely not to be a spammer", among other variations.To use a specific example,
take 100 messages, 50 of which are good. Your spam filter takes out over 90% of
the spam - leaving you with 4 ads for viagra. It lets through 48 of the good
ones, leaving you with 2 missed emails.If you were able to identify that 25 of
those 50 messages were definitely good (your whitelist), then you'd only subject
the remaining 25 to the spam filter. That leaves you with 1 missed email - or,
if 2 was OK, you could double the effectiveness of the filter and only get 2 ads
for Viagra.

This is only one way future companies are getting prepared to keep email alive.This is a great alternative to junkmail. Many large companies do not allow employees to check email at work, because of the fear of receiving a virus, with new advancements such as whitelist this will not be an issue at the workplace. This makes communication even more effective though email.

With email expanding so rapidly, we know there has to be some new technology on its way. Pete Warden says, “Email's the dominant way of communicating on the internet, but our tools for dealing with it have barely changed in a decade. Here's the services I think will define whole new ways of working with email over the next few years[.]” Some of the new technologies he introduces are: Clearcontext’s, which is an outlook add-in that offers dozens of targeted tools, to help you receive the information you need faster, PostBox is another site that helps you search, sort, and categorize your email through modern interface, A simple site to use would be IwantSandy, this is very original site that offers a means to control scheduling, appointments and tasks by emailing requests to their service, OtherInbox offers organization for your non-Human emails. Other technologies include: Xobni, Gmail, Microsoft’s Knowledge Network, Tacit, and Contact Networks. These are all new ways to communicate that companies are working on to be available in the future, making email more advanced.

A critic would argue that email has hurt our society because it has made staying in touch impersonal. Electronic writing has made hand written letters a thing of the past. This critic is wrong because in reality email has helped us stay in contact with one another. One of the main positives would be that email has made a tremendous advancement in staying in touch with old friends. Without email or new technologies such as IM or Facebook it would be really difficult to stay in touch with all my friends from Canada. Between school and work, people do not have time to write letters or even phone an old friend. With technologies like IM and facebook one can see what their friends have been doing and how they are doing. Even though email has made staying in contact impersonal it has made staying in contact easier in general.

This all goes to show that, email has changed a great deal since it was first introduced back in 1997, and is continuing to expand andchange every day. When we view email as meaning more than just the messages in your inbox, we see how email will never die and only keep evolving as the internet continues to grow. Email is so important because it has become one of our main sources of communication. We see how email simply started out as just sending messages between computers, has advanced into social networking, and now has advanced even further with a bunch on new technologies to look forward to. All of these forms of email have made our lives easier, made staying in contact effortless and made communication easier.