The Future of Email: Why the Oldest Internet Tool Still Wins
The Announcement That Keeps Happening
Every few years, someone announces the death of email. It happens with the regularity of a seasonal cold. A startup raises $200 million. A keynote speaker at a tech conference holds up their phone and declares: “We will never send another email.” The audience claps. The press writes headlines. And then, six months later, that startup sends you an email asking if you’d like to try their product.
I’ve been watching this cycle for over a decade now. The killers come and go. Wave. Slack. Teams. Discord. Notion. Whatever new tool promises to finally end the tyranny of the inbox. They all share the same pitch: email is old, email is broken, email is drowning you. Use our thing instead.
And yet here we are in 2027. Email is still the default. Over 350 billion emails are sent every day. Every business contract, every password reset, every receipt, every newsletter you actually enjoy reading — all of it still flows through a protocol designed in the 1970s. The cockroach of communication technology. Unkillable.
This isn’t an accident. It’s not nostalgia. It’s not laziness. Email survives because it is, in the most fundamental technical sense, better designed than anything that has tried to replace it. Not better in the way a sports car is better than a bicycle. Better in the way that water is better than any particular brand of bottled water. It’s the base layer. Everything else is a wrapper.
Let me explain why. And more importantly, let me explain what’s changing — because something genuinely is this time — without pretending that change means death.
The Graveyard of Email Killers
Let’s do a brief tour of the fallen.
Google Wave (2009–2012). Google’s most ambitious communication product combined email, instant messaging, and collaborative editing into a single real-time platform. It was brilliant. It was confusing. Almost nobody used it. Google pulled the plug within three years. The problem wasn’t the technology — it was that Wave tried to be everything at once and ended up being nothing in particular. It required everyone in your life to switch simultaneously, which is the fastest way to ensure nobody switches at all.
Slack (2013–present). Slack didn’t die, but it didn’t kill email either. It displaced some internal communication at companies and created an entirely new category of notification fatigue. The average Slack user receives 70+ notifications per day. Studies from 2025 show that knowledge workers spend 85 minutes daily on Slack — time that largely migrated from email but brought new problems. Channel sprawl. Context switching. The pressure to respond in real time. Many companies now send more email than they did before Slack, because Slack generates follow-up emails: “As discussed in Slack…” has become the new “Per my last email…”
Facebook Workplace (2016–2026). Meta’s enterprise communication tool quietly shut down in 2026. The lesson: nobody wants their work communication tool to share DNA with the platform where their uncle posts conspiracy theories.
Microsoft Teams (2017–present). Teams is the closest thing to a genuine email alternative in the enterprise, largely because it’s bundled free with Microsoft 365. It’s the Internet Explorer of collaboration tools — widely used, rarely loved. But ask any Teams user what happens when they need to communicate with someone outside their organization. They send an email.
Discord (2015–present). Excellent for real-time voice and text in closed groups. Terrible for anything asynchronous, anything that needs to be searchable months later, or anything involving someone who isn’t already in your server. Which describes most professional communication.
The pattern is consistent. Every challenger either tries to replace the protocol (and fails because adoption requires universal buy-in) or tries to replace certain use cases (and succeeds partially, while email retains everything else). No tool has ever managed to do both.
My cat, a British lilac with more opinions than most product managers, watches me toggle between Slack, Teams, and email every morning. She seems unimpressed by all three. I’m starting to think she’s right.
The Protocol Advantage
Here’s the thing that every “email killer” pitch conveniently ignores: email is not a product. Email is a protocol. This distinction matters more than anything else in the entire conversation.
When you use Slack, you use Slack’s servers, Slack’s interface, Slack’s rules, Slack’s pricing. If Slack disappears tomorrow, your messages disappear with it. Your data lives in someone else’s building, governed by someone else’s terms of service, accessible only through someone else’s software.
