Everyone Has Email. Almost Nobody Uses It Right

Everyone has an email address, and per Sergey Kaplich's essay, it remains the internet's most durable and underused infrastructure — the piece argues we treat it like a junk drawer despite its unmatched permanence. Kaplich notes his university-era Gmail address has outlived five phone numbers, multiple countries of residence, and a rotating cast of messengers (Telegram, WeChat, iMessage, Viber, WhatsApp, ICQ), while email archives still surface files, contracts, and receipts going back to 2009. He traces email's origins to Ray Tomlinson's first message in 1971, when the @ symbol was adopted to separate usernames from host names. The piece also positions email as the channel of record for official documents and, notably, as a surprisingly accessible way to reach notable people — authors, for instance, often reply to thoughtful notes where Instagram DMs go unanswered. The takeaway for tech and communications watchers: email's stickiness makes it a rare constant in consumer internet habits, and worth watching is whether a new generation of tools can finally fix how poorly it's actually used.