What is the purpose of e-mail?

What is the purpose of e-mail?

Tim Burress (E-mail Etiquette and Organization Specialist) gives expert video advice on: What are the advantages of business e-mail?; What are the disadvantages of business e-mail? and more...

The purpose of e-mail is to communicate information. It's not to have a conversation as a conversation is best face to face or on the phone when you're synchronous. E-mail is asynchronous. It's passing a message to someone to do something, request something, delivering something, asking them to send something back to someone else. E-mail is best used for communicating something in a very concise and clear manner. But we've moved conversation into that and it's caused e-mails to be confusing, misleading, vague, too long, too short, and often e-mails confuse the receiver with what they should do.