The death of email

You have 138 unread messages – and you’ve been away from your desk for only two hours.

Without getting any further than the subject line, 95% of them will be deleted. You’ll reply to two of them, and dump the rest. And these are only the messages the spam filter and folder redirects actually let you see. Is it any wonder that the younger generation has already received the bigger message: email is dying.

It isn’t only the young – with their MSN accounts, BlackBerry Messenger and Facebook pages – that are shunning their inboxes. Amid a wave of newer communication and collaboration tools, some companies are already moving away from the electronic mail system that’s been a mainstay of business for almost two decades.

Is it any wonder that the younger generation has already received the bigger message: email is dying

Technology company Atos recently put into action plans to kill off internal email within two years. The email server may soon be keeping the fax machine company in the basement store cupboard.

According to research from comScore, webmail usage fell by 6% in 2011. The drop-off was much steeper among the young, with usage for 12 to 17-year-olds plunging by 24%.

Although this was mitigated by an increase in mobile email, it reflects a trend that prompted Facebook to exploit email dissatisfaction among teenagers when in 2010 it launched an email-like service for messaging through the social network.

“High-school kids don’t use email, they use SMS a lot,” Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg said at the time. “People want lightweight things such as SMS and IM to message each other.”

For a generation that’s only just got its head around electronic communications, the looming sell-by date on email may be frustrating. Eventually, however, email could become as marginalised a medium as the written letter it’s all but replaced.

Killing the messenger

Email – despite dating back to the early 1970s – has only been a central part of our communications repertoire for fewer than two decades.

Back in 1991, there were only three million accounts, a figure that’s since climbed to more than 3.1 billion, according to figures from eMarketer. Each year there are more than 90 trillion messages sent to and from those accounts. Along the way, it’s almost killed off the fax, and made phone calls a courtesy rather than a necessity.

It sounds irreplaceable, but there are considerable downsides. According to email provider Sendmail, 90% of those messages are spam, and although filters sift out the majority of junk, the average inbox is still peppered with annoying and time-sapping clutter.

A 2010 survey from computer services company Star claimed that one in five UK workers spends more than an hour each day managing their inboxes, which is the equivalent of 32.5 working days per year.

The time wasted dealing with these emails was one reason behind Atos’ plan to eradicate email from its internal communications by 2013, with CEO Thierry Breton claiming that, on average, staff were receiving more than 200 emails a day – and 15% of them were actually wasting between five and 20 hours a week handling email. Surely, the company reckoned, there must be a better way.

“Email has been adopted as the single tool for everything,” says Rob Price, a director involved with the mail switch-off strategy at Atos. “People spend too long sifting through all the information included in an inbox.”

The emergence of more inclusive, collaborative tools has put the squeeze on email. SMS and instant messaging have long been popular with the younger generation due to their low cost, and also their immediacy. Now perceptions are beginning to change in the workplace.

“People are beginning to understand just how unproductive email really is,” says David Christopher, founder of StopThinkSocial, a website that focuses on social networking in business.

Christopher has invited scorn with his prediction of the death of email by 2018, but believes the claim stands up to scrutiny if only people will take a leap of faith and accept that alternatives are possible.

“Email has only been the key tool for the past 20 years, and that’s what people have been using,” he says. “But email isn’t really a collaborative tool – it’s a linear communication tool.

“It isn’t as necessary as it used to be, and we hold onto it only because of fear – people don’t want to change. I talk to a lot of people about email, and how it could be gone by 2018, but only 20-odd years ago email never even existed. That cycle means it will be replaced by something better.”

Email isn’t really a collaborative tool – it’s a linear communication tool

In his day job as a team leader at a large IT provider, Christopher says that his team has managed to reduce email use by 95% by switching to Twitter, Facebook and enterprise social network tools such as Yammer, which enable more open communications.

While email productivity studies have focused on the workplace, the ideals are equally applicable elsewhere, with personal inboxes also clogged with advertising and only intermittently checked.

“It’s partly generational – but I’m of an age that grew up with email tech,” says Price. “Yet in my personal life – what I do at home or on the train – I look at Twitter, Facebook or Google+. I might look at email, but most of the stuff on email is spam or marketing from retailers – it isn’t the way I communicate in my personal life any more.”

Generation game

Perhaps it’s no surprise that much of the shift away from email has come not from businesses but from youngsters embracing new technology, as they did with SMS, and later RIM’s BBM messaging service. Experts agree that IM suits the quick snippet, often involving multiple chats at once, with instant responses creating a more natural communication platform than premeditated messages constructed in email.

