Your inbox is never empty. New messages arrive faster than you can read them. You spend hours every day reading, writing, filing, and deleting emails. Slack was supposed to replace it. Teams was supposed to replace it. Countless startups have promised to solve email. Yet here we are, drowning in messages just like we were decades ago.

Email is one of the oldest technologies still in widespread use, predating the web by decades. It was designed for a world of research scientists sharing information between universities. Now it carries business contracts, marketing pitches, personal photos, and the daily operations of virtually every organization on Earth.

Why did this particular technology become so dominant, and why can't we escape it?

The Problem This Was Meant to Solve

Before email, written communication at a distance required physical delivery. You wrote a letter, put it in the mail, and waited days for a response. Urgent messages required phone calls, which required both parties to be available simultaneously. There was no good middle ground between synchronous conversation and slow physical mail.

Email offered something new: asynchronous written communication at electronic speed. You could compose a message whenever convenient, send it instantly, and the recipient could read and respond whenever convenient for them. No more telephone tag. No more waiting days for letter delivery. The message arrived immediately but didn't demand immediate attention.

This asynchronous nature solved problems that phone calls and letters couldn't. You could send a message to someone in a different time zone without worrying about waking them. You could compose your thoughts carefully before sending, unlike the spontaneous nature of phone conversations. You could send the same message to multiple people simultaneously. And you had a written record of what was said.

For organizations, email created new possibilities for coordination. Information could flow horizontally across departments, not just up and down hierarchies. Distributed teams could collaborate without expensive conference calls. Documentation happened automatically as conversations created their own paper trail.

How It Actually Came to Exist

Email has remarkably old roots. The first electronic messages were sent between users on the same mainframe computers in the early 1960s. In 1971, Ray Tomlinson sent the first network email—a message between two computers connected by ARPANET, the precursor to the internet. He also introduced the @ symbol to separate user names from computer names, establishing a convention that billions still use.

For its first two decades, email was primarily used by academics and researchers. The technology was there, but the infrastructure wasn't—you needed access to a network-connected computer, which most people didn't have. Email remained a specialized tool for specialized users.

The 1990s changed everything. As internet access spread to homes and businesses, email came with it. Free services like Hotmail (launched 1996) made email accessible to anyone. Corporate email systems became standard office infrastructure. The explosion was rapid—by the mid-1990s, email had gone from niche technology to ubiquitous business tool.

The standardization of email protocols (SMTP for sending, POP and IMAP for receiving) meant that different email systems could communicate with each other. Unlike proprietary messaging systems, email was open—anyone could send to anyone else regardless of which service they used. This interoperability was crucial to email's dominance; it created a universal system rather than fragmented walled gardens.

Why It Still Exists Today

Email's persistence puzzles many observers. Newer tools seem better in almost every way—Slack is more conversational, instant messaging is faster, collaboration platforms are more feature-rich. Yet email remains the baseline, the one channel everyone monitors, the fallback when other systems fail.

The key to email's survival is its universality. Everyone has an email address. You can email anyone, regardless of what other tools they use. You don't need to know if someone is on Slack or Teams or any particular platform—you just email them. This universal addressability is unique to email and makes it irreplaceable for communication across organizational boundaries.

Email is also decentralized in ways that newer tools aren't. No single company controls email. You can switch providers while keeping your communication capabilities. This independence makes email resistant to the fate of discontinued products or changed terms of service. Platforms come and go; email persists.

The asynchronous nature that made email valuable originally remains valuable. Unlike chat tools that create pressure for immediate response, email's conventions allow for delay. You can respond tomorrow, or next week, without seeming rude. For many kinds of communication, this lower-pressure dynamic is preferable to the real-time demands of chat.

There's also simple inertia. Business processes are built around email. Legal and regulatory frameworks recognize email as official communication. Contracts are signed via email. Customer support happens via email. Replacing these systems would require coordinated change across entire organizations and ecosystems.

What People Misunderstand About It

The most common misconception is that email volume is the problem. People complain about receiving too much email, but the real issue is often about expectations and habits, not technology. Many emails exist because people CC unnecessarily, send messages that could be conversations, or use email for tasks better suited to other tools. The technology enables overuse but doesn't mandate it.

Another misconception is that newer tools will replace email for all uses. In practice, new tools tend to complement email rather than replace it. Slack handles quick team conversations; email handles external communication. Chat is for informal exchanges; email is for formal documentation. Most organizations now use multiple communication channels, with email remaining central.

Many people don't realize that email's openness is both its strength and its vulnerability. The same protocols that let anyone email anyone also let spammers reach millions at virtually no cost. The spam problem that has plagued email for decades is a direct consequence of its open architecture. Filtering has improved, but the fundamental vulnerability remains.

Perhaps the biggest misunderstanding is that email is outdated technology that should be replaced. Email is actually remarkably well-designed for its purpose. The problems people have with email—volume, distraction, expectation of immediate response—are cultural problems, not technical ones. The technology does exactly what it's supposed to do: deliver messages asynchronously and universally. How we choose to use it is a human problem, not a technological one.