Slack CTO: Email is never going to die completely. It's the cockroach of the internet

Photo: Reuters

Slack is the fastest growing business on the planet. But while the office instant messaging business is banking on growing its user base by more than 6,000%, according to a panel at Web Summit, in a separate interview the group’s co-founder and chief technology officer Cal Henderson acknowledged that Slack will never kill off emails.

“Email is never going to die completely. Long-term, it is the cockroach of the internet; nobody likes it but it is impossible to eradicate. Email addresses will be around indefinitely,” said Henderson to Silicon Republic at Web Summit (4 November to 8 November).

By the end of 2019, there will be more than 3.8 billion email users, over one million more people than the previous year, according to 2018 Radicati Group study. At the moment, Slack has 8 million daily active users and wants to grow this to 500 million.

READ MORE: Slack co-founder’s goal: Grow users by more than 6,000%

“But I think what is going to happen is … more and more use cases, which email isn’t suited to, will move away. If you look at the standard inbox on email today, it is a mix between that internal and external communication, friends and family, spam, marketing messages,” added Henderson in his interview to Silicon Republic.

For more news and insights from Web Summit, check out Yahoo Finance’s coverage here.