When you use email, you use an open, federated, interoperable protocol. SMTP for sending. IMAP or POP3 for receiving. You can run your own server. You can choose from dozens of clients. You can switch providers without losing your address (if you own your domain). Your Gmail account can talk to someone’s Outlook account, which can talk to someone’s self-hosted Postfix server, which can talk to someone’s corporate Exchange instance. No permission needed. No partnership required. No API access to negotiate.
This is the TCP/IP of human communication. It’s not owned by anyone. No single company can shut it down, paywall it, or enshittify it — to borrow Cory Doctorow’s useful term.
graph LR
A[Your Email Client] -->|SMTP| B[Your Mail Server]
B -->|SMTP| C[Recipient's Mail Server]
C -->|IMAP| D[Recipient's Email Client]
E[Any Provider] -->|Same Protocol| F[Any Other Provider]
G[Self-Hosted] -->|Same Protocol| H[Gmail / Outlook / etc.]
style A fill:#e8f4f8
style D fill:#e8f4f8
style E fill:#f0e8f4
style H fill:#f0e8f4
Consider what happens when a company switches from Slack to Teams. Every message history, every file shared, every conversation thread — gone, or locked behind an export that nobody will ever import. Now consider what happens when someone switches from Gmail to Fastmail. They update their DNS records, maybe set up forwarding for a while, and continue emailing exactly as before. Their contacts notice nothing. The transition is invisible.
This is the superpower of open protocols. They create a commons that nobody controls. And in a world where every tech company is desperately trying to lock you into their ecosystem, the commons is more valuable than ever.
Every closed platform is eventually subject to three forces: price increases, feature removals, and acquisition. Email has survived all three because there’s no single throat to choke.
How We Evaluated
To compare communication tools fairly, I looked at several dimensions that matter for long-term viability and practical daily use. This isn’t a feature-by-feature comparison — it’s an assessment of structural advantages and disadvantages.
Interoperability. Can the tool communicate with people who don’t use the same tool? Email scores perfectly here. Slack, Teams, and Discord all fail — they are walled gardens by design. You cannot send a Slack message to a Teams user. You can always send an email to anyone with an email address.
Data ownership. Who controls your data, and what happens if the provider disappears? With email on your own domain, you own everything. With any SaaS chat tool, the provider owns your data in practical terms, regardless of what the terms of service claim.
Longevity. How long has the tool existed, and what’s the probability it will exist in ten years? Email has existed since 1971. Slack since 2013. Google has killed more communication products than most companies have ever launched.
Asynchronous communication quality. How well does the tool handle messages that don’t need immediate responses? Email was built for this. Chat tools actively work against it — the real-time interface creates social pressure to respond quickly, even when the message isn’t urgent.
Cost of switching. How painful is it to leave the tool? Email with a custom domain: nearly painless. Slack with years of message history: extremely painful. This asymmetry is not accidental.
Formality spectrum. Can the tool handle both casual and formal communication? Email adapts to tone effortlessly — you can send a contract or a joke using the same tool. Chat platforms are inherintly casual, which makes them awkward for formal business communication.
Search and retrieval. Can you find a specific message from three years ago? Email clients have decades of optimization for search. Slack’s search is notoriously limited on free plans, and even paid plans struggle with large archives.
I weighted interoperability and data ownership most heavily, because these are the factors that determine whether a tool can survive structural changes in the market. Features can be copied. Protocols cannot be easily replaced.
The Fatigue Comparison: Email vs. Slack vs. Teams
There’s a popular narrative that email is overwhelming and chat tools are the cure. The data tells a more nuanced story.
A 2026 study by the University of California, Irvine found that knowledge workers check email an average of 15 times per day. Sounds like a lot, until you learn that the same workers check Slack or Teams an average of 50 times per day. The median time to respond to an email is 1.5 hours. The median time to respond to a Slack message is 8 minutes.
This difference isn’t a feature of chat tools — it’s a bug. The expectation of immediate response transforms every message into an interruption. And interruptions are the single biggest destroyer of deep work.
