Everybody Wants To Fix Email But It's Not Really Broken

Do you use email? If you do, how often do you use email and what for? These days, emails act primarily as an identity provider to sign up to online services, a bit like having mobile phone numbers. Millions of people still communicate via email, and in fact it has become accepted as a formal communication method in lieu of printed methods but there are those who want email changed or want to skip emails entirely. There is a race to inbox zero and people proudly declare when their email inboxes are empty as if it's an achievement.

I admit, the majority of emails in my personal inbox are notices from just about every online service that I've signed up to. Most are filed away to the archive, unread, with their own labels, while others remain in the inbox regardless of whether I've read them. Relatively very few of those emails are about something I need to respond to and more often than not, I choose to respond to them later in the day, after all, it's my personal inbox. I can just search for them later thanks to Gmail's robust search feature. Emails to my work inbox on the other hand are treated with a bit more urgency.

I've reached inbox zero once and it brought nothing. Aside from a sense of relief and perhaps an achievement, reaching inbox zero is like being able to clear one level of that Kung Fu game on Nintendo only to face more henchmen on the next one. Those bastards just keep on coming at you. A lot of people cheat inbox zero by selecting all emails and sending them directly to the archive or to the trash. That, dear readers, is what's called email bankruptcy. Email bankruptcy defeats all purpose of inbox zero and achieves nothing other than an empty inbox. It's like quitting a game and restarting or dumping the mess in your room into a closet. You still have to deal with them eventually anyway.

Inbox zero is not about an empty inbox, it's about being able to clear all your tasks that arrive through email and at the end of the day, accomplish your work effectively. Of course, not all of your tasks arrive via email, but that's a bit beside the point. Inbox zero is a state of mind, a sense of accomplishment based on actual work. Inbox zero is about getting things done. You don't need to literally file emails away to achieve that.

The funny thing about this perceived need to clear emails or the need to deal with emails, is that this has actually kickstarted a widespread effort to create the most productive and innovative email clients. People are no longer content with the default apps that come with their devices and the remarkable fanfare that apps like Sparrow, Gmail mobile app, Mailbox, Incredimail, and Alto, receive when they were announced, speaks volumes.

As someone who mainly uses the default clients, with only Gmail as the non-default email app being used, this obsession with fixing email seems rather amusing. Granted, I don't receive hundreds of emails a day that didn't come from an online service, but with Gmail's ability to sort and separate emails based on labels, everything seems manageable.

After seeing a number of these new email apps and a flood of articles written about emails, I've come to the conclusion that there is nothing wrong with the default email apps. What's happening is that people's attitudes, behaviors, and expectations have changed, especially now that touch screen devices are standard, they want a more pleasant experience in dealing with emails. None of these new apps offer a new way of emailing but they do present fresh approaches in reading, sorting, and displaying emails.

With decades of seeing emails being presented the same way, apps like Incredimail, Sparrow, and Alto try to introduce new experiences by bringing new interface concepts. Mailbox encourages inbox zero behavior. Gmail and Yahoo Mail mobile apps deliver a facelift to the email experience while leveraging their own respective email services, and so on, and so forth.

Email isn't broken, people just want a better way of dealing with them. A bit like how people are getting tired of Facebook so they flock to Path. They still do the same things mostly, but everything is more pleasant on Path. Well, almost everything.