Email’s Glow Up
Your inbox from 20 years ago probably looked very different than it does today. (For one, I hope it’s now on Gmail.)
From better spam filters to cleaner design and categorization, the email experience has certainly improved since its inception. But the real transformation of email is in the kind of content we now consume through this 50+ year old medium of communication.
Yep, email has been around a long time, and it’s finally glo’d up;. A late bloomer, if you will.
The concept of intra-network messaging was implemented earliest in the early 1960s, through time-shared computers with shared files to pass messages.
Email was first established on ARPANET, where SMTP became influential. The first email was sent over ARPANET in 1971 by Ray Tomlinson, who later also became famous for making the @ a widespread delimiter for email addresses.
With the advent of email, researchers across the nation began to be able to communicate with one another easily, sharing results and papers. From there, it was only a short time until email would be used on other intranets, typically at large companies for interdepartmental communications.
In the late 1980s, Microsoft and CompuServe launched email servers available to the public, and until the mid 1990s, only plain text emails could be sent. When HTML support became mainstream, we started to see colors, fonts, and images. Email began to change.
What started as an easy way to communicate with other departments in your company evolved to be how you kept up with your sister in Chicago and your new niece’s shenanigans.
Email was great until your inbox was full of forwards, spam, and unsolicited marketing. Fortunately, IM and social media broke through just about then — so short chats became easier with AIM and Skype, and later Google Talk and Facebook Messenger.
Social media — from MySpace to Facebook and Twitter, leading from the early 2000s to now — displaced most of the social communication that occured previously via email. Now, you could see your new nephew in LA grow up on Facebook, not through limited quality photos from the occasional email.
That left email largely in the workplace.
And that’s evolved, too; we have chat/social apps taking over there too — Slack, Facebook Workplace, and HipChat.
So where does that leave email, then? Well, while we were moving our social communication to other places, email marketers got good.
We started getting reminders to keep shopping, notifications about new products, emails about ongoing promotions — sometimes just for us!
At some point, the average personal inbox became another consumption channel for organizations to reach us. Everywhere you had an account, they had your email. The gym, the bank, retail stores, restaurants, everyone.
You could subscribe to news, too. News about your locality, the whole country, a company. And as email began to handle more than just plain text, these newsletters started looking better. And they came with ads! As organizations began to embrace technology, they could start to personalize comms to users.
This is one I find particularly interesting — as they’re nothing new. A recent resurgence for good, distraction free content are bringing these back to the forefront.
Newsletters give you news quickly and concisely. They do the research for you, finding what’s important, what happened, and why you should care.
You could go to the New York Times or the Washington Post. People stopped subscribing to physical newspapers, though, because it was all online. Visitng a few different websites for full coverage was harder than it should be, though. So people would go to Twitter or Reddit — find out things as they happened, and see a diversity of content.
The oversaturation of social media, however, is what I believe led to the return to the inbox with great email newsletters. They look good, they’re curated, and they’re quick.
They’re sustainable with ads, but these ads look good — it’s sponsored content. Ads don’t seem so bad when they’re not a complete waste of your time.
If you want to repopulate your inbox with some good content, here are a few of my recommendations.
Morning Brew will give you a witty and concise general news update, with a focus on financial happenings. They keep the lingo simple, keep you updated with the politics, business, and tech, and crack some jokes. Great design, and my favorite of the three.
theSkimm delivers a quippy recap of some major events. A fun read with a unique categorization style. As opposed to Morning Brew who would have the header “Media”, theSkimm opts for something along the lines of “Who people are talking about…”. You get the idea.
The Hustle focuses on tech and business — some of my favorite things. Occasionally they write a longer piece on a product or event, featured in their newsletter. Here everything is business, so headings are news headlines.
If I had to recommend just one, it’s Morning Brew. A recap of all kinds of news, great organization and design, and a sense of humor.
Linked above are referral links — gets me some sweet stickers for my laptop! Here are the non-referral links: Morning Brew | theSkimm | The Hustle
Email’s Glow Up
Research & References of Email’s Glow Up|A&C Accounting And Tax Services
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