Is it finally time to get rid of email?
Hypothesis: Yes.
Verdict: Yes — for the way a business talks to customers. Keep a mailbox for receipts, contracts, and the odd long document. Stop treating the inbox as the front door, the support desk, and the relationship.
The people who are thirty now did not grow up waiting on email. They grew up on a lock screen. Text first. Chat second. Email when a school, a job, or a receipt forced it. If your company is in IT and you already built the hard part — a desktop carrier phone that behaves like chat — the remaining work is cultural, not technical. Put a text link where the contact form used to be. Let the customer start the thread. Answer it on a desk, not on a handset in a drawer.
The thirty-year-old is not "anti email." They are post inbox.
Someone who is thirty in 2026 was born around 1996. That is the last of the millennial years, the first people who had a phone in their pocket before they had a job. The folklore says they do not use email. The homework is more precise than the folklore, and more useful.
They text. A UK generational study of more than four thousand people found 99 percent of both millennials and Gen Z send text messages. The same study found 36 percent of both would rather message a colleague on an app than phone or email them — the highest share of any generation. Messaging apps such as WhatsApp show up as a regular work tool for a large share of both groups. Voicemail is already a relic: only about 16 percent of millennials in that survey said they would leave one.
They have not deleted the mailbox. At work, email is still the formal channel. A 2026 ZeroBounce survey of nearly 1,400 Gen Z workers found 42 percent still named email as their top workplace tool — ahead of Slack-style apps and texting. That does not mean they live there. It means institutions still assign them an address. The habit at home, with friends, and increasingly with brands, is the thread.
On the customer side the split is even clearer. EZ Texting's 2026 survey of 959 U.S. consumers found that when people choose how a business should reach them, texting leads in nine of ten message categories. The exception is polls and surveys, where email still edges ahead. Eighty-nine percent have opted in to texts from at least one business. Eighty-seven percent check a business text within fifteen minutes. Text is no longer a side channel for the young. It is the channel a thirty-year-old already trusts for anything that needs a reply today.
So the honest claim is not "nobody under thirty-five has an inbox." The honest claim is this: if you ask them to fill out a form so you can email them later, you are asking them to leave the room they actually live in, walk down the hall, and check a box that fills up with noise. Many of them will not.
What replaced email, besides SMS
SMS is the reliable floor. It is not the whole building. A business that only thinks "text or email" misses the set the thirty-year-old already uses.
Chat apps. WhatsApp, iMessage, Signal, Telegram. These are how peer groups actually coordinate. WhatsApp in particular is the default in a lot of the world, and a normal work tool for younger staff. The limit is platform lock-in. You do not own the pipe, and a customer who does not have the app cannot reach you.
RCS. Richer carrier messaging — images, branding, verified sender marks — riding the same phone number as SMS. Sinch's generational work has found younger people more likely to trust a verified RCS mark. Treat it as SMS that grew up, not as a separate religion. If the other phone cannot do RCS, it falls back to text. That is the point.
Apple Messages for Business, and in-app chat. Useful if your customers already live inside Apple or inside your product. Useless as a public front door. A stranger on your website cannot be assumed to have either.
Team tools. Slack, Teams, Discord. Right for staff. Wrong as the only way a customer starts a job. You should not make someone join a workspace to ask what a visit costs.
Voice notes. Common among Gen Z, rising among millennials. Fine inside a thread. A terrible system of record if that is all you keep.
The web itself. A short page, a booking link, a status page. Not a message, but it removes the need for one.
None of those replace a phone number the customer already has. SMS — and a desktop app that turns that number into a shared chat — is the one alternative that does not ask them to install anything, create an account, or remember a password. The others are lanes. The number is the road.
Contact forms are not a front door. They are an open inbox with no lock.
The old website pattern is still everywhere. A name field. An email field. A message box. A submit button. It feels polite. It is also one of the easiest things on the public web to abuse.
Spam operations do not need a human anymore. In 2025, researchers documented AkiraBot, a tool that reads a small-business site and writes a custom pitch, then drops it into contact forms and chat widgets. SentinelLabs traced more than 80,000 successful submissions, against a target list that had passed 400,000 sites, concentrated on Shopify, GoDaddy, Wix, and Squarespace. OOPSpam's 2025 sample of more than 25 million malicious IPs put contact forms at 26 percent of the form-spam categories it tracked, behind only sign-up forms. Residential proxies mean the junk no longer comes from an obvious datacenter address. AI means the junk no longer says "buy cheap watches." It mentions your actual services.
