Techie Couple

Emails have become an integral part of our daily lives. Before 2005, owning an email account was considered a luxury. To check emails, one needed a computer which was expensive or had to visit an internet cafe and pay by the minute.

However, everything changed with the arrival of Gmail. Starting with an unprecedented 5GB inbox when most others were offering storage in mere megabytes and now offering 15GB, Gmail completely revolutionized the email experience. Combined with the rise of affordable computers, cheaper internet, and the widespread adoption of smartphones, the email landscape underwent a massive transformation. Nearly two decades later, email has become omnipresent. According to some statistics, over 100,000 emails are sent and received every minute globally, amounting to more than 300 billion emails per day as of 2024.

But how are so many emails being generated? Are they all personal, one-to-one messages? Not quite.

If you check your inbox, you’ll notice a wide variety of emails from personal messages to completely unrelated ones. Let’s explore the different types of emails commonly received:

1. Personal Emails

These are one-to-one or one-to-many messages exchanged with people you know personally. Services like Gmail, Outlook, and Yahoo provide inboxes under their own domains for such communications. These emails typically have 100% deliverability, unless you block the sender yourself.

2. Transactional Emails

These emails are triggered by specific actions or transactions on websites or applications. Examples include:

• Bank transaction alerts
  
• One-Time Passwords (OTPs) for authentication
  
• Invoices, bills, or receipts for purchases

They are sent directly from the domain where the action took place. These emails are generally trusted by email providers and enjoy near-perfect deliverability.

3. Semi-Transactional Emails

These are reminders related to actions you’ve started but haven’t completed, for example:

• Abandoned cart emails from Amazon or other online stores
  
• “We miss you” messages from platforms you haven’t accessed in a while

I call these semi-transactional because they often carry subtle promotional intent alongside their original purpose. While they usually come from domains you’ve interacted with, their deliverability may vary. Email providers might classify them as promotional, depending on their content.

4. Support or Business Emails

This category includes:

• Replies from customer support agents
  
• CRM emails containing webinar or demo links from pre-sales teams
  
• Negotiation emails from sales representatives

The deliverability of these emails depends largely on the sender domain’s reputation. If the domain has a poor reputation often due to spam markings or bad sending behavior, these emails may end up in the spam folder. This is a common issue for businesses that don’t follow proper email-sending practices. I’ll be writing a dedicated post soon to cover best practices for businesses to improve their email deliverability.

5. Promotional Emails

These are the most common types of emails cluttering our inboxes:

• Discounts and offers
  
• Lead nurturing emails
  
• Sales announcements

In fact, Gmail introduced a dedicated “Promotions” tab to keep such emails separate from more important ones. There’s an entire multi-billion-dollar industry around email marketing and automation that helps businesses send such campaigns to their leads and customers.

To combat excessive promotional emails, many countries have introduced laws to protect users from email overload. I’ll cover these laws in a separate post.

6. Spam or Fraud Emails

Finally, there’s the category we all dread, spam and fraudulent emails. Email service providers work tirelessly to protect users from such content, but some of it still manages to sneak through. I’ll go into more detail about spam and scam emails in an upcoming post.

Thanks for reading.

-He-