Email exists because it’s ubiquitous, not because it’s good.

Has email had its day? Maybe not quite yet, but I am proposing that we start to consider the End of Days for email, in fact for many reasons I think the sooner it goes, the better.

Email is a relic of the 1970s. It’s built on internet standards that date back decades, with the foundations and many conventions still carried forward today.

Its core architecture carries the baggage of being a text-based system in the days of dial-up modems, long before the advent of modern connected behaviour and today’s highly evolved threat landscape.

Aside from the functional clumsiness compared to more modern communication and collaboration tools, it remains one of the biggest resilience headaches in many organisations and could well be the highest security risk or most exposed surfaces in your IT estate.

Email has become a bloated marketing tool, a document store and, in many cases, the master reset point for wider digital identity. It is a behemoth of data, full of attachments with disclaimers and signatures that often outweigh the message itself. Its days should at least be numbered.

EU institutional sources indicate that spam has historically accounted for at least half of email traffic, and in some network-level measurements the vast majority of inbound email attempts were blocked before delivery. This is backed up by Kaspersky’s February 2026 figures stating that 45% of all emails sent globally in 2025 were spam.

Our email addresses are public in a way that even our postal addresses aren’t and given the volume of junk mail rather than real mail, it’s time to seal the letterbox. We need to start treating email as one of our low trust systems, alongside web browsing or social media channels.

We should all be using closed systems for our internal messages. Slack and Microsoft Teams adoption is growing, at least for a proportion of internal communication; but how do we get to inter rather than intra-company messages outside of email? We should be in a closed, high trust environment to exchange high value information.

Trust in the recipient’s identity is important. Platforms like Slack are becoming more advanced in their capabilities for shared channels of communication. Some businesses have moved to dedicated portals for exchanging information with clients – this is popular with the legal and financial sector. Accountants are leading the way with portals for documents where trust and traceability are core.

I don’t think the answer is adding more and more layers of complexity to email in order to fight spam and phishing. Not only is it expensive to secure systems with layers of third party anti-spam, anti-impersonation, anti-malware, there is an overhead in management both for IT professionals and for end users, with quarantine and reporting tasks. Securing email properly now depends on a stack of interlocking controls, including SPF, DKIM and DMARC.

Universality is not the same as suitability. If your organisation is ready to reduce reliance on email and move high-value communication into more controlled environments, that is a conversation worth having.