Inbox Eternal: Why Email Survived Everything

“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” – Leonardo da Vinci

Email is one of the few things on the internet that still works the way it did thirty years ago.

Most technologies don’t age well. They get replaced, absorbed, or slowly reshaped until they’re unrecognizable. Email hasn’t. It’s still essentially what it was in the 90s: a message you send to someone’s address, which lands in their inbox and sits there until they read it. In a world of aggressive notifications and real-time everything, that sounds almost quaint. But maybe that’s why it survived.

New tools often appear with a strong sense of purpose: to be faster, cleaner, more collaborative, better designed. Each one claims it will finally replace email. And yet email stays. It’s not that people particularly love it. Most don’t. But it’s useful in a way that newer things rarely are — not because it’s the best tool for any one job, but because it works just well enough for almost everything.

Part of its resilience comes from the fact that nobody owns it. Email is a protocol, not a product. There are companies that build email clients and companies that host email servers, but no company that controls how email itself works. That makes it hard to disrupt. You can build something better than Gmail, but you can’t replace the entire email ecosystem unless you convince the entire world to switch at once. And if your new system only works when both sender and receiver use it, it won’t scale. Email’s openness makes it both messy and irreplaceable.

It’s also surprisingly neutral. Most communication tools today come with built-in assumptions about how you should work. They encourage short messages, fast replies, group threads, reactions, visibility. Email doesn’t enforce any of that. It doesn’t care how long your message is, how quickly you respond, or how many people are on the thread. It just moves text from one place to another. In that sense, it gives people more control. The user decides how email is used, not the tool itself.

That might be why email resists being absorbed into other platforms. Slack lets you talk to your team. Not your accountant. Not your dentist. Not a publisher. Not a researcher on the other side of the world. Email does. Most apps are communities with borders. Email is more like the street. It’s public infrastructure, not a club.

Of course, that also means it’s chaotic. Your inbox is a mix of things you want, things you need, and things you wish you’d never received. It’s not elegant. But there’s something honest about that. The messiness is part of how the real world works. The perfect communication tool would let you write to anyone, let anyone write to you, and still let you ignore most of it. Email gets closer to that ideal than most alternatives, even if it does so imperfectly.

Maybe the most interesting thing about email is that it didn’t win by being better. It won by being stubborn. It just stayed. It was simple enough not to break and open enough not to be locked in. And once people got used to it, replacing it required more coordination than anyone could manage. Most technologies are improved by design. Email was preserved by inertia.

That’s not a compliment exactly. But it might be a kind of success. When people say something is “just good enough,” they usually mean it’s ready to be replaced. Sometimes they’re wrong. Sometimes “good enough” is the highest bar something needs to clear.