E-mail Will Soon Disappear - Is It?

In recent years, more and more often you can see opinions that e-mail is outdated and looks like a "dinosaur" against the background of instant messengers, video call services and other modern communication tools.

Content:
1. The history of the emergence and development of e-mail
2. Benefits of e-mail
3. What is the future of e-mail?
4. Conclusion

Skeptics argue that the end of the era of e-mail is just around the corner and soon it will become the same relic of the past, like ICQ or LiveJournal. We decided to look into this issue, analyze the situation and form our opinion about what the future holds for e-mail and whether addresses with the @ sign will really disappear from the online spaces soon.

The principles of e-mail exchange originated several decades before the advent of the mass public Internet. The forerunner of e-mail was the ARPAnet system, created at the turn of the 60-70s as a single electronic network of US research centers. The nodes of this network exchanged information with each other using note messages called RFCs (Requests For Comments).

However, the RFC technology was quite complex, confusing, and not well suited for mass adoption. Just like reading e-mail or sending a letter through it was difficult, so in 1971, a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (the famous MIT) Ray Tomlinson decided to simplify it.

He developed an electronic messaging program called SNDMSG and sent the first e-mail to a remote computer, for which he is now considered the founder of modern e-mail. Equally important, Tomlinson's mailing address used the @ symbol to separate the user's name from the network host name. And it was he who became the permanent symbol of e-mail throughout its history. By the way, since the name of the SNDMSG program was not very well remembered, the first users began to call it e-mail, and over time, this whole technology began to be called that.

In the future, e-mail technology was constantly improved, for example, after the advent of the DNS system, postal addresses received domain names in the modern format: [email protected] . At the same time, dedicated mail servers arose, which began to function as hubs to speed up the distribution of letters. From these servers, letters were sent to users' computers via network protocols (POP3, MAPI, IMAP) or web interfaces. In 1996, the first commercial e-mail provider, Hotmail, was launched, and in 1997, one of the first free e-mail services, Yahoo! Mail.

Predictions about the imminent decline of e-mail have long worried Internet users, but so far, none of them has come true. First, social networks were called “killers” of e-mail, then instant messengers, and now they are considered multifunctional cloud platforms for communication and collaboration - for example, Slack. But e-mail has a number of tangible benefits that make it still relevant and popular, even 50 years after its inception. These include:

Despite all the predictions about the imminent decline of e-mail, the number of messages sent is growing every year. For example, in 2015, more than 205 million business and commercial e-mails were sent online daily. And by the end of 2021, this figure is likely to exceed 320 million.

Experts believe that the further development of e-mail will be closely related to its personalization and automation. Already, many mail services support automatic sorting of letters. Their algorithms recognize different types of incoming messages (personal, promotions, social networks, spam, etc.) and organize them into the appropriate folders.

Another promising direction in the development of e-mail can be "smart" assistants and autoresponders. Perhaps in the future, AI algorithms will be created similar to modern chatbots that will be able to conduct meaningful correspondence with real people. This feature is very useful for business, as it will significantly facilitate and speed up communication with customers and partners. It is likely that changes are also waiting for the e-mail address - in the event that e-mail moves to any new standard.

In general, e-mail services are constantly changing, acquiring new features and adopting advanced technologies. They are also not spared by the global trend towards simplification, and in the future these changes will be even more noticeable. For example, replacing copies and blind copies with e-mail sharing, as well as the ability to leave comments on letters instead of forwarding them, is very relevant now.

E-mail was one of the first tools for online communication, but it still has not lost its relevance. The volume of e-mail correspondence is steadily growing every year, and a significant part of it is business and commercial letters. Today, e-mail can rightly be called the most popular business communication channel, and the emergence of new features and technologies expands its capabilities every year.

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