How to Actually Use Email (And Why It Still Matters)

What Makes Email Different

Not everyone has TikTok. Not everyone has Twitter (or X, or whatever we're calling it this week). Not everyone has Facebook, Instagram, or that new app your cousin won't shut up about. But everyone — and I mean everyone — has an email address.

Email is the most important thing on the internet, and yet somehow we've collectively decided to treat it like that drawer in your kitchen where you throw random batteries, expired coupons, and twist ties.

We ignore it. We fear it. We let it accumulate 170,183,723 unread messages like some kind of digital hoarder.

This is a guide about email. Not the boring corporate kind where someone CCs twelve people to ask about printer paper. The real kind. The useful kind. The kind that's been quietly running the internet for decades while we were busy taking selfies (btw do you remember the time when there were NO selfies on the internet?)

The Digital Thing That Actually Lasts

In the last fifteen years, I've changed my phone number five times. I've switched countries, cities, apartments, and haircuts of my beard. But the Gmail address I got when I was in university? Still works. You can send me an email right now and I will (most definitely) reply. Unless you're being delulu, obviously.

I've also changed messengers more times than I can count: Telegram, WeChat (I lived in China for a while), iMessage, Viber, WhatsApp, ICQ (yes, I'm that old), Facebook Messenger, and probably a dozen others I've forgotten. Some of them don't even exist anymore.

But email? Email is still here. Email has always been here. Email will be here when we're all cyborgs arguing about neural-link etiquette.

Here's the thing: I can search my email and find files from 2009. Photos people sent me. Job offers. Apartment contracts. That one recipe for lemon cake my friend's mom sent me in 2013.

All official things come through email — documents, confirmations, receipts, that thing you need to prove you actually paid for something three years ago.

And there's another thing nobody tells you about email: it's how you talk to people who matter. Any time I read a book I love, and if the author is still alive and available online, I try to find their email and write them a thank you note. Most of them reply.

You can't DM famous people on Instagram and expect a response, but send them a thoughtful email and suddenly you're having a conversation.

Email is the infrastructure of the internet. It's not sexy, but neither is plumbing, and you definitely notice when that stops working.

A Brief History

Email is older than the internet as we know it. The first email was sent in 1971 by a guy named Ray Tomlinson, who also decided that we should use the @ symbol to separate usernames from host names. Thanks for that, Ray. Truly iconic work.

Back then, email was just a way for researchers to leave messages for each other on the same computer network. It wasn't instant. It wasn't fancy. It was just... useful. And that usefulness is exactly why it survived.

By the 1990s, email became the killer app that got normal people online. Everyone wanted an email address. It was your identity on the internet before social media made "identity" a monetizable data point.

And unlike every social platform that's come and gone (RIP Friendster, MySpace, Google+, Vine, and whatever's dying as I write this), email is still here because it's built on open standards.

No one company owns email. It just... exists.

That's the magic. Facebook can shut down tomorrow. Twitter can rebrand itself into oblivion. But email? Email is forever.

What Email Is For

Email serves a few distinct purposes, and understanding them helps you use it better:

Official Communication

This is the boring but essential stuff. Your bank sends you statements. The government sends you tax information. Your doctor's office confirms appointments. Your landlord sends you lease agreements. Job offers arrive via email. So do rejection letters, but we don't talk about those.

Email is your digital identity for anything official. You can't open a bank account with your Instagram handle.

You need an email address. It's the closest thing we have to a universal internet passport.

Asynchronous Communication

Unlike instant messaging, email doesn't demand an immediate response. You can think before you reply. You can write something longer than three sentences without everyone involved having a panic attack. It's communication with breathing room, which in our current age of constant notifications feels almost luxurious.

Documentation and Memory

Email is searchable history. Every conversation, every attachment, every confirmation number is sitting there waiting for you to need it. I can search "flight confirmation 2019 Barcelona" and find exactly what I need in three seconds. Try doing that with your WhatsApp messages. I'll wait.

Direct Access to Humans

This is the underrated one.

Email addresses are publicly available in a way phone numbers and social media accounts aren't. You can email authors, entrepreneurs, artists, professors, journalists — anyone really — and there's a decent chance they'll read it.

The Problem: Email Overload

Here's where most people go wrong. They sign up for everything. Every website wants your email. Every app needs to "send you updates." Every company you bought something from in 2014 thinks you want their newsletter about Memorial Day sales.

Before you know it, your inbox has 47,392 unread emails and you've given up. You just let it accumulate. The number becomes meaningless. You miss important things because they're buried under promotional emails about shoes you looked at once.

If this is you, let me say this clearly: it's time to declare email bankruptcy.

Mark everything as read. Archive it all. Start fresh. I'm serious. That number haunting you at the top of your screen is just anxiety made visible.

You're not going to go through 47,392 emails.

You know it.

I know it.

Let it go.

How to Manage Your Email

Unsubscribe from Everything You Don't Read

Be ruthless. If you haven't opened an email from a company in three months, you don't need their emails. Every legitimate marketing email has an unsubscribe link at the bottom. Use it.

