Is Email an Endangered Species? Our Tech Expert’s Insights

With instant messaging apps on the rise and changing the way we communicate in the workplace, could email be phased out?

How we communicate has changed greatly over time. Just a few decades ago, we saw post mail superseded by the email and, now, it appears that email might be an endangered species due to a bunch of newly adopted ways of communication, particularly in the workplace.

Geoff Quattromani from the Technology Uncorked podcast spoke to me about whether or not he believes the evidence points towards emails heading the way of “snail mail”.

“From a corporate perspective, we are now seeing applications that allow teams to work together in a better way,” Geoff said.

“What we used to have was people hitting reply-all on large emails that might have had 10, 20 people in them. You would get to work in the morning, and there was a list a mile long, of a conversation where you had to open every email to see what was happening.

“In instant messaging in a corporate sense, you’re able to see a conversation happening around documents, conversations, or people giving project updates based on a chat feature.”

It’s clear that apps like Slack and Microsoft Teams are changing the way that workplaces are able to collaborate, but will these ever spell the end of the email?

“A lot of [companies] have tried to kill the email,” Geoff said.

“It really became clogged up with garbage, it almost became a junk box for a lot of people, so when you start to look at instant messaging as a potential replacement for email, these big brands will continue to try until one day they succeed.”

Listen to the full chat about the future of email and instant messaging in the player above.