The pros and cons of email

Even though email only became commonplace in homes and offices relatively recently in the 1990s, it is difficult for most of us to remember life without it – especially with regard to the office workplace, where reading, writing and responding to emails now takes up large proportions of many people’s daily lives. Although email has transformed communication in some very useful ways, not all the changes that email has brought are positive. I look at the main advantages and disadvantages of email compared to snail mail and other traditional forms of communication in my pros and cons of email.

Email is essentially free, assuming that you are paying for an internet connection anyway, you can send and receive as many emails as you like without incurring any extra charges.

It is fast. Emails can arrive almost instantaneously, unlike snail mail which can take days, or even weeks if it’s long distance.

It is accessible. As well as computers and laptops, you can now send and receive emails using handheld devices such as mobile phones too.

You can attach photographs, documents and other media to emails. For instance, you can take a photo with a digital camera and email the photos to the recipient pretty much immediately.

Emails are great for sending information to multiple people or organizations. It is often no more effort to send an email to a thousand people, as it is to one person.

You are not limited by distance. The internet is global, so you can send emails anywhere that you want and it doesn’t cost you any extra money, or take the information any longer to arrive, than it would if you were only sending it a few miles.

Sending information by email is more environmentally friendly than sending a letter by snail mail (if you discount the fact that computers aren’t particularly eco-friendly).

Emails are relatively easy to organize. You can create separate folders for different sorts of email, organize them by date, sender, etc. You can also access all your emails wherever you are, provided you have a device such as a laptop or mobile phone and internet access – so an online email account is like have an entire filing cabinet of letters and information at your disposal.

You can tell what an email is about by reading the subject line, rather than having to read through it all, which can be very useful when prioritizing your workload.

Once you are set up, it is generally much easier and less effort to write an email and send it, than writing and posting a traditional snail mail letter.

Emails are much less personal than most other forms of communication.

It is easy for misunderstandings to happen using email. For instance, it may not be clear when a joke is being made and when someone is being serious, something that can be easily conveyed in person or over the phone through tone of voice etc.

Emails are impossible to take back once sent, so an email sent in the heat of the moment can cause people problems, especially in the workplace.

Emails can be sent anonymously, which means that they are sometimes used maliciously to bully or upset people.

It is relatively easy to make mistakes with email by clicking a wrong button. For instance, you can send a personal email to multiple people rather than just an individual, or you can send an email to the wrong person by not realizing that you’ve clicked the wrong name in an address list.

Because emails are so easy to send, people who have to respond to emails can often have problems with information overload, especially in the workplace.

Although the situation has recently improved, there are still major problems with spam or unsolicited advertising arriving via email. This takes up time and energy to control and can be overwhelming if it gets out of control.

Email is one of the commonest ways for viruses to travel and infect computers.

As mentioned in the introduction, reading, writing and responding to emails can take up vast amounts of a modern workers’ time and energy – this work can be dull and passive and sometimes there can appear to be few obvious tangible benefits resulting from it.