Byte meets Ink: Emails in the Digital age and whether they really work?

"Hi, I am writing to you in this email to enquire about the purposes of...."

How many of you have actually used this opening line whether working at home or in the office when composing an email to someone. It could be your boss, your colleague, a person you are trying to enquire a business or service from, it could be the local mechanic from down the road!

A lot of us use emails throughout our day to day lives both in a personal or business sense but do we really like sending them or is email culture in the 21st century digital future bogging us down and ruining our productivity levels in our lives as the statistics do not make positive reading. 

An article released by Forbes in April 2021 showed that "89% of office workers admitted that daily work tasks such as sorting through inboxes or navigating Slack/Teams messages is one of the most unpleasant part of working remotely" and "38% of workers said 'email fatigue' is likely to push them to quit their jobs" 

German online data configuration company Statista published figures in November 2022 of the amount of emails sent worldwide since 2017 alongside projections up to 2026. The year of 2022 recorded 333.2 billion emails sent across the globe and projections expect that number to rise to 392.5 billion by the year ending 2026.

It is important though to state that emails are not entirely a negative part of 21st century technology. Both the convenience and the efficiency in which information, documentation & other forms of communication can be supplied between two people far supersedes the more old-fashioned method of handwritten post sent from a letterbox.

Plus, emails have greatly helped the world of business or more specifically marketing a business. For example, for every $1 (£0.78) spent email marketing you can expect on average $36-$40 (£28.44-£31.60) in Return on Investment (Source: Omnisend 28 Nov 2023) 

It all comes down to the person at the end of the day. What do you think? Is email culture in danger of exhausting employees and worsening technological culture in the digital age or are we in a much better place with emails than before they existed therefore seeing the positives outweighing the drawbacks here?