The death of email?

almost 2 years ago

I was getting ready to send out an email at work the other day and I suddenly found myself wondering if it was even worth it. It seems like many times these days emails go ignored or viewed, but not actually read. Working at a school district, I have a large number of my users who figuratively "shut off" their email for the summer.

It never fails, I always have a handful of users who come into my office at the beginning of each school year asking me to reset their password because they forgot it. It blows me away. For me, checking and using your email should be just as much a part of your job as clocking in and clocking out (if you aren't salary).

If you are salary then it should just be a part of your day to day responsibilities. Required, not optional.

I remember my first introduction to email. My parents had a PC with dial up access that my dad used to connect to bulletin board services, but it wasn't until one day at college that I discovered Electronic Mail.

I was working in the library at a local community college and the IT department set me up with an email account. You could only access it via a Unix terminal and it ran on a system called PINE. It was totally text based, but it was absolutely amazing.

Suddenly my buddy and I could send messages to each other in an instant since he was also attending the same college. My fiancee at the time had AOL or one of the other early dial up services, so her and I were also able to suddenly communicate instantaneously.

Sure, I could have just picked up a phone too, but I have always had a bit of "phoneaphobia". I hate talking on the phone. I hate talking in person honestly. If I have the chance to write something instead of saying something, I would just rather do that. I just feel I am better at it.

Anyway, it wasn't long before I had my own Yahoo account and the rest is history. If you had told me back then I would eventually have 10 or more email accounts, I probably wouldn't have believed you.

The other day I got thinking about email and the dilemma I seem to face every year at work. I also got thinking about how little people seem to check their emails and it made me start to wonder if it was a generational thing.

With the advent of Discord, Whatsapp, Snapchat, and IM's, does the current generation even have or check their email accounts anymore?

I figured a good Hive/Leo post should have some facts to back it up, so I started doing a little Googling about email use. Surprisingly, it appears that I was off quite a bit on my assumption.

Searching for "Do millennials use email" brought me to this page. Granted, this site (and the majority of other ones I found) are focused specifically on email marketing, but I figure if you are reading the junk mail in your inbox, you are more than likely reading the important stuff too.

As I said, surprisingly across all demographics, they felt that email is the most preferred channel for marketing materials. Those same demographics feel that it is the most personal method of communication versus other social media forms.

Of course, since that site is specifically dealing with marketing, people could be saying they prefer email over other forms of communication because it is just easier to ignore an email.

Then I found this other site from 2017 (which I know is a bit old), but they actually break down each form of communication and give some feedback on it.

As I said, the results were pretty well tipped in favor of email. At least for Millenials they prefer that form of communication because:

Millennials appreciate the Email message because of the lack of timelines, allowing them time to actually think and reply at their leisure.

Pretty interesting. I don't know what that says for Generation Z, but I would assume the results are going to be somewhat similar. Especially when you take into account he poll results from the earlier page I mentioned.

I really thought this was going to turn out different. All you have to do is look at the title of this post and you would realize I thought email was going the way of the fax machine. Clearly that isn't the case. It still doesn't explain why people think it is okay to just ignore their email for three months out of the year, but that appears to be a totally different issue.

What do you think? If you are from one of the younger generations, what is your preferred method of contact and correspondence?

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The death of email?

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