Cal Newport has written extensively about this. Gloria Mark’s research at UC Irvine showed that it takes an average of 23 minutes to fully regain focus after an interruption. If you’re checking Slack 50 times per day, you’re never reaching full focus. You’re operating in a permanent state of partial attention.
Email, by contrast, is inherently asynchronous. Nobody expects a reply within 8 minutes. The social contract around email allows for batching — checking it a few times per day and responding in focused bursts. This is objectively better for cognitive performance.
The counterargument is that email volume is the problem. And yes, the average office worker receives 120+ emails per day. But most of those are automated — newsletters, notifications, receipts, system alerts. The number of emails requiring a thoughtful human response is typically under 20. Compare that to the 70+ Slack notifications, many of which are @mentions expecting a response.
Chat tools didn’t reduce communication overhead. They added a new layer on top of existing email. Most companies now maintain both, which means knowledge workers are drowning in two inboxes instead of one.
The irony is thick. Tools designed to reduce communication friction have increased the total volume of messages a person must process daily. Email didn’t create this problem. It existed alongside it, doing what it always did: carrying the messages that actually matter.
graph TD
A[Daily Communication Load] --> B[Email: ~120 messages]
A --> C[Slack/Teams: ~70+ notifications]
B --> D[Automated: ~100]
B --> E[Requires Response: ~20]
C --> F[Channel noise: ~40]
C --> G[Direct/Mentions: ~30]
E --> H[Avg Response Time: 1.5 hrs]
G --> I[Avg Response Time: 8 min]
H --> J[Allows Deep Work]
I --> K[Destroys Deep Work]
style J fill:#d4edda
style K fill:#f8d7daAI Email Assistants: What Works, What Doesn’t
Now let’s talk about the thing that is genuinely changing email in 2027: artificial intelligence.
Every major email provider now offers AI features. Gmail has Gemini integration. Outlook has Copilot. Apple Mail has its own intelligence layer. Third-party tools like Superhuman and Shortwave have built their entire value proposition around AI-powered email management.
Here’s what actually works:
Smart categorization. AI is excellent at sorting email into meaningful buckets — not just spam vs. not-spam, but “needs your response,” “FYI only,” “newsletter,” “automated notification,” “payment related.” This is genuinely useful. It transforms a flat inbox into a prioritized work queue.
Draft suggestions. For routine responses — confirmations, scheduling, brief acknowledgments — AI-generated drafts save real time. They’re not perfect, but they’re good enough to edit and send in 10 seconds instead of typing from scratch in 60.
Summary generation. Long email threads are a pain to catch up on. AI summaries that extract the key decisions, action items, and open questions from a 47-message thread are legitimately helpful.
Smart scheduling. AI that analyzes your communication patterns and suggests optimal times to check and respond to email. This sounds trivial but helps enforce the batching behavior that makes email manageable.
Here’s what doesn’t work:
Fully automated responses. Every attempt to have AI respond to emails on your behalf has created problems. The tone is wrong. The nuance is missing. The AI agrees to things you wouldn’t agree to, makes promises you can’t keep, or sends replies that are technically correct but socially tone-deaf. In 2026, a widely reported incident involved an executive whose AI assistant accepted a contract modification that cost the company $2 million, because the AI interpreted “that works for us” as approval.
Inbox zero automation. The dream of AI that processes your entire inbox and surfaces only what matters remains mostly a dream. The problem is that “what matters” is deeply contextual and personal. An email from an unknown sender might be spam or might be the most important business opportunity of the year. AI can’t reliably distinguish between the two without understanding your goals, relationships, and current priorities at a level that requires, well, being you.
Emotional intelligence. AI still struggles with the emotional subtext of email. Is this sender angry or just direct? Is this praise genuine or passive-aggressive? Humans read these signals instinctively. AI misreads them regularly.
