Every so often (a rather ambiguous date range, don’t you think?) the demise of email is predicted.

It’s a pain.

It’s a spam-laden nightmare.

It’s archaic and clunky.

It’s possible that you, too, see email through this lens. But I’m going to hazard a guess and say that, regardless, email is still an essential part of your business and of your life.

In fact, I’ll go a step further: Without email, your overall communication plan (business or personal) would be irrevocably stunted. This is nothing to be ashamed of (though it seems many are). Without the keyless entry on my car, I’d drop a lot more groceries. I don’t think this makes me a bad person.

The latest fad in the “email is dead” game is to claim that social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter and MySpace will replace traditional email. Status updates, it is said, will suffice for passing along the critical information that travels through email. Check out this BBC article to prove it.

If this appears to be a sleek, trendy, agile solution to the headaches associated with email, well, it’s a bit premature. There is a long list of interesting and useful business applications possible with social networks. Conveying developed pieces of information necessary both internally and externally as part of the business process is not one of them.

That’s still the job of email.

• Email is a place where you get more than 140 characters to decode your message (unlike Twitter, for instance).
• Traditional email (as opposed to Facebook messages, for instance) is a credible, go-to business communication channel. It’s still a vehicle for CEOs to reach out to one another and for customer service reps to personally engage your customers.
• With 210 billion messages sent every day (a large percentage spam, I know), email is a part of our communication fabric, tied undeniably to much of what we do.

Want to make email even more useful? Check out some tips and tricks by clicking here.

Jason Gallic
Product Marketing Manager

Start with this list of 15 Applications No Online Business Can Live Without on Freelance Folder this morning. Some are obvious–Google Analytics, for example, and Basecamp–and some I’ve never heard of, but want to.

Add four more:

16. Email Center Pro

As soon as you have a second person–let alone three, five or 10–working with you, your e-mail takes a nosedive toward chaos. Email Center Pro adds management, accountability and collaboration to your existing e-mail. Assign e-mails, coordinate responses, speak as a company with a single e-mail voice but manage with visibility in the back office. Email Center Pro doesn’t replace your e-mail server; it works with it. (Disclosure: published by my company, Palo Alto Software).

17. TypePad

The list of 15 starts with WordPress, which is appropriate. I like WordPress and use it a lot. But TypePad belongs on this list as well. It’s a reasonable alternative to WordPress for blogging. I use it for my Planning Startups Stories blog. Last time I looked, so did Seth Godin, Robert Sutton and many other major-league bloggers.

18. Windows Live Writer or MarsEdit

OK, neither of these is actually online. The real zing of blog post editing software is being able to work in the same interface for multiple blogs, and switching from one to another. I use both Mac and Windows at different times almost every day. The Windows Live Writer, a freebie by Microsoft, is the best I’ve tried. MarsEdit for the Mac is pretty good, too; it switches from blog to blog as does Live Writer; and if you’re on the Mac, Live Writer is irrelevant anyhow.

19. Instant Messenger

Instant communication. I use mostly Yahoo! Messenger because my team standardized on that one a couple of years ago. There are four or five main standards and several online apps that combine them. A lot of people like Meebo, which links to several of the major instant messengers. I’ve also used and liked Trillian. Here’s a link to a Lifehacker post from a year ago called the Five Best Instant Messengers.

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And I’m stopping here, with 19. Sure, I could make this 20 by adding something obvious like Google Docs, but let it be 19.