I just read the HBR report about email usage. Keeping in mind that they polled "2600 workers in the US, UK and South Africa who use email every day" ​- which means that it will be skewed toward the business uses of email - it is still provides good data about important aspects of the evolution of email.

Here's an overview of where I think email is in its evolution. [Please note that the conclusions and suggestions that follow are mine and not indicated in the report.]  

1. Mail is largely a means for business communication at this stage.

2. Communication and the context differ between phone, tablet and laptop/pc. Different experiences are required. 

3. Mail is effectively a personal search engine. It is the place where you go to find everything on the web (and documents that aren't on the web) that have been tagged with your name (what do you think that To: line is if not a metatag?). Currently, it's organized chronologically, but that's something of a historical accident. (Google is attempting to help make it easier to parse, but that's really just putting four mailboxes on your stoop.)

What happened to Personal mail?

1. The one-to-one personal communication (and photo sharing) and identity verification that email provided has shifted to text and social networks. A personal mailbox is largely used for three purposes:

1. ​Commercial mail

2. Personal project management - think about the number of mails necessary to buy a house or plan a wedding or set up a bake sale ​

3. Personal filing cabinet (see "Mail is a personal search engine")​ - it's where you get pings from social networks or notes from the school

As you'll note, there are other ways of accomplishing all of these thing. Does that mean that mail is going to disappear? ​Not any time soon. I once heard a writer describe a poem as an affair, a short story as a relationship and a novel as a marriage. I'd make the case that tweet is a hookup, a post is dating, an email is a relationship and a blog is a marriage. 

And just like relationships, email needs to evolve to make it over the long-term.

The Evolutionary Path

e-mail is still stuck on the idea that it’s an electronic version of paper letters. It makes sense that we tended toward this model as we shifted away from the known means of communication. One of the big advances of Gmail is that it shifted away from the skeuomorphism that dominated email previously - remember the AOL post box where the flag would go up when you had mail? - by linking conversations. But that was 5 years ago.

So, we have already evolved from the first stages of email, where it quite literally looked like electronic mail. But it still suffers from four ballasts. ​

1. It assumes everything that wasn't spam is legitimate for all time.

The majority of commercial mail has a very limited lifespan. The alerts that we receive largely exist elsewhere (do you look in your mail for the facebook notification?). ​Most workmail is ridiculously short-lived (or shouldn't exist at all - see sidebar "Scheduling a meeting"). But even the valuable mail fades to lesser importance when the project is done. 

So what? Well, this feeds into the second problem . . .​

2. It's hard to manage

According to the HBR report, 22% of the time is spent managing mail, versus 15% reading and 13% writing. The default sorting mechanism is chronological and the important mails are lost among the unimportant ones. Searching is inefficient because information is tagged poorly and it's all natural language.   

That's because . . .​

3. Mail is treated as separate from the web.  ​

Reducing "workspam"

- unclogging your work mailbox can be done if the mail providers would just treat the use case of managing a conversation:​

The addition of a person into a conversation should not result in another email.

• When an email is forwarded to someone, mail should prompt the user whether the person should be added to the conversation or just see this one email.

  • Person will also be able to say why they are adding the person

  • This can be done when a person hits "reply all" but doesn't add any text (beyond the name of a new person)

• When a "reply all" is hit, the person composing the mail get a clear visual prompt of the people who are now included in the conversation.

  • People who were not on the original mail will be distinguished and the author of the mail will be able to see who added them, when and why.

• Are there a lot of +1*? If so, a +1 counter can be added as a visual clue in the same way as adding people (Asana has done this by adding the "like" function.)

​*"+1" is a way of indicating that you agree with the content of the email.

As I stated above, mail is really just the part of the web that contains stuff that's been tagged for us. (For corporate mail that may be the Intranet, but it's still not the PC.) While we know that we need our mail to be highly search optimized, there are few standards in place to enable the kind of indexing that would make everyone's life easier. A standard and simple way to meta tag or otherwise enhance the searchability of a mail would really help. [If anyone reading this is a product manager for a mail product, can I stress that a Subject line is NOT a meta tag.] For instance, mails that exist elsewhere on the web should be kept as links, not as mails. Documents that are associated with mails should be given the context of the mail for indexing and vice-versa. The context of the way the mail was consumed or created originally should be added to the mail. 

But the last one is the a problem, because . . . ​

4. Mail is not context aware.

Communication is about the reception as much as the transmission. As I noted in my post about content creation, control of the message changes depending on the context in which the message is consumed. According to the HBS study, 24% of mails are consumed on devices that aren't PCs. (I have no idea who these people are- I would have thought the number was at least 50/50, but that's me.)​ 

Let's face it: mail is a very different experience when consumed on phone, on tablet or on laptop/pc. In addition to keeping track of when/where we consumed the mail (each time we open it), we should make the mail experience oriented toward the medium in which it is ​being consumed.  I don't think this has to come from the device, as is hinted at in Motorola's description of their upcoming phone:

Moto X will be laden with sensors that are tightly integrated into the phone and draw little power, Woodside said. For example, the phone will know when it’s taken out of someone’s pocket. And in a car traveling 60 miles per hour, the phone will act differently so a user can interact with it safely.

​But these kinds of context-aware changes to the experience of mail should be standard. For example: 

• Mails that are above 140 characters in content should be sorted below mails that are shorter when a person opens their mailbox on their phone. (an autoreply of "tl;dr, I'm on my phone" could also set expectations)

• When I'm at home, personal mails should be prioritized over work mails, when I'm at work, vice versa. ​

• When I'm on a larger screen, I should be given social update information from the sender (personal: facebook updates. work: current job title/recent connections from linked-in.) so that I can have a sense for ​their context.

Just as the iPhone didn't fundamentally change phone calls, but it did do away with a ton of the inefficiencies (like having to go through voice mails chronologically), it's time that we make the experience of longer-form written communication better. E-mail is a really good productivity tool, if we use it productively. 

Haven't these problems been solved?

Lately, there have been a slew of mail apps that have hit the market (mailbox, cloze, awayfind, triage). Surely, these have addressed the problems.

No. ​

First, they only address the problem on the phone or tablet. Second, they're really just oriented in solving the usability problem. They don't really address the fundamental problem with the data. In reality, these apps aren't businesses. They're not even products. These are just features. ​(I'll put up a post about the differences soon.)

If I were less generous, I'd say that they weren't ​even features. They're highly ambitious resumes. At least one of which has paid off so far.