The net effect of AI on email is positive but modest. It makes email approximately 20% more efficient for the average user, according to a 2027 productivity survey by Reclaim.ai. That’s meaningful. It’s not revolutionary.
The most important thing AI does for email is also the most boring: better spam filtering. Modern AI-powered spam filters catch 99.9% of unwanted messages before they reach your inbox. This is an extraordinary engineering achievement that nobody appreciates because it’s invisible. If spam filtering suddenly stopped working, every “email killer” pitch would evaporate overnight, because the problem they claim to solve would become trivially small compared to the deluge of spam.
Email as the Backbone of Business
Strip away all the hot takes and trend pieces, and you find a simple truth: email is the legal and operational backbone of modern business. Not because it’s glamorous. Because it’s reliable.
Contracts and agreements. When a deal closes, the final terms arrive by email. When a dispute arises, lawyers subpoena email records. Courts have consistently held email as admissible evidence. No court has ever treated a Slack message with the same weight, partly because Slack messages can be edited and deleted without audit trails.
Identity and authentication. Your email address is your identity on the internet. Every account you create — banking, social media, government services, SaaS tools — is tied to an email address. Password resets go to email. Two-factor authentication codes go to email. If you lose access to your email, you effectively lose access to your digital identity.
Receipts and records. Every purchase confirmation, shipping notification, and financial statement arrives by email. These create a paper trail that’s searchable, archivable, and legally meaningful.
Regulatory compliance. Industries like finance, healthcare, and law require communication records that are tamper-resistant and retainable for years. Email archiving solutions are mature and well-understood. Slack archiving is a nightmare of API calls and incomplete exports.
This infrastructure cannot be replaced by a chat tool. It’s not a matter of features or user experience. It’s a matter of legal frameworks, regulatory requirements, and institutional trust built over decades. The legal system understands email. It doesn’t understand Slack, and it won’t for a long time.
Think about it this way: if every chat tool disappeared tomorrow, business would continue with minor disruption. If email disappeared tomorrow, the global economy would grind to a halt within hours. That asymmetry tells you everything about which tool is actually essential.
The Newsletter Renaissance
One of the most unexpected developments of the 2020s has been the resurgence of email as a publishing medium. Substack, Beehiiv, ConvertKit, Ghost — these platforms have turned email newsletters into a viable business model for independent writers, journalists, and creators.
The numbers are striking. Substack alone had over 35 million active subscriptions by the end of 2026. The top newsletter writers earn seven-figure incomes from email alone. And unlike social media platforms, where algorithmic changes can destroy a creator’s audience overnight, an email list is owned by the creator. Nobody can throttle your reach. Nobody can shadowban your newsletter. Nobody can change the algorithm to show your subscribers fewer of your posts.
This ownership model is why serious creators are moving to email-first strategies. Social media becomes the acquisition channel. Email becomes the relationship channel. The distinction matters enormously, because relationships — not impressions — are what drive sustainable revenue.
I run a newsletter myself, and the contrast with social media is stark. When I post on social media, I reach maybe 5-10% of my followers. When I send a newsletter, I reach 40-60% of my subscribers consistently. The open rate doesn’t fluctuate based on some opaque algorithm. I control the variables. I control nothing on social media.
The newsletter renaissance is also producing better writing. There’s something about the email format — the intimacy of arriving in someone’s inbox, the implicit contract that the subscriber actively chose to receive your words — that encourages writers to be more thoughtful, more personal, more substantive. The best newsletters read like letters from a knowledgeable friend. Social media posts read like billboards on a highway.
This isn’t nostalgia for an earlier internet. It’s a rational response to platform risk. Every creator who has been burned by a social media algorithm change — and that’s most creators — eventually arrives at the same conclusion: build on email, promote everywhere else.
The Simplicity Thesis
Here’s my core argument for why email will outlast every challenger: it is irreducibly simple.
