How to slay the email dragon?

Old habits die hard. Switching from one familiar email client to another is no small change. It's a lifestyle change, as baked into one's personality as a bad habit that is hard to quit.

This is a story about email, technology, and AI. More importantly, it reflects how writing and responding to emails consumes as much time as generating new knowledge. We should be creating new products, solutions, fiction, and music, but instead, we spend our days and, at times, nights answering emails.

For those of us who began our academic journeys before or during the rise of the Internet, we were told that digital technologies would set us free. Now, I’m not so confident. The barrage of emails, Zoom and Google Meet requests, and chat messages feels more like an onslaught, if not an outright form of digital enslavement.

I started my academic pursuits in Canada around 30 years ago, when email was already in use, and the Internet was gaining traction. I still recall that small room on the third floor of the then-Ryerson University Library with about ten computers connected to the Internet. Mozilla was the first browser I used there.

Academics have always been proficient in correspondence. Before email, scholars would mail manuscripts through postal services and patiently await responses for months, exchanging ideas through regular mail over long periods. There was a simplicity and rhythm to those exchanges.

Today, we are bombarded with emails around the clock, with new ones awaiting us first thing in the morning. And if you manage people, your email volume must be through the charts. This was not the digital freedom we envisioned.

Enter Generative AI, which promises to enhance our ability to handle correspondence more efficiently and effectively. Companies like Alphabet (through Gmail) and Microsoft (through Exchange servers) are incorporating AI into their email platforms. They aim to prioritize incoming messages, snooze others for later, and even draft preliminary responses based on past interactions. It sounds like a dream come true, and you might wonder why these capabilities have yet to be widely available. For instance, Google’s Gemini offers some of these features and more.

However, there is a catch. The challenge lies in protecting our privacy and ensuring that the AI doesn’t retain or misuse our content, inadvertently compromising our intellectual property. I understand that CTOs in public and private sector institutions are actively exploring AI-based email solutions that maintain our privacy and data security.

In the meantime, I’ve been experimenting (with email clients), which brings me back to old habits. I started teaching at McGill University some 22 years ago. McGill was a Microsoft-oriented institution where I developed a deep familiarity with Microsoft tools, from Outlook to OneNote and the rest of the Office suite. I continued using Microsoft Outlook even after moving to Ryerson University (now Toronto Metropolitan University, TMU), especially as TMU transitioned to Gmail. However, integrating the Outlook desktop application with the Gmail server often required third-party tools that never felt seamless.

You might wonder why I don’t just use the web-based Gmail interface. The simple answer is that I don't find it user-friendly. There is also a practical concern: if the Internet were to go down, as it has occasionally, access to potentially decades' worth of correspondence would be temporarily lost. A desktop solution enables one to maintain at least one local copy of all correspondence.

However, Outlook Desktop (with Gmail) wasn’t a perfect fit for me either, as it lacked features like snoozing emails for later response and creating integrated to-do lists accessible across multiple devices. So, my search for a better alternative continued.

I came across eM Client about ten years ago and found it a strong contender. Despite this, I reverted to Outlook because, well, old habits die hard.

However, over the past week, I revisited eM Client and was impressed with its seamless integration into the Gmail ecosystem. It fetches emails directly from Gmail servers without intermediary fixes and synchronizes effectively with Gmail's calendar, tasks, Google Meet, G Drive, and more. And beyond these features, it’s AI-enabled. I can draft a generic response in seconds with minimal prompts and a simple click. For example, when responding to prospective students interested in graduate studies, I often need to send polite messages explaining that space may not be available. Drafting these responses can be time-consuming if done for every email individually, but generative AI simplifies the process significantly, as it readily generates customized email responses.

How secure is this facility? em Client mentions that the "information used for the text generation or editing is sent only to the AI provider and is not stored or logged by eM Client anywhere." em Client uses ChatGPT as their AI provider.*

There must be a better way to handle the unending influx of emails. Using AI to prioritize email responses, generate automated responses, create tasks for the ToDo lists, and pencil in meetings in the calendar are some of the advances that can help managers and others to spend less time on email and more on being creative and innovative.

The email dragon needs slaying, and Generative AI might be the tool.

• An earlier draft erroneously stated that em Client did not mention the identity of their AI partner. We have made the correction and regret the error.