Yes, it takes time. Yes, you'll have to do it for dozens (maybe hundreds) of subscriptions. But it's worth it: think of it as spring cleaning for your digital life.

Set Up Filters

Filters are automated rules that organize your email before you even see it. This is where email gets powerful.

Basic filtering:

Automatically label/tag emails from specific people or domains
Skip the inbox for newsletters you want to keep but don't need to read immediately
Star emails from your family members or important contacts
Automatically archive receipts and confirmations after applying a label

Most email clients let you create filters. In Gmail, you click the three dots on any email and select "Filter messages like this." In Apple Mail, you go to Mail → Settings → Rules. In Outlook, it's under Settings → Mail → Rules.

Advanced filtering (for the brave):

Use search operators to create complex filters (like from:newsletter@* OR from:promo@*)
Set up auto-responders for specific senders when you're unavailable
Create filters that forward certain emails to other addresses

Color Coding (Apple Mail)

If you use Apple Mail, you can add color tags to emails, which makes scanning your inbox significantly easier. Different colors can represent different categories, urgency levels, or projects.

To set this up in Apple Mail:

Go to Mail → Settings → Rules
Create a new rule
Set conditions (like "From contains" or "Subject contains")
Under "Perform the following actions," select "Set Color" and choose your color
Save it

I use red for urgent stuff, blue for personal correspondence, green for confirmations, and yellow for things I need to read but aren't time-sensitive. Your system can be whatever makes sense to you. The point is visual organization that helps your brain process information faster.

Use Search Like a Pro

Email search is incredibly powerful if you know how to use it. Here are some tricks:

Gmail search operators:

from:[email protected] – emails from a specific person
to:me – emails sent directly to you
subject:invoice – emails with "invoice" in the subject
has:attachment – emails with attachments
filename:pdf – emails with PDF attachments
after:2023/01/01 – emails from a specific date onward
is:unread – unread emails (obviously)
is:starred – starred emails

You can combine these: from:[email protected] has:attachment after:2024/01/01

Apple Mail search:

Use the search field at the top and select specific criteria (From, To, Subject)
Use quotation marks for exact phrases: "quarterly report"
Search within a specific mailbox by selecting it first

The better you get at search, the less you need to organize things manually. Search is your friend. Search is life.

Different Email Philosophies

People handle email in wildly different ways. Here are a few approaches:

The Archive Everything Method: This is my personal favorite. Process emails quickly, archive aggressively, and rely on search to find things later.

Your inbox only contains things that need action. Everything else is archived and searchable. Clean, simple, effective.

The Tony Hsieh Method: Tony Hsieh, the CEO of Zappos, had an interesting approach: he responded to emails the next day. By batching his responses, he always knew how many emails he needed to handle each day, which prevented overwhelm. If you get a lot of email, this is worth trying. Set aside 30 minutes in the morning to process yesterday's emails, then ignore your inbox for the rest of the day.

The Controlled Chaos Method: Some people keep everything in their inbox but use stars, flags, and labels to mark what's important. Their inbox has 2,000 emails, but they know exactly which 15 matter. This works if you have a good memory and don't get anxious looking at large numbers.

Pick what works for you. The only wrong approach is doing nothing and letting chaos reign.

Email Etiquette That Matters

Some quick rules that will make everyone like you more:

Reply All is a weapon, not a toy. Use it only when everyone genuinely needs to see your response. Do not Reply All to say "thanks" or "got it." This is how email chains become war crimes.

Write useful subject lines. "Question" is not a subject line. "Meeting time for Friday's presentation?" is a subject line. Future you will thank present you.

Use formatting sparingly. Bold and bullet points are helpful. Comic Sans and seventeen different colors are not. You're writing an email, not a ransom note.

Don't email when angry. Write the angry email. Get it all out. Then delete it and write the actual email after you've calmed down. This rule has saved more careers than I can count.

Respond to people. Even if it's just "Thanks, got it." Leaving emails unanswered is the digital equivalent of ignoring someone who's talking to you. It's rude. Don't be rude.

Add the address at the end. Add the recipient's address at the end of your email creation process. Since I'm sure you've been in a situation where you sent a blank letter, because you accidentally clicked "Send" before finishing.

Final Thoughts

Email isn't going anywhere. It's been here for fifty years and it'll be here for fifty more. Every new messaging app that promises to replace email eventually adds email notifications because email is the infrastructure everything else is built on.

The difference between people who love email and people who hate it is simple: the people who love it have a system.

They've set up filters, they archive regularly, they don't let things pile up, and they use search instead of manual organization.

You don't need to become an email wizard. You just need to treat your inbox like what it is: a tool, not a storage unit. A workspace, not a graveyard.

Start fresh. Set up some basic filters. Unsubscribe from the noise. Actually read the emails that matter and archive the ones that don't. Use search when you need to find something.

And maybe — just maybe — send a thank you email to someone whose work you appreciate. For example, me :)

Everyone Has Email. Nobody Uses It Right