An email has a sender, a recipient, a subject line, and a body. That’s it. Four elements. You can add attachments. You can CC people. You can format the text. But the fundamental unit is a message from one person to another. A child can understand it. A CEO can use it. A government agency can mandate it.
Chat tools add complexity by design. Channels, threads, reactions, mentions, statuses, integrations, bots, workflows, huddles. Each feature solves a specific problem and creates two new ones. Channel proliferation means information gets lost. Threading means conversations fragment. Reactions mean ambiguous responses (“Does the thumbs-up mean they approve the proposal or just acknowledge they saw it?”). Every feature is an opportunity for misunderstanding.
Email’s simplicity is not a limitation. It’s a feature. It’s the reason a protocol designed in the 1970s can handle use cases its creators never imagined — e-commerce receipts, newsletter publishing, calendar invitations, file sharing, automated alerts. The simplicity of the format makes it infinitely adaptable.
This is what technology commentators consistently get wrong. They look at email’s sparse interface and see something primitive. What they should see is something robust. Complex systems are fragile. Simple systems are antifragile — they gain from disorder, to use Nassim Taleb’s framework. Every time the communication landscape gets more chaotic, email benefits, because it’s the one tool everyone already has and already understands.
My cat — the British lilac one, not a metaphorical cat — demonstrates this principle daily. She has a bed, three different blankets, a heated pad, and a custom cat house. She sleeps on the cardboard box the cat house came in. Simplicity wins. The tool that does the basic thing well outlasts the tool that does twenty things adequately.
Generative Engine Optimization
As AI-powered search engines and answer engines grow in influence, the relationship between email and search engine optimization is shifting in ways most marketers haven’t fully grasped.
Traditional SEO focused on getting your website to rank in Google’s search results. Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) focuses on getting your content cited and surfaced by AI systems — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google’s AI Overviews, and the growing ecosystem of answer engines that synthesize information rather than listing links.
Email plays a surprising role in this new landscape. AI systems are trained on massive corpi of text, and email newsletters — particularly those published on platforms like Substack that make content publicly accessible — are part of that training data. Writers who build authority through consistent, high-quality newsletter publishing are finding that their ideas and frameworks get cited by AI systems more often than equivalent content published only on social media.
The mechanism is straightforward. AI systems prioritize authoritative, well-structured, substantive content. Email newsletters, by their nature, tend to be longer, more thoughtful, and more original than social media posts. They’re also more stable — a newsletter sent in 2024 still exists in its original form, while a tweet from 2024 may have been deleted, edited, or buried by algorithmic changes.
For businesses, this creates a compelling case for investing in email content. A well-written newsletter doesn’t just reach your subscribers directly. It builds a corpus of authoritative content that AI systems can reference, cite, and surface to new audiences. It’s the rare marketing channel that compounds over time rather than decaying.
The practical implications for GEO are clear. Write email content that is specific, substantive, and original. Publish newsletter archives publicly so they can be indexed. Use consistent terminology and frameworks. Treat every newsletter as a long-term asset, not a disposable communication.
This is the opposite of how most companies treat email marketing. They write disposable promotional emails designed to drive a single click. The emails that matter for GEO are the ones that contain genuine insight — analysis, frameworks, data, original thinking.
What Email Gets Wrong
I’ve spent most of this article defending email. Let me be fair about its weaknesses, because email is far from perfect.
Group conversations are terrible. Reply-all chains are a war crime against productivity. There’s no clean way to have a multi-person discussion via email without descending into chaos. Chat tools are genuinely better at this, and that’s the primary reason they’ve gained traction.
Real-time collaboration doesn’t exist. You cannot co-edit a document over email. You cannot have a quick back-and-forth discussion. You cannot share your screen. For synchronous work, email is the wrong tool entirely.
Encryption is an aftermarket hack. Email was designed without encryption. PGP and S/MIME were bolted on decades later and remain so difficult to use that virtually nobody uses them. In 2027, the vast majority of emails are still sent in plaintext across the internet. This is a genuine security problem that the email ecosystem has never adequately solved.
