• by Ray Schultz , Columnist, August 2, 2019

There’s one tech company that has the future of email marketing in its hands. But it’s not Google, Apple or Microsoft. 

No, it’s Verizon, the firm that over five years bought “the dregs of the dot-com economy”: AOL and Yahoo. 

That’s the premise of an article in the Atlantic, titled,  “”Work Ruined Email,” by Ian Bogost 

You don’t see many articles celebrating the brands of the former Oath. But Bogost contends that “Yahoo and AOL embody a different ethos than the bigger, more data-mercenary companies that replaced them.”

The article is also unusual -- for a piece in a consumer publication -- in that it takes a benign view of email.

“On email, people have greater control over their identities and relationships than they do on social media or messaging apps. Maybe more than anywhere else online,” Bogost writes.

So why does poor old Yahoo Mail represent the future?

First, there’s the issue of advertising. Like their competitors, the Verizon brands make money on ads. But ““unlike Microsoft, Google, and Amazon, they don’t operate big enterprise-services divisions, which make lots of money helping businesses rather than consumers,” Bogost notes.

Indeed, Gmail and Outlook are “built for enterprise use first, which infects home email with the Sisyphean despair of the office,” he adds.

We’re all familiar with that despair. Email has become so overwhelming at work that people now brag perversely brag about their crowded inboxes: One party boasted to Bogost, “I get several hundred emails a day At least.”

But Yahoo Mail and AOL hope to wrest email from work’s oppressive grip by redesigning it for use at home, he says.

For instance, AOL’s Alto Mail tool has been integrated with Yahoo Mail. It sorts emails into “virtual stacks, just like people tend to do with physical mail: This is a bill, this is a catalog, this is trash, and so on.

"Other services also separate email. But Yahoo Mail has gone further than its competitors,” Bogost reports. 

How?

“Signs of an event or an appointment can cause the system to offer to set a reminder. A flight itinerary or hotel reservation can be flagged and then highlighted on the day of travel. Coupons can be virtually clipped, and the system stores them in one place, like the paper coupons that used to go in a wallet in the kitchen drawer. Yahoo’s software can even remind you when the coupon is about to expire.” 

Then there’s this: “The coupon-clipping feature has been expanded into a whole grocery service, which flags deals from stores such as Safeway and Dollar General and gives Yahoo email users the ability to store them on frequent-shopper cards.” 

Forgive us if we’re skeptical. Yahoo Mail has only 6.3% of email clients, as even Bogost admits. It’s hard to envision the service beating the elephant in the room: Gmail.

But that’s not the end game.

“Any pressure Yahoo puts on Apple Mail and Gmail -- let alone services like Facebook Messenger, which are also responsible for absconding with personal communications -- helps ensure the overall health of email,” Bogost states. 

And if it works?

“Perhaps the ‘cockroach of the internet’ could yet liberate people from the walled gardens of tech, where big companies dictate how a service works from end to end.”