Email Still Works. So Why Hide It?
Email shouldn’t feel like a relief, but it does. When companies hide behind chatbots and help centres, even simple support becomes a negotiation. Email stays the calmest way to explain a real problem, on your own time.
I’ve started to notice a small moment on company websites, and it’s hard to ignore now.
I land on a company’s site, scroll to the bottom, click “Contact”, and brace for what I already expect: a chatbot bubble, a knowledge base, a maze of “helpful” articles, and a sequence of questions designed to stop me from speaking to anyone.
Then, occasionally, I see it.
An email address.
And I genuinely breathe a sigh of relief.
Not because email is nostalgic, or because I’m trying to live in the past, but because an email address signals something that’s getting rarer: a company that will accept a real message, in plain language, without making me fight a system first.
Email is still the calmest way to explain a problem
Most problems aren’t simple. Even when they are, they still need context — and context needs room.
It fits the way I generally think about email: as a tool for clarity, not urgency (I explain that more in How I think about email).
Email gives you that room. It lets the full story sit in one place — what happened, what was tried, what’s needed — with screenshots attached and the details tidy enough that the first human reply has a chance of actually solving it.
That’s what I value most: asynchronous communication that respects time. You send the message when you’re ready. They reply when they can. No live queue. No pressure to stay “online” long enough to earn a response.
The problem isn’t chat. It’s being forced into it
I’m not anti-chatbot, and I’m not anti-automation either.
When I needed to change my bank details with my insurance company, the chatbot did a fine job. That’s a narrow, predictable request — essentially a form with a friendly wrapper — and for that kind of task it works.
The problem is that support isn’t always that neat. A lot of the time the job isn’t “complete this transaction”, it’s “explain what’s going on”. It’s a policy that needs clarifying, a bill that’s wrong, or something that isn’t working and you don’t yet know why.
That’s where chat-first support can start to feel less like modern convenience and more like behaviour control: the business decides the shape of your question before you’re allowed to ask it.
If you’ve ever tried to explain a real issue to a chatbot, you’ll recognise the pattern. It nudges you toward pre-set options, you keep rewording your situation to match them, you eventually hit a wall, and then you get the line that says some version of:
All live operators are currently offline.
At that point you weren’t really being supported. You were being contained until the humans came back.
This is about choice
I’m not arguing that chatbots should disappear. I’m arguing that customers should be allowed to choose how they communicate.
If a business wants to offer chat for simple queries, fine. If it wants to use AI to triage requests, suggest articles, or capture basic details, also fine. Those tools can be genuinely useful when they’re offered as options.
I don’t mind new channels when they’re offered as options. I just don’t like being funnelled — which is part of what I wrestled with in HEY Email: Brilliant Reinvention or Overpriced Experiment?
The issue is when the chatbot becomes the gatekeeper. Once it’s the only door, it stops being a tool and becomes a filter. The experience turns into a negotiation with the interface: how do you phrase this so the system will accept it, and will it let you reach a person?
Email avoids that. It doesn’t require a shared window of availability or a live handover. In a world that keeps pushing support into “right now”, that lack of synchronisation is a quiet relief.
It’s the same reason I still want simple, low-friction controls in email — like mark as unread — because they respect attention rather than demanding constant immediacy.
I don’t even mind ticketing systems
I don’t mind ticketing systems at all.
If a company wants structure on their side — routing, priorities, SLAs — fine. That’s their job. The problem isn’t that support teams use tools; it’s when the tool becomes a barrier.
The ideal version is straightforward: email the company in plain language, their system turns it into a ticket behind the scenes, and a real person replies. The customer gets the convenience of email — writing when it suits them, adding context, attaching screenshots — and the business still gets the organisation it needs to run support at scale.
That’s a reasonable compromise. It keeps the conversation human, without pretending every problem can be reduced to buttons in a chat window.
Why companies hide their email address
None of this is difficult to understand from the business side.
Email is messy for them because it isn’t structured and because the underlying plumbing of email is messy too (authentication alone is a rabbit hole: SPF, DKIM, and DMARC).. It’s harder to triage quickly, and it often produces longer messages with context — the kind of context that takes time (and therefore money) to read, understand, and respond to properly. Chat, by contrast, can be managed like a queue. Chatbots can absorb a lot of first-line volume. Knowledge bases can divert a chunk of requests before they ever reach a person.
In other words, steering people away from email is a cost-saving strategy.
I wrote more about what “good support” actually looks like (and why it breaks at scale) in Why Email Provider Support Needs a Rethink.
It’s the same move as self-scanning at supermarkets. The shop saves on staff because customers have taken on part of the job. Most of the time it’s fine — until something doesn’t scan, a discount won’t apply, or the system flags someone for “assistance”, and suddenly the queue appears anyway.
That’s what a lot of modern support feels like. Customers do the early legwork: troubleshooting first, searching the help centre, then trying to squeeze a real situation into whatever multiple-choice path the chatbot allows. If it still doesn’t fit, the next step is waiting for a window where “live support” is actually available — and when it finally reaches a person, the story often has to be repeated from scratch.
Email isn’t perfect, but it’s more straightforward. It lets someone describe the problem in their own words, send it when it suits them, and let the company handle the organising behind the scenes. In other words, it keeps the burden where it belongs: with the business being paid to provide the service.
What an email address signals
This is why that small moment matters.
When a company publishes a clear email address, it signals a willingness to accept a real message, not just a series of clicks. It means there’s space to write normally, explain the odd situation that doesn’t match the script, and use words instead of being forced into a form.
It doesn’t guarantee great support. Plenty of companies list an email address and still reply with templates.
But it’s still a better starting point than being trapped in a chatbot loop, sent round endless help articles, or left hunting for contact details just to reach a person.
The thing I miss
I miss the time when a company website would simply list an email address and someone would reply like a person. Not instantly, and not with endless back-and-forth — just a normal response that dealt with the issue and moved things along.
Email is still one of the simplest ways for customers to reach one-to-one support. It’s asynchronous, widely accessible, and it leaves a record you can refer back to.
That record matters even more now that so many people are trained to distrust unexpected messages — something I touched on in Somewhere out there, a Nigerian oil minister still owes me $26 million.
So when a business pushes customers away from email, it doesn’t feel like a neutral channel change. It changes the shape of the conversation. It shifts control toward the company. Instead of choosing how to explain the problem, the customer gets funnelled into whatever the system can handle, in the order the system prefers. That might be efficient internally, but it often means doing extra work just to translate a real issue into something the workflow will accept — which is a different kind of “improvement” entirely.
Email pushes in the other direction. A message can be started, left in drafts, refined, and expanded with the context that actually matters — screenshots, order numbers, the timeline, the exact wording of an error. That extra clarity isn’t overkill; it’s often what makes the first human reply more likely to fix the issue, instead of kicking off another round of back-and-forth.
A small request that would make a big difference
If a company wants to offer chat, fine. If it wants to publish a knowledge base and encourage self-service for simple issues, also fine. Those tools can genuinely help, and there are plenty of situations where they’re the quickest route to an answer.
What I don’t want is for those tools to become the only route.
A clear email address should still exist as a first-class option — visible, usable, and not hidden behind five screens of triage or locked behind a chatbot that decides whether a problem is worthy of a human reply. It doesn’t need to promise instant responses. It just needs to be a door that remains open.
Because when I see an email address on a company website, I don’t read it as old-fashioned. I read it as a sign there’s still a direct route to a person — no gatekeeping, no hoops, no “prove you qualify” first.