So the staff cost is not the form. It is the sorting. Someone opens each message, decides it is fake, and deletes it. Real customers wait in the same pile. Add a CAPTCHA and you tax the human you wanted, especially on a phone, while the better bots walk around it.
A contact form also creates an email problem you did not ask for. The submission has to land somewhere. That somewhere is a mailbox, a ticket queue fed by a mailbox, or a notification that is itself an email. You just rebuilt the inbox, then invited the internet to write to it anonymously.
There is a cleaner object, and it has been in the HTML spec's family since the mailto link. It is the sms link.
href="sms:" is the contact form, except the customer is real
A mailto link opens a compose window. An sms link does the same thing for text. The scheme is defined in RFC 5724. A typical control looks like this:
<a href="sms:+15551234567">...
Tap it on a phone and the messaging app opens with your number filled in, and often a first line already written. The customer still hits send. The browser cannot fire the text by itself. That is a feature. A bot farm cannot submit the form, because there is no form. A person has to use a phone number they control.
That one change does several jobs at once.
You know who is writing. A phone number is harder to mint in bulk than a throwaway Gmail address. OOPSpam's card-testing sample found Gmail alone accounted for about 63 percent of the addresses used. An sms link does not collect an address at all.
You skip the spam appliance. No honeypot field. No CAPTCHA. No "prove you are human" step between a ready customer and a reply.
You start a thread, not a ticket. The first message is already in the channel you will use for the rest of the job. Appointment time, photo of the problem, "running ten minutes late," invoice paid — same conversation.
You get consent the clean way. In the United States, texting people who did not ask is a legal mess under the TCPA. A customer who taps Text us and sends the first message has started the conversation. You reply in that thread. You do not need to guess whether a scraped address wanted to hear from you.
The link belongs anywhere a mailto used to sit: the contact page, the header, a Google Business profile, a QR code on a van, an email signature you are about to retire, a missed-call text-back. Pre-fill a short body so the customer does not have to invent the opening line. "Hi, I need a quote for…" is enough.
Two implementation notes, because this is where sloppy links die. Use the full number with country code. Include both ? and & before body so Android and iOS both pre-fill the message. Keep the draft short. The customer can edit it. You are removing friction, not putting words in their mouth forever.
On a desktop browser the same link is weaker, because the visitor may not have a carrier handset in front of them. That is not an argument for the form. It is an argument for the other half of the product: staff already live on desktops. Customers live on phones. The bridge is a carrier number that both sides can treat as chat.
The cost argument is simpler than the culture argument
Email looks free until you count the objects you have to keep alive.
A Google Workspace mailbox is not a rounding error. Business Starter is $7 per user per month on an annual plan, or $8.40 on the flexible month-to-month plan. That price is per user — a seat you provision, store, secure, and eventually offboard. If the lazy design of a customer relationship is "give them an account so we can email each other," you are paying mailbox rent for a person who wanted to ask one question. A basic line that lands near a dollar a month is already the cheaper object, and it is the object the customer already knows how to use.
Even if you never issue a mailbox per customer, you still pay for the system around email. A domain. DNS and authentication records so mail is not rejected. A filtering vendor. Storage. Admin time. The slow leak of mail that lands in Promotions or spam, which is a cost you cannot see on the invoice and cannot fully measure, because open tracking itself is broken. Apple's Mail Privacy Protection pre-fetches the tracking pixel. Some corporate servers strip it. The "open rate" on a dashboard is a compromised number. Delivery of a text to a handset is a blunter, more honest event: it arrived on the device they already check.
Then there is the meter you are going to pay anyway. If the business sends texts in bulk — reminders, "we're on the way," "your part is in" — the carrier or the messaging API charges for the segment. That cost is the real meter. The software that sits on top of it does not have to be a second platform with a second seat fee per customer. If you already built a desktop carrier phone that behaves like chat, the inbox is the free layer. The text is the part that costs a little. You were going to pay that to reach people. You should not also pay Google, a form vendor, a spam filter, and a ticketing suite so the same person can eventually get a reply three tools later.
