The first royal email was sent 50 years ago today. If only it were still so glamorous

Exactly 50 years ago, Queen Elizabeth II sat down at a terminal in Malvern, pressed a velvet-covered computer key, sent an email over ARPANET-era machinery to announce the availability of a Coral 66 compiler from an account called HME2, and became the first monarch to “appear” in an inbox. Royalty met machine; the future arrived via a pastel hat and pristine white gloves. For a few keystrokes over one very British afternoon, machinery minded its manners, and networked communication got to borrow a tiara.

Then, it went to work.

Half a century later, that very same medium helps run some of the drearier parts of modern life: the pre-dawn inbox check before your brain has fully joined your body, the thread somebody revives to prove you did, in fact, say the thing you were hoping nobody remembered, the timestamp as a “look how hard I work” alibi. Email has aged into the office’s messenger — and into its after-hours claim on attention. 

Microsoft $MSFT’s 2025 Work Trend Index says that the average worker gets 117 emails a day. That mass emails with 20-plus recipients are rising, while one-to-one threads are slipping. That 40% of people online by 6 a.m. are already triaging messages before the first coffee has done its job. That nearly a third of active workers are back in their inboxes by 10 p.m. Meanwhile, a Pew study back in 2002 found that only 15% of workers checked their email before heading to work, and only 26% checked it after work.

Technology arrives with glamour, promise, and a little institutional pageantry. It gets sold as access, speed, status, modernity, and a lot more convenience. But after the confetti has been swept up and the thing has settled into the monotony of ordinary life, technology starts doing another kind of work. Email, now full of newsletters, phishing, and “circling back,” has settled into daily life as expectation, administration, surveillance, cleanup — and extra work for the people who are already drowning in it.

The queen got a polished little demo. Everybody else may have gotten royally screwed.

The office found a shorter leash

Email was sold as a faster way to send information across distances. And — of course — it does just that. But for offices, email’s real genius was something slightly more sinister and much more durable: It made responsibility portable. The BlackBerry 5810, the first model that was both a smartphone and a secure email device, was marketed primarily to business users. The pitch was straightforward: Work could travel; important people could stay connected (and important). 

But once your inbox finds a home in your pocket, convenience has a way of hardening into expectation. By 2008, Pew found that 37% of workers with work email checked it constantly, 50% checked it on weekends, and 34% checked it on vacation. That drift got bad enough that France’s “right to disconnect” law took effect in 2017, requiring larger companies to negotiate rules around after-hours communication. One French legislator described workers as attached to work by “a kind of electronic leash — like a dog.”

A tool that makes it possible to check email from anywhere becomes a background assumption. If a message can reach you anywhere, why would it wait? If you can — and are expected to — reply from the metro, the couch, the grocery line, or the sideline of your kid’s soccer game, the line between “available” and “responsible” begins to blur. The technology has renegotiated obligation. “Per my last email” has earned its place in the canon of passive-aggressive office literature.

Microsoft’s 2024 Work Trend Index found that 85% of emails are read in under 15 seconds and that the typical person reads about four emails for every one they send. Asana’s 2025 research says that constant emails are the top reason nearly a third of workers regularly stay late and that knowledge workers spend 60% of their time on “work about work,” such as chasing updates and coordinating things instead of doing the job itself.

The problem isn’t merely volume, though 117-plus messages a day is its own kind of swamp. Your inbox, a place built for correspondence, now looks increasingly like a broadcast system for bureaucracy. And bureaucracy has social demands. Email became one of the places workers can prove they’re attentive, organized, reachable, agreeable, and game for whatever just landed with a cheerful subject line (and a less-than-cheerful ask). Answer fast and you look sharp. Answer late at night and you’ve helped teach everyone at the office what counts as normal.

The fix? Another layer

After email colonized the workday, Silicon Valley spent years promising to rescue workers from the burdens of communication with more communication tools.

Slack $WORK was supposed to be quicker, more humane. Teams was supposed to gather the sprawl into one small-ish place. Companies kept email and added chat on top of it. Slack’s own help pages explain how to send emails into Slack, while Microsoft says the average worker now gets 153 Teams messages a day. Your inbox learned ventriloquism.

Google $GOOGL says email volume is at an “all-time high,” so its answer is more email — with AI sitting on top of it. Gmail is entering its “Gemini era,” the company said earlier this year, with a “personal, proactive assistant.” See: AI overviews, Suggested Replies, Help Me Write, and Proofread built into your inbox. Apple $AAPL’s Mail now offers Priority Messages, automatic summaries, and Smart Reply. Microsoft is pushing the same direction in Outlook, where Copilot is an “agentic” layer that moves “from intent to execution,” drafting and refining emails — and working across email and calendar to RSVP on a user’s behalf. Email is starting to mutate from a read-and-respond medium into a summarize-draft-execute prompt.

But ActivTrak found that after AI adoption, time spent in email rose 104%. Chat and messaging rose 145%. Focus time fell by 23 minutes a day. In 2025, BetterUp and Stanford’s Social Media Lab found that 40% of full-time U.S. desk workers had received AI “workslop” in the previous month, and each instance took about an hour and 51 minutes to deal with. That’s a nasty little exchange rate. One person’s “efficiency” becomes somebody else’s cleanup. 

Software is now writing the junk, filtering the junk, summarizing the junk, and offering to draft the response to the junk. Somewhere in the middle, a human is supposed to feel more productive.

AI also smooths the social rough edges in ways that can make office communication feel cleaner and less trustworthy at the same time. The University of Florida found that AI can make managers’ emails look more professional while still eroding trust when the habit gets too heavy. The prose grows more polished. The human signal fades. Plenty of people know the feeling already. Late-stage email has a gift for turning its own mess into the next product pitch. Machine-generated outreach shows up, so machine-generated filtering appears. A long thread grows unwieldy, so a machine offers to summarize the thread. The summaries pile up, the notes keep coming, and the work of sorting the overflow doesn’t vanish so much as move around the system looking for the next available human.

Maybe the AI tools will help at the margin. Summaries are probably better than reading 14 replies where nine people on the chain say some version of “Yep, that works for me.” But offices have a long track record of taking any efficiency gains and reinvesting them in new demands. The worker who saves 20 minutes is rarely handed 20 minutes of peace. More often, they’re handed another expectation and another reason to stay a little more reachable.

The whole ecosystem starts to feel recursive after that. Mark Cuban said recently that he bought a Mac Mini and was training AI to help fend off a flood of AI-generated email and unwanted subscriptions.

Email began as a small miracle of connection and wound up as one of the ways work keeps finding people. Then, the burden got heavy enough that a second wave of software arrived to help people survive the first. And now, the software is creating burdens of its own.

A queen at a terminal once made networked communication look polished enough for the palace. Five decades later, the mature version looks more like a worker staring at a phone before sunrise while software offers a brisk digest of overnight demands. The message got longer. The office got hungrier. The cleanup got automated. The glamour never really stood a chance.