You've Got Mail ...Lots And Lots Of Mail

Email is the central nervous system of our digital lives, and yet it has also become a living nightmare. In a world of space tourism, VR and self-driving cars, surely someone can fix it?

- Charlie Burton

There are some technologies that we take as a given, as much a fact of everyday life as the air we breathe. But on which will future generations look back and go: wait, what?

The motorcar is one. We think nothing of driving a lump of metal at 120km/h down busy roads. In years to come, when autonomous vehicles are the norm, it will seem insane that the most popular way of getting from A to B once involved a significant risk of death, mitigated only by the fallible, sluggish human brain.

Email is another such technology. I get around 40 emails every hour at work. Sometimes when I’m sifting through them I recall an article I once read in the tech journal Fast Company that did a fine job capturing the absurdity of the situation. Email’s user experience design, it argued, was taken from the paper fax. ‘But what if you were expected to use a fax like a telephone – waiting by the machine, scrawling out replies by hand, like Al Pacino and Russell Crowe in The Insider? The messages would quickly pile up, of course. You’d be doing nothing but faxing, all day, every day. The few important documents or memoranda that did come through would be buried in the blizzard, and if you did surface them, you’d be too stressed out managing the relentless volume to respond meaningfully.’ For most of us, that is the horror that is email.