The ability to combine instant messaging with a social network where people can gather with friends, and communicate in real-time, means that many no longer even bother with email at all. Why have an address that people have to remember when they can interact directly through a personal page?

While time spent in webmail has dropped, social networking accounted for 16.6% of all time spent online at the end of 2011, according to web metrics firm comScore. The shift to social network communication is also highlighted by an Econsultancy paper, showing that among marketers who rely on email as a communications tool, 75% admitted social networks made their work outlook “challenging” or “very challenging”.

Part of this is due to the fact that social platforms are better suited to always-connected mobile devices, which teenagers are far more like to own than PCs. Research from consultancy Intersperience showed that 75% of 18 to 21-year-olds regard laptops and smartphones as their most wanted devices, with only 5% naming desktop PCs as most important to them.

“Mobility holds the key to device popularity, particularly among the younger generation of ‘digital natives’ who demand an always-on internet connection,” says Paul Hudson, CEO of Intersperience. “The PC is still an important device for the older generation, but our data points to a sharp demographic divide on how PCs are regarded.”

The reticence to use a medium that belongs to their parents’ generation can cause problems as children begin to enter the adult world.

“Universities use email as the default mode of communication, but getting our undergraduates onto email is always a problem because they use other forms of communication,” says Dr Neil Selwyn, senior lecturer in IT at the Institute of Education at the University of London. “It’s a perennial problem getting students to use their official email addresses because they have their own accounts elsewhere.

“When we speak to young people, the way that they communicate is ‘polymedial’ – many different things are on the go at once. A conversation will take place over Facebook, then switch to MSN and maybe text messages, and then face to face,” says Selwyn. “To then expect children to communicate in a linear way through one medium is unrealistic; and is the reason why we could see problems developing in the workplace.”

I have a policy in my workgroup that I won’t answer support questions by email

Email is also responsible for useful information getting trapped in private inboxes, where it never sees the light of day. According to Christopher, its one-to-one nature means that people don’t share information, resulting in work being repeated several times.

“I have a policy in my workgroup that I won’t answer support questions by email – I’ll force the inquirer to put it into an online social platform,” he says. “I do that for two reasons: one, I don’t want to be a bottleneck, and no-one can always respond to all emails immediately; and because other people could be able to answer that question.

“If I reply to an email, the answer I give doesn’t benefit the rest of the community – and the amount of times I receive an email on a one-to-one basis where that information could be useful is huge. Open is better than closed.”

Post-email workplace

When Atos announced its plans to exile internal email, people raised concerns that there would be a dearth of communication within the company. However, Atos went on to deploy tools that were more in line with social networks.

Rather than one-on-one discussions, or one-to-many systems that lead to a flurry of confusion over which document version is the latest, the company is finding better alternatives. “There’s a lot of progress around unified communications, with online meetings and instant messaging, and there are enterprise social networks and social platforms emerging,” says Atos’ Price.

The new tools immediately undermine email by providing real-time access to updated files.

“The simplest example is using the wiki as a collaboration space, which enables people to share content and collaborate on what they’re doing – whether it’s preparing a bid, working on a consulting engagement or an outsource bid,” Price claims. “These are all things that people would have sent using emails, sending documents and big attachments back and forth, and there would be a lack of clarity on what the right version was. Collaboration space provides access to shared thinking that wasn’t there with email.”

Another reason behind why young people are shunning email is its rigid formality. The medium has barely progressed from the linear format that made it the mainstay of the workplace – email clients remain lines of text that reflect the filing cabinets of the letters they replaced.

The sense of stolidity is exacerbated by the fact that email is often seen as a proper, accountable communication, with companies required to keep copies and messages carrying legal gravitas. But that doesn’t mean newer platforms lack credibility.

“In legal standing, as I understand it, an IM can carry the same legal weight as an email,” says Bob Hallewell, founder of email management company Expert Messaging. “It’s still an electronic communication from a company – companies might not keep them in the same way that they keep email, so it might be harder to enforce, but in terms of law, it’s equally strong to send an email or tweet or post to the internet.”

A slow death

Even if it is showing unmistakable signs of decline, email is a long way from extinction (see In defence of email, left). Yet it’s lost its monopoly on electronic communications. Increasingly, it’s a marginal, functional tool that’s used predominantly by an older generation of office workers. For today’s teenagers, email is now used for little more than signing up for social networking services.

How it will fare as the post-email generation becomes more influential in the workplace remains to be seen, but its role as a central contact point looks vulnerable to services such as Facebook Connect, a one-stop login concept.

Email will linger on – we still receive a clutch of letters through the post every day, after all – but in a few years’ time, the number of unread messages in your inbox almost certainly won’t break three figures when you pop out for a meeting.