Dive Brief:

• The average worker spends five hours a day looking at email, according to a survey on email use from Adobe released Wednesday. The study, which surveyed 1,002 adults in the U.S., found people devote almost three and a half hours a day to catch up on work emails, plus another two sorting through personal email.
• Personal and work email use are down since 2016, but the drop hasn't been precipitous. Three years ago, people spent 4.2 hours a day checking work email, compared to 3.4 hours in 2019. Year-over-year, time spent in work inboxes rose slightly, up from 3.3 hours in 2018 to 3.4 hours. 
• Roughly one-third of millennials say they check email while in bed or watching TV at home. Another 26% say they remain connected to email inboxes even while on vacation.

Dive Insight:

Email is a target for companies in the collaboration software market, which are betting on a future workplace where email goes the way of the fax machine.

While these tools have eased internal communication flows, the need for external communication keeps email a relevant tool. 

"It's incredibly clear that we're all comfortable with email, and we've integrated it into almost every part of our day,"said Sarah Kennedy, Adobe's VP of global marketing and digital experience, in an emailed statement. "While it's important to note that the time we spend checking email overall has declined since 2016, the frequency remains substantial."

Looking to broaden usability, Slack built a connector that lets companies communicate with vendors, customers or other Enterprise Grid members. The strategy is aimed at offering external communication capabilities while also luring non-users onto the app. 

In June, Slack went public through direct listing on the New York Stock Exchange. As it lays out a long-term strategy, industry is keeping a close eye on Slack's paying enterprise customers as a bellwether for the market as a whole. 

Despite Slack's loyal user base, Microsoft easily dwarfs the company's active user count. Slack said in January it surpassed the 10-million daily active user mark.

But Microsoft Teams — with help from the company's bundled approach to software — sprinted past Slack's numbers with a daily user base of 14 million.