The Future of Email

Email, as we know it, has mostly been the same ever since it was invented (back in the ARPANET days). You must be wondering that I have no idea of what I am talking about. May be you are right. But I bet if you read this post completely, you might just get what I am trying to say. Email (or maybe the usenet groups) may also be the earliest form of cloud computing, which is a widely popular term these days. Before I digress into the cloud, I should come back to Email and the surrounding services. I accept that there have been lots of innovations around Email like the user interfaces, in-built chat, security related features, handling spam, email previews, labels, search, etc. There are a few other innovations made by the desktop email clients. But all these are not innovations to the product "Email", they are innovations around email. All these have been trying to make email the one thing that we check every morning (like we go to the loo every morning) and one of the most frequent tasks throughout the day. In fact, it is safe to say that these days "Email" checks us rather than us checking emails. Do not believe me? Just count the number of times you check your email throughout the day. By checking, I do not mean logging in, but peeking at the inbox. I am pretty sure you will give up after some time. It has become one of the most important forms of communication in today's times. The innovations around email have also been trying to make it the one-stop shop for many things that we do. For example, chat inside email, watch videos inside email, submit form inside email, view documents inside email, view ads inside email, etc. Anyways, email has always been email. The sending and receiving of digital messages on a network.

And it will always remain Email since it is a form of communication, one which is as basic as human life. Of course, there have some amazing innovations (read facebook, twitter) as far as other forms of communications are concerned. And a lot of these innovations revolve to some extent around emails. But in today's world of information overflow, Email has lost its market share when it comes to communication forms. Why? Because it is difficult to keep track of so many things happening around the world through emails. That is why Facebook is so successful. It has become so big in terms of the number of users that it can be called the third largest country in the world. In addition, with the rise of spam, automated emails, bulk emails, notifications, alerts, etc. Email has become hard to manage. These problems made me think about the future of email and the surrounding services (The whole email product). It would be difficult for email to regain the "communication forms" market share, but it can always become the platform for future innovation. What I mean is to become an infrastructure of sorts for various other communication forms.

What if our email clients/services were so intelligent that they understood what the email contains and automatically do these things for us. For example, I get an email about an event next Friday at 6:00 pm and my email service understands it and creates a calendar entry for me. Before the event, I may also get a reminder automatically depending on the importance of the event or the sender. After the event, my email client should automatically send thank you to the organizer again depending on the importance of the event or the organizer. Another example would be I get an email about a local deal by a daily deals website (which I usually ignore) and my email client knows that I have been wanting to buy it badly and somehow escapes the filter I created and alerts me. Or may be I get an email about paying my phone bill and the client recognizes that the due date mentioned in it (if at all) is still far and automatically reminds me just before the due date. What if my email client understands that some news alerts are really important for me to see. What if my email client recognizes that an email was not supposed to be sent and gives me an option to recall (This has happened with one of my friends quite a lot of times and it is no less than embarrassing). These may sound ridiculous but these are some of the tasks where most of my time (in some cases my money) goes. I know these are some of the most difficult problems to solve in computer science. In fact, there are some companies who try to do similar things with search and may have created a Filter Bubble. I also know that it will be a long time (in years) before these things become a reality. But, they will be done one day. Even today, many people use Facebook for personal communication and for them, email is just another boring alerts database. May be LinkedIn will become their professional form of communication (which is mostly limited to Profile views right now). I wonder when will everyone stop using email as their personal form of communication. May be never. Or may be in a decade. I do not know. But I do know that the "whole email product" has to change.