Like many innovations in infrastructure, email has gone from excitement to daily routine. The transformation email brought is real. There is much less need for postal services today. Yet many people miss the creativity and privacy allowed in postal services. Postcards can be a work of art, with messages delivered privately. It's a wonderful thing. Emails today lack wonders, which is why further innovation in email may be desirable. Actually, it's surprising that for Apple, which championed user experience, the standard of email can remain barely rich text for decades and stagnate. Imagine a totally redesigned email that lets users easily compose interactive multimedia postcards with cloud support that won't drain recipient's disk space. Emails can be exciting again.
In the past few decades, the greatest improvement emails receive is storage in the cloud, rather than as local copies. Reliability went up significantly, at the cost of privacy sacrifices. But, technologically speaking, privacy can be protected, like ProtonMail. Technological giants should consider allowing users to choose privacy settings for their emails. Plain email for news, and private email for personal communications should be a option.
The rise of social networks made mundane emails outdated. Friends today interact with each other with very rich content semi-publicly on Facebook, etc., even for activities that traditionally considered private. The technological aesthetics should change. People should be allowed to communicate rich content privately. If social networks don't change, innovations in emails are the most straightforward channel to accomplish this.
Current quality of email technology is poor. If emails can be as sophisticated as social networks, there is hope that digital civilization may prevail over unsatisfactory status quo.
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