Due to my recent email woes, I had the opportunity to look through more than a decade’s worth of emails. Trawling through thousands of messages unraveled a fairly distinct trend in the types of emails I’ve received over the past ten years or so – there has been a gradual shift away from email correspondence of personal nature, especially as social networks and mobile messaging apps grew increasingly popular over the last decade.

In the pre-Facebook, pre-smartphone era, we mainly relied on instant messaging and email for online correspondence. Today, while IM remains a predominant way of communicating online, it has somewhat evolved. Yesteryear’s one-to-one proprietary messaging has given way to today’s many-to-many cross-platform communication. In contrast, emailing has stayed relatively unchanged. Even though technological advancements have enabled fancier features, the fundamentals of email have remained the same as a decade ago.

However, the types of emails we exchange today are variedly different. In the early noughties, emails are more likely to come from personal contacts – be it the forwarding of chain letters or sharing of photos. Today, these activities have migrated over to social networks and mobile messaging apps; personal messages are more frequently exchanged on these platforms than through emails. Email, as it seems, has been relegated to the realm of official use only.

But email is not heading down a blind alley. Emails are going to persist for a long time, primarily because the email protocol serves as a universal standard to online communication and many official correspondence still take place over it. Very much like its physical counterpart, I don’t think emails will be entirely eliminated even as its uses become more limited because there are simply no perfect substitutes for them.