I ask because I just read an article that said that the number of online email jumped from around 4% in 2009, to 20% in 2010. I was thinking about this and my own history with email and I think I have some reasons why this is happening.

1. Levels of spam. If you don’t have great spam filtering which most desktop clients do not, you tend to get stuck with a high garbage to useful email ratio. Online filtering has been better than any kind of spam filtering on the client side, even using highly regarded spam filtering products.
2. Importance of email as a communications medium. Email has some good qualities, but I think that people are seeing the limits to sharing their data. Now with services like SugarSync, and cloud storage, one of the major reasons people use email (to move files) is becoming less important. People are creating videos on their phones/ipads/cameras and traditional email isn’t an easy way to transfer it. Most email providers have size limitations, and most people’s internet connections are not reliable/fast enough to make this process easy. So I think people are uploading their video to services like Dropbox or Google documents and sharing them from there.
3. Rise of Twitter/social networks, plugins to text for free on smartphones. I think that the immediate and easy nature of these apps bypass the ability of marketers to spam their messages. People are learning to control what information they take in, just to be able to deal with all of the information they are asked to absorb. So naturally they want to eliminate things like advertisements in Gmail, or things like Aol/Hotmail advertisements as well. They are using plugins in their browser to secure their privacy, and putting their numbers on Do not Call lists. People are sick of being spammed with email “newsletters” that every website seems to assume they want when they only want to finish reading an article they found interesting.
4. Email is an older application like Gopher, and like older applications, new generations want to explore new ways of communicating. With the mainstreaming of Facebook/LinkedIn/Twitter, they are seeking new ways to connect. So apps that are mobile will probably be the new communication method. Younger people seem to like distributed and peer-to-peer applications that don’t depend on a central server to verify and maintain their information. Apps like Tiger text which provide anonymity I believe will grow even more popular.

I don’t see the death of email, since lots of older users like me find it easy. I do see it being subsumed by Skype, or other online video like FaceTime that is only a component of their full services. One day typing a message will seem as quaint as using a telegraph machine. Kids will ask, did you really have to “type” out messages? Why didn’t voice recognition just send it? Why indeed?