Why Email Remains A Killer App

The first email was sent in 1971 by the inventor of this beloved and hated, technology, Ray Tomlinson. He created email for the ARPANET, the earliest iteration of the internet, which lead to Tim Burners-Lee creating the World Wide Web, which is not the same as the internet but is often conflated with it. So email has been with us for over 50 years. It’s still with us and it likely isn’t going anywhere soon. We exchange over 330 billion emails every day. Why is it the killer app?

Email apps have evolved significantly over the years. Both for work and personal use. Outlook of course, has been around forever. Surprisingly though, it’s Apple’s Mail that is the most used email app according to Litmus, an email marketing platform. Oberus, another one, has similar data. Mail accounts for around 57% of of the most used email clients, through its laptop/desktop, iPhone and iPad devices. This is followed by Gmail at 27% and Outlook, surprisingly at just 4%. That’s email client preference. But it doesn’t explain why email remains so popular as a premium option in both business and personal use. What does?

In my work as a digital (cultural) anthropologist, I do a lot of workplace ethnography studies. This is a form of research that all anthropologists use, whether studying remote societies in the hills of Papua New Guinea or talking to workers about the technologies they use. I’ve never been to remote societies in the jungle. My work has always been in the concrete jungles and the vast labyrinths of cubicles and sterile meeting rooms devoid of any cultural warmth. Although occasionally there’s a nice, half-dead plant in the room.

I always ask about email. In over 50 workplace ethnographies, email always features. Always. Email is a part of life for anyone that is active in our digital world. It’s critical in the workplace as the still dominant communication tool, despite Slack, Teams or most any other corporate app. We often have to use email to sign up or sign in to personal apps and services we use.

Email remains a killer app because it is both an invisible technology and deeply personal. Email has become a key element of our digital lives.

When I say invisible, I mean that much like a telephone, we have all grown up with this technology. We use it without thinking about it. It is so pervasive in our culture that we just adopt it. It is a technology that is fundamental to functioning in our digital society. So much so, that “sign-in with Google” is so ubiquitous with any app that a digital product company includes it as an option without even thinking about it. Apple is fast following. Microsoft had a chance with Hotmail, but like mobile OS, missed the game.

Attempts have been made to replace email. None have succeeded and likely none will, at least not for a while. Slack was hyped for its first few years as the app that would kill off email. Until it didn’t. Other similar tools came along and they too, would put an end to email. None have.

An email address has become such a key element in our digital lives that we have even developed social norms and behaviours around it. Email has featured prominently in the arts aspect of culture; movies, tv shows, literature, music. Thus, email has become a technology embedded into cultures around the world. We become angry when businesses abuse it, such as sending too many marketing emails. We are as mad about our email address being leaked in a data breach as we are about financial information being leaked. Apple has even created a way to make anonymous emails and email providers such as Apple, Google and Microsoft have spent many millions developing anti-spam technology, to great success. It is all but impossible to sign up for anything without an email address.

Some companies are trying to evolve email apps, recognising that email plays such a key role in our work and personal lives. Some do this well, others have failed. For a time, some tried to make email work like Slack and similar tools with mixed results. Almost all good email apps today have some form of calendar integration and often can connect to other apps we use like task management and productivity apps.

All of this signals that email is far from dead and will continue to evolve in interesting ways. Creators of email clients have an interesting set of opportunities in front of them. The more they understand personal behaviours and how email fits into culture beyond productivity (which is where they mostly focus right now unfortunately) the more they’ll find new revenue opportunities beyond subscription fees.

Rather than finding ways to try and kill off email addresses, we should be thinking about how we can make email work better for us.