JavaMail API

Epilogue: Email Past and Future

I’m dating myself here, but I remember a time when AOL was obviously going to replace email (or at least that’s what the pundits and day traders told us). Standard Internet email was clearly too anarchic, uncontrolled, and uncommercial to be suitable for real business. Now that email was escaping the ivory towers of academia, it had to be owned and managed by a corporation. That…didn’t happen.

A few years later, MySpace was obviously going to replace email. Email was only used by old fogies like myself. Anyone under 18 didn’t send or read email; and as they grew up, graduated from college, and joined the work force, email was going to fade away much like Usenet news before it. That also…didn’t happen.

MySpace sold itself to Rupert Murdoch and promptly imploded. The teenagers who made MySpace the new hotness rapidly defected to upstart Facebook. And for a few years the same talking heads who had told us AOL and MySpace were going to replace email were now saying that Facebook was going to replace email. Email had become choked with spam and thus useless. Clearly Facebook was the wave of the future. By this point the articles and blog posts were beginning to sound a little familiar, as if someone had just done s/MySpace/Facebook and rerun the same pieces. In any case, once again that…didn’t happen.

That’s only a brief selection of “email killers” that have been sold to us over the last decade and a half. MSN, Twitter, text messages, YouTube, Skype, and ...