With this article I’d like to start a new section on our blog, called “Email Fact or Myth?“. On this section we’ll detail notorious email facts or myths. Here is the first one:

Email is dead or it will soon be obsolete

Many advocates of “next-gen technologies” underline that email is slowly dying away, as it gets replaced by other communication methods (social networks communication being their favorite example). Email is being compared to other technologies that slowly disappeared or are about to disappear, like fax machines or CDs.

But here are some hard facts:

– the email traffic almost doubled from 2009 to 2013, raising from 247 billion emails per day (2009) to 507 billion emails per day (2013) – see the Radicati report;

– the largest group of email users fall into the 20 to 40 years old age group, while the second largest group fall into the 15 – 20 years old age group. This indicates that the majority of email users is formed by young people and email isn’t a dinosaur for the younger generations;

– Gmail is the 3rd most popular app on Android devices (after Google Play and Google Maps), with over 500 million installations. Given that Android is the operating system is the highest growth rate, it’s obvious that email is a highly preferred communication method even on trending platforms;

– there are 20 million messages sent through Facebook every 20 minutes. At the same time, there are 7 billion emails sent in the same (20 minutes) period! So there are about 350 times more emails sent than Facebook messages sent. At the same time, there are supposed to be about 2,5 billion active email accounts, while Facebook reports about 1,1 billion active profiles, so there are only 2.2 times more email accounts than Facebook accounts. Which means that, although many people use both email and Facebook, they still overwhelmingly prefer to communicate by email and not through the most popular social network.

In my view, I believe I can safely say that email is far from being dead. In fact, its getting even more popular!

What is your view? Do you think email is going to be replaced by other communication methods? Do you think it will happen sooner rather than later? Feel free to comment below 🙂

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