Everyone Has Email. Nobody Uses It Right

Not everyone has TikTok. Not everyone has Twitter (or X, or whatever we're calling it this week). Not everyone has Facebook, Instagram, or that new app your cousin won't shut up about. But everyone — and I mean everyone — has an email address.

We ignore it. We fear it. We let it accumulate 170,183,723 unread messages like some kind of digital hoarder.

This is a guide about email. Not the boring corporate kind where someone CCs twelve people to ask about printer paper. The real kind. The useful kind. The kind that's been quietly running the internet for decades while we were busy taking selfies (btw do you remember the time when there were NO selfies on the internet?)

In the last fifteen years, I've changed my phone number five times. I've switched countries, cities, apartments, and my beard style. But the Gmail address I got when I was in university? Still works. You can send me an email right now and I will (most definitely) reply. Unless you're being delulu, obviously.

I've also changed messengers more times than I can count: Telegram, WeChat (I lived in China for a while), iMessage, Viber, WhatsApp, ICQ (yes, I'm that old), Facebook Messenger, and probably a dozen others I've forgotten. Some of them don't even exist anymore.

But email? Email is still here. Email has always been here. Email will be here when we're all cyborgs arguing about neural-link etiquette.

All official things come through email — documents, confirmations, receipts, that thing you need to prove you actually paid for something three years ago.

And there's another thing nobody tells you about email: it's how you talk to people who matter. Any time I read a book I love, and if the author is still alive and available online, I try to find their email and write them a thank you note. Most of them reply.

You can't DM famous people on Instagram and expect a response, but send them a thoughtful email and suddenly you're having a conversation.

Email is the infrastructure of the internet. It's not sexy, but neither is plumbing, and you definitely notice when that stops working.

Email is older than the internet as we know it. The first email was sent in 1971 by a guy named Ray Tomlinson, who also decided that we should use the @ symbol to separate usernames from host names. Thanks for that, Ray. Truly iconic work.

Back then, email was just a way for researchers to leave messages for each other on the same computer network. It wasn't instant. It wasn't fancy. It was just... useful. And that usefulness is exactly why it survived.

By the 1990s, email became the killer app that got normal people online. Everyone wanted an email address. It was your identity on the internet before social media made "identity" a monetizable data point.

And unlike every social platform that's come and gone (RIP Friendster, MySpace, Google+, Vine, and whatever's dying as I write this), email is still here because it's built on open standards.

That's the magic. Facebook can shut down tomorrow. Twitter can rebrand itself into oblivion. But email? Email is forever.

Email serves a few distinct purposes, and understanding them helps you use it better:

This is the boring but essential stuff. Your bank sends you statements. The government sends you tax information. Your doctor's office confirms appointments. Your landlord sends you lease agreements. Job offers arrive via email. So do rejection letters, but we don't talk about those.

You need an email address. It's the closest thing we have to a universal internet passport.

Unlike instant messaging, email doesn't demand an immediate response. You can think before you reply. You can write something longer than three sentences without everyone involved having a panic attack. It's communication with breathing room, which in our current age of constant notifications feels almost luxurious.

Email is searchable history. Every conversation, every attachment, every confirmation number is sitting there waiting for you to need it. I can search "flight confirmation 2019 Barcelona" and find exactly what I need in three seconds. Try doing that with your WhatsApp messages. I'll wait.