We may have fallen out of love with emails but they serve us well

Do you remember your first email? Did you consider it at the time to be something only a little bit short of Gandalf’s magical staff or the sudden arrival of a unicorn in the sittingroom?

The answer likely depends on your age and your memory – and willingness to be honest because, let’s be frank, most of us now on first reflection consider email to be a spam-saturated chore, a necessary evil.

But if you were online a decade or more ago, you very likely got a bona fide thrill when you checked your email account (likely to be one given to you by your internet service provider and including its company name) and discovered that an email – maybe even two – had arrived in your inbox.

I was reminded of the contrast between then and now by a little cartoon doing the rounds of Facebook, because you do really forget these things.

I sometimes find it difficult to remember life before mobile phones. The concept of a fixed line being your primary contact point – did we really live like that?

A whole generation has grown up for which songs like By the Time I Get to Phoenix or Blondie's Hanging on the Telephone make no sense. Why would a phone keep ringing, especially off the wall, when surely the person has their smartphone in their pocket and voicemail? Why would anyone remain hanging on the telephone – or even hang up and run to somebody – when everyone knows you can run and keep right on talking on a mobile?

Anyway. In the email cartoon, the first panel is entitled “10 years ago” and shows a stick figure on the left looking in a resigned way at big a handful of paper mail in envelopes. By contrast, on the right the figure gazes delightedly at a big PC as it goes “Ding! You’ve got mail!”

In the second panel, labelled “Now”, on the left the character with the same disgruntled face sits at a laptop and reads “436 unread emails,” but on the right holds up a single letter in happiness.

Yes, that’s my life. Every day I open my laptop in trepidation. Cheap storage means few of us delete mail any more – at best, we are more likely to archive it. But I am always reluctant to archive things because I worry I’ve overlooked an important email that I should reply to (never mind that the emails are so old that no one expects a reply anymore).

At the moment I have over 11,000 emails in my inbox – and they only date back to the start of May. Even more goes to my webmail accounts (although I only really use those when I am travelling). This electronic onslaught is why I am not persuaded about the occasional predictions of the death of email.

This line of thought argues that we are being pulled more towards chat, messaging and social media.

eMarketer noted last year that about 90 per cent of all internet users in the US have at least one email account. And while consumers do seem to be gradually decreasing their use of email as a communications medium with friends and family, consumer usage of email is actually still growing.

According to a report last year from analyst Radicati, about 800 million consumer email accounts will be created worldwide from 2013 to 2017, accounting for about three-quarters of all email accounts. In all, the 3.9 billion total email accounts in the world will grow to 4.9 billion by the end of 2017.

The continuing growth in consumer accounts reflects some interesting trends. Although people may be using other methods to talk to one other they still have to have an email account to sign up for those methods, be they chat clients, Twitter or Facebook.

People also use email to communicate with their local and national governments, public services and companies. It is how they get invoices and shipment notifications when they buy online. Setting aside unwanted spam, many sign up to get commercial email, such as details about new products or services or upcoming sales and coupons.

Most people aged 25-40 have multiple email accounts. Three-quarters of people surveyed in this age bracket by eMarketer said they managed their email using multiple accounts, often across multiple devices.

Businesses in survey after survey say that email not only is important to their business but for a majority is the single most important communication medium they use with customers or potential customers. The majority of email last year comprised business email of one sort or another, accounting for over 100 billion emails, according to Radicati. “Email remains the predominant form of communication in the business space,” the report notes.

All of which connects right back to that little cartoon. We may not be in love with email any longer and the excitement and mystery might have gone out of the relationship, but it’s now a useful, if mundane, companion to daily life.