The spam problem is managed, not solved. AI-powered filters are excellent, but they’re engaged in a permanent arms race with spammers who also use AI. Legitimate emails still end up in spam folders. Spam still occasionally reaches inboxes. The fundamental architecture of email — anyone can send a message to anyone — is both its greatest strength and its greatest vulnerability.
Calendar invitations are chaos. The .ics standard for calendar events over email is functional but barely. Time zones, recurring events, updated invitations — the user experience is consistently terrible across every email client.
These are real problems. But notice something about them: they’re all solvable without replacing email itself. Better threading UIs. Integration with collaboration tools. Improved encryption standards. More sophisticated spam filtering. Better calendar protocols. Each of these can be addressed as an incremental improvement to the existing email ecosystem. None of them require abandoning the protocol.
This is the key distinction. Email’s problems are problems of implementation, not of architecture. The protocol is sound. The user experience built on top of it can always be improved.
Predictions for Email’s Next Evolution
Let me stick my neck out with some predictions for where email goes from here. These are based on current trends, not wishful thinking.
AI-native email clients will become the default by 2030. Within three years, the standard email experience will include AI categorization, draft suggestions, and summary generation as built-in features, not premium add-ons. The email client of 2030 will feel dramatically different from today’s Gmail or Outlook, even though the underlying protocol will be identical. This is the beauty of open protocols — the experience layer can evolve independently of the transport layer.
Email authentication will get stricter. DMARC, DKIM, and SPF — the protocols that verify sender identity — are already becoming mandatory. By 2029, unauthenticated email will be effectively undeliverable. This raises the cost of spam while making legitimate email more trustworthy.
Interoperability bridges will emerge. Someone will build a protocol bridge that lets you send a message from Slack to an email address and receive the reply back in Slack. The technical groundwork exists. When this becomes seamless, it will eliminate the last coherent argument for choosing chat over email.
Email addresses will become decentralized identities. As self-sovereign identity frameworks mature, email addresses — particularly those on custom domains — will serve as portable, verifiable digital identities. A unique identifier that you control, verified by third parties without relying on any single platform.
Newsletter platforms will merge with CRM. The line between sending a newsletter and managing customer relationships is already blurring. By 2030, email will be the connective tissue that binds content marketing, sales, and customer success into a single workflow.
The inbox will become a dashboard. Instead of a chronological list of messages, the email client of the future will present a synthesized view: tasks extracted from emails, upcoming deadlines, pending responses, key metrics. The raw messages will still exist underneath. Some clients, like Superhuman and Shortwave, are already moving in this direction.
Why Email Wins
The answer to “why does email survive?” is ultimately boring. And that’s the point.
Email survives because it is open. Because it is federated. Because it is simple. Because nobody owns it. Because it works across every device, every operating system, every organization, every country. Because the legal system understands it. Because the financial system depends on it. Because the identity layer of the entire internet is built on it.
Every email killer has failed for the same reason: they offered a better experience within a walled garden, while email offered a good-enough experience across the entire world. In technology, universal and adequate always beats excellent and exclusive.
The companies that understand this are building on email rather than against it. They’re making email clients smarter, email marketing more sophisticated, email security more robust. They’re treating email as infrastructure — like roads, like plumbing, like electricity — and building better things on top of it.
The companies that don’t understand this will continue launching “email killers” every few years. And every few years, I’ll write another article explaining why they failed. It’s a comfortable rhythm. Predictable. Reliable.
Kind of like email itself.
I check my inbox one final time before closing my laptop. Three newsletters I actually want to read. A contract that needs signing. A receipt for the overpriced cat food that my British lilac insists upon. A message from a friend I haven’t spoken to in months.
All delivered by a protocol that’s older than I am. All arriving reliably, silently, without friction. No app to download. No account to create. No subscription tier to evaluate.
Just messages, from people, to people. The way it’s always worked. The way it always will.