Staff cost dwarfs both. A form submission that is junk still takes a human minute. A text from a real number takes a human minute that was worth spending. Multiply that by a week of AkiraBot and the seven-dollar mailbox is not the expensive line item. Attention is.
What to keep, so this does not become a stunt
Getting rid of email as the relationship channel is not the same as abolishing the file format.
Keep email, or a PDF, for things that must be forwarded to an accountant, attached to a permit, or read without a phone: invoices people asked to file, signed agreements, long specs. Offer the document in the thread as a link. Do not make the mailbox the place the conversation happens.
Keep a written record. A desktop chat log on a carrier number is a record. Export it. Do not rely on one person's personal iMessage.
Do not blast. The win is the inbound sms link and the replies inside threads people started. Marketing texts are a different product, with consent, frequency, and an easy stop. The thirty-year-old who likes texting a business will mute a brand that treats the lock screen like a billboard.
Do not pretend the 98 percent SMS "open rate" that floats around marketing blogs is a laboratory result. Much of that figure is inferred from delivery, not from a measured read. Use it as a direction, not a trophy. The sturdier facts are the ones above: near-universal texting among people now in their thirties, text leading most "how should a business reach me" categories, and form spam that is now written by software about your actual website.
What an IT company should do on Monday
Take the contact form off the primary button. Leave it in a footer if a regulator or a partner still needs a written submission path. The button that matters says Text us, and the href is sms.
Point that link at a number the whole desk can see. One shared line, or a small pool, rendered as chat on the computers where the work already happens. Not a phone that lives in a truck. Not a personal cell that walks out at 5.
Pre-fill a calm first line. Route threads to a person. Reply like a chat, because that is what the other side thinks it is.
Stop provisioning a mailbox because "that is how customers contact us." At seven to eight dollars a seat, Google is a fine office suite. It is an expensive way to simulate a conversation your customer already knows how to start with their thumb.
The thirty-year-old did not kill email in a meeting. They just stopped checking it first. The businesses that look modern in five years will not be the ones with a prettier form. They will be the ones you can text, and that text you back from a desktop, in the same thread, without making you create an account to ask a question.
Yes. It is time. Not to smash every mail server. To stop making email do a job the phone already won.
Sources
- Generationally Speaking, Gen Z vs Millennials at work (survey of 4,067 UK people; millennials aged 28–43 in 2024): 99% of millennials and Gen Z send texts; 36% prefer messaging a colleague on an app rather than phone or email. https://generationallyspeaking.co.uk/gen-z-vs-millennials-at-work/
- ZeroBounce, Gen Z at Work, 2026 report (nearly 1,400 Gen Z respondents, Dec 2024–Jan 2025): 42% named email as their top workplace communication tool. https://www.zerobounce.net/GenZ-work-report
- EZ Texting, 2026 Consumer Texting Behavior Report (959 US consumers): texting leads 9 of 10 "how should a business reach you" categories; 89% have opted in to at least one business text program; 87% check a business text within 15 minutes. https://www.eztexting.com/report/2026-consumer-texting-behavior-report
- Adaptavist Group, workplace messaging: WhatsApp used regularly by 44% of Gen Z and 42% of millennials vs 28% of boomers. https://www.theadaptavistgroup.com/company/press/talk-tiktok-to-me
- Google Workspace Business Starter pricing: $7 per user/month annual, $8.40 flexible. https://knowledge.workspace.google.com/admin/getting-started/editions/business-editions
- RFC 5724, URI scheme for SMS. https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc5724
- SentinelLabs / reporting on AkiraBot: AI-written contact-form and chat-widget spam; 80,000+ successful submissions, 400,000+ sites targeted since September 2024. https://hackread.com/akirabot-abuses-openai-api-spam-website-contact-forms/
- OOPSpam, 2025 Annual Spam Report: 25.6 million malicious IPs sampled; contact forms 26% of tracked form-spam categories; Gmail 63.21% of addresses in the card-testing sample. https://www.oopspam.com/2025-spam-report
- FCC, Telephone Consumer Protection Act (consent rules for autodialed and prerecorded calls and texts). https://www.fcc.gov/general/telemarketing-and-robocalls