I’m sure there was a time when receiving an email was exciting, but I can’t remember when that was.

As with everything in tech – like Facebook, for example – people get overexcited and dive right in.

Now Facebook is just a breeding ground for idiocy and fake news, and our email inboxes are flooded with non-stop spam and newsletters. Worse still, some of the stuff you actually want (or need) to read ends up in the junk folder, and who has time to sift through that nonsense?

Basically, people are getting over email at a rapid rate, and the Telegraph is on board, too:

Each day, over 269 billion emails are pumped out across the globe – most of them by machines.

Already they devour employees’ time and productivity but the figure is expected to rise to 333bn by 2022.

For those that can even remember them, the few short years during the Nineties when email was considered thrilling and modern have receded into the distant past.

Instead, growing employee frustration over spam, the draining process of triaging important messages from the unfiltered mass, and the steady rise of alternative forms of communication – from messaging apps like WhatsApp to new software like Slack and Asana have prompted many companies and individuals to ask an inevitable question: how long will it be before the email can be consigned to history, like the telegram, the fax and the pager before it?

It’s still a few years off but such predictions, which have been made for a while, now look plausible.

That’s right, email is dying and it’s not just the much-maligned Millennials that are over it.

Massive companies like IBM and Vodafone are working to curtail their internal use of email, because they now understand that it’s all got a little out of hand:

The average UK worker now receives 121 emails per day – of which 48pc are spam and only a small minority are messages that actually require a reply.

The majority are meaningless, bland but legitimate business emails dispatched in bulk to bored end-users – a fact that explains how swiping your smartphone to delete emails has become as routine and unwelcome a chore as washing dishes or mopping the bathroom floor.

Many people simply feel overwhelmed, including a colleague who said recently he had over 100,000 unread messages in his inbox. How could anyone feasibly process that many messages – and would it be a valuable use of their time? The answer is an unequivocal no.

It’s happening.

Welcome to the revolution.

First heads on the chopping block belong to those who don’t know the difference between ‘reply’ and ‘reply all’.

[source:telegraph]