Hate Email? These 4 Innovations Make It Better

pcmag.com:

People hate email. It's not a new sentiment. Some of us have hated work email in particular for more than two decades. Despite the adoption of team messaging apps, chat apps, and other tools that have reduced the need for email, incoming messages at work are productivity interruptions, hardly anyone writes clearly, and the CC line holds a tangle of people who may or may not be relevant to the conversation at hand. In addition, phishing attempts make email simultaneously more annoying and risky. And heavens to Betsy if anyone mistakenly taps Reply All on a companywide message.

We have been so mired in our pessimistic attitude toward email for so long that we haven't kept up with how much better email tools have become. These advances don't fix all the problems with email, but they may mitigate the worst of them, or at least make email easier to deal with when you're on the receiving end.

Here are some developments that may change how you feel about email.

I'm staunchly against letting artificial intelligence (AI) write my emails. If you're comfortable writing and you can craft a good AI prompt, just cut to the chase and write a concise message yourself. That said, many people might be very happy to use a bot to help you get started. Gmail now has generative AI tools that can write a draft of a message for you based on a prompt that you give it, and so can the new Copilot AI in Microsoft 365 apps. You could send the draft as is, but you're always better off revising and editing it. The AI still does the heavy lifting on the front end, which is helpful for people who struggle with writing.

Microsoft's Copilot can also summarize emails you receive. That's an example of how AI can mitigate less-than-ideal human behavior.