Nicholas Toone

For as long as anyone remembers, email gets a ton of shit for a variety of reasons:

Spam. Bad organization. Spam. Search that can never really find what you’re looking for. Spam. Ridiculous unread counts (which led to this supremely weird need to achieve Inbox Zero). Spam.

People seem to dislike email. Like, really dislike it.

A lot of things have been blamed, most notably the email clients themselves, which, to be fair …

… email clients can be pretty horrendous. Whoever designed the Gmail interface needs a stern talking to ¹. And who gave the green light to stupid shit like Focused Inbox and Conversation thread view? It’s email, not chat.

All of this spawns “articles” (which are really ads) for more email clients that do it better (they never do), and companies that claim they’ve re-imagined email (they haven’t, but will happily charge you for it) but, in the end, it’s still. just. email.

There are two very basic things you can do to make email easy:

1. 1. 1. Manually organize; create a few custom folders.
      2. Learn the very basics of setting up filters and make use of them.

That’s it. These two things take hardly any time at all and once you learn/do them, you’ll rarely have issues going forward.

The one thing that all the detractors fail to recognize is that while so very much has changed online in the past few decades, Email has been the one constant.

The dot com craze came and went. The MySpace and Napster generation had its time in the sun. Whatever the fuck Web 2.0 was had its moment. Then the iPhone showed up and now and now we have to do everything via apps. Don’t forget the Internet of Things and all the stupid smart devices. And there’s steaming and subscription plans. Right now, AI is the new shiny.

And yet, quietly in the background, one of the things keeping everything together is email. It still uses SMTP and the only real change I can think of was the move to IMAP from POP (allowing for full synchronization between clients/devices). As far as clients go, the only difference between then and now is that the message list in most email apps moved to the left of the preview pane as opposed to above it.  Sure, companies have screwed around here and there by implementing pretty templates and other bits of fluff (like goddamned Conversation view!) but, at its core, email is still email.

Is email really making us miserable? It’s not making me miserable. What makes me miserable is having to navigate a phone tree menu that tells me there is all kinds of good information on the website even though I was just at the website and it has nothing but a half baked knowledge base and/or an AI Chatbot masquerading as “live support”. Oh, and I can’t find an email address anywhere on your site. And now I’m sitting on the phone because I managed to find your companies number on page four of a Reddit thread complaining about how hard it is to get a hold of anyone at this company.

What makes me miserable is the fact we have to install a mobile app and sign up if we want to do anything from travel to banking to rewards cards from coffee shops.

Apps will save us! Apps will make things easier! Oh, and they’ll provide you with a never ending barrage of notifications and, you guessed it, emails! All turned on by default! You’re welcome!

You need an email to sign up for an account on the app. You need an email to sign up for an account anywhere.

I really don’t understand how email sets people off. I’ve seen people share their screen where there is a red bubble on Outlook with a 20K unread badge and I wonder what the hell is the matter. Then again, these are the same people who have browsers that look like this:

And/or taskbars that look like this:

Look, email is not difficult. Like everything else in this world, people just make it difficult. Email is simply one more thing to be upset at and complain about.

Who knows what the online world will look like in another couple of decades. For some reason I feel AI will settle down within the next five years and become something pretty tame. I really hope that VR/AR/Spatial Computing² will crash and burn. I don’t know what the next real ³ life altering tech will be or what it will look like, but  I will bet cash money that you’ll need to sign up and sign in with your email address.

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^1: I mean. Googles “design” team isn’t what I’d call top notch. Most of Googles software products are perfect examples of what happens when you let engineers design interfaces: either overly cluttered or obtusely sparse.

^2: “Spatial Computing” is fucking dumb. Yes yes, 360 degree videos are neat but the idea of looking at websites or watching movies with a giant thing on your face is just plain fucking stupid. The Internet and TV are two dimensional. No matter if your looking at a 6″ phone screen, a 24″ computer monitor, a 65″ TV or some giant, virtual browser that eye screens in the HelmetMask has hovering over your coffee table, the content is still two dimensional.

^3: The idea of VR is neat and it always has been. Its problem is that it’s so  limited no one really seems to know what to do with it. I don’t really see VR going anywhere fast.

AR is definitely cooler and will have its uses. For example, the idea of having instructions on how to fix an engine overlaid on your vision while you’re fixing an engine is a fantastic idea. The issue is that 1: this will take a huge amount of hardware shrunk down into something the size of reading glasses, and 2:  people will need to get over the idea of computer glasses being awkward (which they are and will be for a long time yet).