Artificial intelligence (AI) could be the final nail in the coffin for email, a form of communication that is increasingly less used, especially among young people, who see it as a relic of the past. Many users receive a daily deluge of emails that don’t interest them in the slightest. An analysis by Hostinger, one of the world’s leading web hosting and domain providers, reveals one of the reasons for the irrelevance of most of the electronic communications we receive: 87% of global email traffic is generated by automated systems, meaning it’s not written by people. Another striking finding from their report is that only 44% of emails passed the recipients’ security checks (anti-spam and antivirus) and made it to their inbox.
The effectiveness of emails is declining. “What for years was a communication tool between people has become a digital infrastructure dominated by automation,” conclude the authors of the study, whose findings were drawn after processing one billion anonymized emails sent during January 2026.
“There’s something that I find particularly relevant and that completely changes the game: email has ceased to be an open channel and has become an ecosystem highly filtered by trust algorithms,” explains Walter Guido, regional director for Spain at Hostinger. “The fact that more than half of global traffic doesn’t even reach the inbox isn’t a technical detail; it’s a structural change.”
Most emails circulating today are notifications, promotions, alerts, and transactional messages generated by business platforms, social networks, software-as-a-service (SaaS) tools, or marketing systems. In other words, they’re not very engaging. While generative AI is helping to personalize email texts somewhat, users can easily tell at a glance if what they’re seeing is pre-written and, if so, tend to discard or ignore it.
But the disconnect between emails and the general public doesn’t stem solely from automation. Or at least not exclusively. “An email written by a person but sent en masse, without consent or segmentation, is far more likely to fail than an automated but relevant and anticipated one,” Guido explains. The issue isn’t so much who writes it, but rather its purpose and how it’s sent.
There’s also a cultural component. Newer generations simply consider it an obsolete and inefficient communication channel. Even for work-related matters, they prefer to use instant messaging systems linked to the professional environment, such as Slack. In their personal lives, they either ignore it or limit its use to the bare minimum, such as receiving codes when opening accounts on platforms.
Paradigm shift
For Guido, the structural change he refers to — the fact that less than half of the emails sent actually reach their destination — has at least two consequences. The first: mass mailing as a marketing tool, as it was conceived years ago, is practically obsolete. “Not because it has stopped working in creative terms, but because it is increasingly difficult to get past the incoming filters,” he points out. The battle doesn’t begin with the content, but with delivery.
The second point: trust has become the primary metric. “Before, we measured opens or conversions; now, the primary objective is much more basic and more demanding: being considered a legitimate sender.” The sender’s reputation — that is, whether the system identifies the sender as trustworthy or not — explains a very high percentage (34%, according to the study) of emails that are blocked before reaching the inbox, as the system suspects they may be phishing (theft of sensitive information through techniques that impersonate legitimate entities), other types of malware, or bots.
The most important thing for an email to be read by its recipient is, therefore, that it passes the email service’s automatic filters. If this hurdle is overcome, other factors come into play that can capture the user’s attention, such as the email subject line. “That’s where mistakes are often made, such as being overly aggressive, contrived, or downright deceptive. This might generate occasional opens, but it erodes trust in the long run,” Guido maintains.
Then there’s the issue of personalization. “Changing the recipient’s name isn’t personalization, it’s automation with a cosmetic touch. Users quickly detect when there’s genuine effort behind it and when there isn’t,” says the Hostinger executive. Finally, there’s frequency: “It’s important not to confuse visibility with saturation,” Guido points out.
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