Yet when we talk about email we often focus on the the shortcomings and misuses. Given the misunderstandings, misdirections and scamming that goes on in email, it’s no surprise that email gets a bad rap that it doesn’t necessarily deserve. Just like the shark.

I really got thinking about just how long email has lasted after hearing the CBC Spark story A World Without Email. At the heart of the piece is an experiment by IBM Social Media Evangelist Luis Suarez. Luis abandoned work-related email and replaced it with a collection of social information tools: wikis, blogs, microblogs, and so on. He has some great bosses; I never would have gotten away with that.

The title is a bit sensational, missing that email is itself an essentially social tool, but I heard a lot of what I agree with. Email traps information in its distribution lists, natively resisting the flow of knowledge to where it should go. That very aspect makes email an unwitting hider of facts and an easily-enlisted accomplice to political maneuvering. Sharing organizational knowledge in web-based systems just makes sense.

But the story left me uncomfortable. I use social knowledge tools all the time: blogs, wikis, forums, bug trackers, link sharing, the works. But I start the productive part of almost every day with email. If the new tools are so effective, what’s bringing me back to the inbox?

I chatted with Luis (via Twitter) to suggest that email still fills a viable niche (even if I couldn’t name it). In the conversation I mentioned that I always saw notice of a new direct message first by email, he said he got his by RSS. The light went on for me: email had moved from being where I did the talking to telling me where the conversations were happening.

Same Animal, New Niche

Most email I get notifies me about changes on the various web applications I use. The inbox in this use shifts from a place for electronic letters to a hub for attention management, helping me figure out which individuals, projects and communities to engage with, without having to visit all of them first.

How can we optimize email for this new role that its filling as we use more web-based services with frequent updates? We can’t change the world of email clients easily, but we can make software use email as effectively as possible:

1. Don’t Break Email. This means no ‘no-reply’ addresses. They all have to come back to support or try to handle the response. The users don’t have it wrong when they reply to a no-reply email; they have it right, and are saying that email needs to work both ways.
2. Include response actions in notifications. Click to Unsubscribe in newsletters is probably the earliest example of this idea, and can be expanded by considering user would want to do from that message and putting those actions within reach.
3. Say what you can in the message. An email notification shouldn’t be a reason for people to visit the website that sends it, unless it’s necessary to visit the site in order to take action on the news it delivers.
4. Provide alternatives to email. RSS, Twitter integration or SMS messaging are all viable alternatives to using email for update notifications. It’s unwise to over-rely on email as it is to ignore it in an application’s communication design.

I’ve never been able to get all of these ideas implemented in one product before. They’re not trivial to design and implement, but those that can be achieved will likely impact most if not all users. That’s a good bang to buck ratio for any product manager.

Email’s central idea works well enough that it can keep finding efficiencies despite its disadvantages and the innovations of the web that’s grown around it. It only seems natural that we leverage what we can from one of the internet’s most resiliant design patterns.