Back before my kids were even born, I went out and setup email accounts for them when we decided on their names. I remember a time where this was important. I may be aging myself a bit here, but let’s just say I was around when email was a big deal.
My family of five all had AOL accounts and it seemed like that was going to be the future. After AOL I had Yahoo, then MSN, then Gmail, then Outlook and lastly, I have even had my own domain. With each provider I setup and used first.last@domain and if you are clever here you might be able to guess my own mail server address that is a more recent addition of first@last.com.
Email in the year 2000 was quicker than postal mail, but was viewed as less formal and was to be addressed daily or even less frequent. At one point in early 2005, I probably checked it every hour or upon notification of a new email. Over the years I found that I checked the mailboxes less and less to the point now where I will often not check my email unless I am looking for something or am expecting something. And furthermore, notifications are off.
So let me ask you, what is the oldest email in your inbox? And do you check email?
Before Covid at an after hours LAN party at work, I offered up this challenge to my fellow nerdy coworkers. Prove to me the oldest email you can still access on the internet. The winner was a guy that was just 2 years older than me and could still access an email from 1999, while I could only go back to early 2000. Others found that the old email address no longer existed. Most email providers quickly implemented deletion policies for not accessing email account for 6 months. Then there were some younger techs that only had emails from their schools and from NuWave.
We are a hybrid company that is leaning towards using Microsoft teams for all internal communications. It works well for us and cuts down on the number of unwanted emails. So much so that between that and spam filters if I get an email from someone that I do not know it is often from our internal phishing attack simulator trying to get me to click a link.
It is hard for me to believe that the collective future of technology is left in the hands of posterity. Email is not dead yet and the reason may just be because nothing has truly replaced it. Slack, Microsoft teams, Webex, DM's, and online chats are great but are even less formal than email. I can see how this too will change, but I do not think email will every truly go away. Just like postal mail, it's still here despite the fact that email was supposed to be the death of that.
If you have questions about how to start using Microsoft teams at your company, let us know! Also, if you like the idea of having your own email server with your own domain name NuWave can help.
As always stay safe and don’t click that link.
