Back in 2010, there was a flurry of media coverage around Facebook’s launch of a unified messaging product designed to integrate email, SMS, instant messaging and Facebook chat into one interface.
A few months earlier, Facebook’s then chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, said that email was “probably going away” as younger people increasingly preferred social networks and instant messaging. Fast forward to today and those channels have changed the way people communicate, but perhaps not in the way Facebook leaders anticipated at the time. Many people accepted the idea that newer platforms would eventually replace email altogether. They didn’t.
Instead, each new communication platform has found its own place. Messaging apps are great for conversations happening now. Collaboration tools help teams work together. Social media connects communities. But none of them has replaced what email has quietly become: society’s most important digital memory.
Email remains the common link between people and the services they use online. The number of messages sent and received worldwide has risen every year since 2018 and is expected to keep growing. Its role has certainly evolved, with its importance now lying as much in the history it preserves as in the messages it carries.
In a time of AI agents that can rewrite novels in moments, email’s safeguards matter even more. A message on somebody else’s platform can be edited or unsent after you’ve read it. Once you receive an email, it’s yours – nobody can change it or take it back.
Email is more than communication
It’s inherent in the nature of email that messages are delivered and then stored, and we’re all used to searching for emails from yesterday or many years ago. For its 4.5 billion users, these habits are embedded in our digital lives.
That long-term memory matters more than people often realise. Many of us can still find an email from ten years ago explaining why a decision was made, confirming a purchase or recording an important conversation. In a world where so much information is transient, email provides a stable record that we own and can revisit.
After all, ‘electronic mail’ was instantly compelling when it reached the mass market during the 1990s, helped by the arrival of AOL and Hotmail alongside a host of other brands that have since disappeared.
Email’s open design is central to its staying power. It remains the largest open federated communication network on the internet. Unlike many modern communication platforms, it isn’t controlled by a single company or locked inside one ecosystem. Through open standards, people can choose the provider that best meets their needs and move their data if those needs change.
Messages can seamlessly pass between providers, allowing people to communicate with organisations and online services without all joining the same proprietary platform.
So, while it’s true that social networks and messaging apps have taken over much of our day-to-day conversation, they haven’t replaced email’s unique role as a trusted, durable record.
AI makes integrity more valuable
AI makes it dramatically easier to generate, analyse and organise information. The challenge is that AI also makes it much easier to create convincing synthetic content or modify existing information. The temptation to use it to tidy up the past is overwhelming, and we’ve all experienced the “did I remember this wrong” twinge when something online doesn’t seem the same.
That changes the way we think about trust. Privacy has always been fundamental to email, but in the AI era integrity deserves equal attention. If email is our digital memory, that memory only has value if we can trust that messages remain accurate, authentic and accessible over time.
Security professionals often describe this through the CIA triad: Confidentiality, Integrity and Availability. Historically we’ve focused heavily on confidentiality. The next decade will require much greater attention to integrity while ensuring information remains available when it is needed.
Protecting our digital memory
To an extent, this is a data resilience issue. Keeping multiple copies of email data can support recovery from hardware failure or a system outage. Independent backup arrangements are therefore essential because copies held outside the live environment provide a separate source of truth if a shared fault corrupts or removes data.
That separation is more important than many people realise. If every copy depends on the same software layer, the same bug can affect them all. Independent backup systems provide protection against corruption, accidental deletion and infrastructure failures that might otherwise compromise the historical record.
We saw this in practice during a recent incident at Fastmail. A bug in a data replication layer caused entire folders to disappear for a small number of customers. Although the fault affected every live copy of the data, a separate offline backup system allowed almost every email to be restored. The handful that couldn’t be recovered directly were reconstructed from system logs, ensuring that no customer information was permanently lost. That’s what protecting digital memory looks like in practice.
Open standards build trust
Email works across providers because it is based on open standards that define how messages are exchanged. These standards are publicly available and developed through industry bodies such as the Internet Engineering Task Force.
That openness matters. It means no single company controls how email works, and anyone can build software that participates in the network. That’s one of the reasons email has survived every technology cycle over the past four decades. And it’s the reason email will continue to survive many more.
Open source also plays an important role in the software that implements and operates email services. Code can be inspected by independent developers and security researchers, providing greater visibility into how email infrastructure handles and protects data. Transparency doesn’t eliminate security risks, but it does make systems easier to audit, improve and trust over time.
Modern foundations for the AI era
Much of the infrastructure supporting email today was developed decades ago. IMAP remains a remarkably successful protocol, but years of extensions have also made it increasingly complex.
JMAP was designed to simplify that complexity. Rather than replacing email, it modernises how applications interact with it. Built on familiar web technologies such as HTTP and JSON, it provides developers with a cleaner, more consistent interface while preserving compatibility with the existing email ecosystem.
It includes a standard mechanism for tracking changes to email data, allowing clients to request only the updates they need. Message threads and push notifications are fundamentals rather than afterthoughts, and JMAP takes advantage of mature web infrastructure for security and traffic management.
JMAP was also designed to coexist with IMAP while adoption grows. That reflects one of the strengths of the email ecosystem: evolution rather than disruption. New standards build on what already works instead of forcing everyone into a single proprietary platform.
This becomes increasingly important as AI-enabled applications need reliable access to communications data. Open standards give developers a consistent way to build new tools while allowing users to retain control of where their information lives. Humans can start building with JMAP in minutes, and coding agents love it – because it’s well specified and builds on libraries that ship with modern programming languages.
The specific technologies will continue to evolve, just as they always have. What’s more important is preserving the principles that have allowed email to endure: open standards, interoperability and user choice. You can decide who to trust with your email, or build your own email system on top of the tools and standards, and your messages will remain untampered just how you remember them.
Bron Gondwana
Bron Gondwana is CEO of Fastmail, a long-time open source developer, and a Working Group Chair at the IETF. He brings deep expertise in internet standards, email, and open technologies, alongside extensive experience building and leading technology businesses. Bron is also a Graduate of the Australian Institute of Company Directors (GAICD).
