How every generation really uses email: What the data means for IT strategy

Gen Z chooses email for job applications more often than Baby Boomers do: 36% versus 23%. It's one of several findings from a new Exclaimer survey that break the standard IT assumption about how each generation actually uses email.

That statistic alone should complicate how most IT teams think about email risk. The standard model treats Gen Z as chat-native and largely absent from the inbox, Baby Boomers as the email-first generation who never left it, and younger employees generally as the lower-risk, less security-conscious group. Real decisions get built on that model: where security investment goes, how infrastructure gets prioritized, what governance looks like for different parts of the workforce. A new Exclaimer survey suggests most of it needs a second look.

In a recent webinar, "How every generation really uses email: And what it means for your IT strategy," Exclaimer's James Wayne, Senior Product Marketing Manager, sat down with Elisabeth Goossens, Director of Brand Communications, and Cemal Ulgerli, IT Systems Engineer, to test that model against data. Elisabeth commissioned the underlying research, When it Matters: How People Really Communicate, a nationally representative survey of 2,000 UK and US adults conducted by OnePoll. Cemal brought a dual perspective: years spent managing email infrastructure in heavily regulated environments, and a set of habits from his own generation that the research puts directly under the microscope. Here's what the panel found, and what it means for IT.

Email is being reserved, not abandoned

People are intentional about which platform they use for which message. Casual, low-stakes moments go to WhatsApp or text. Anything with real stakes, anything they might need to reference or prove later, goes to email.

The research tested 11 everyday situations, from sharing a joke to filing a formal complaint to submitting a job application. Email leads by a wide margin across every high-stakes scenario, and the more consequential the message, the more dominant email becomes. Elisabeth's read on the data is that this is deliberate rather than habitual: people route anything they might need to prove or revisit later to the one channel that reliably keeps a record.

The generational breakdown upends the standard IT mental model directly. Gen Z chooses email for job applications at 36%, ahead of Baby Boomers at 23%. Millennials hold the highest standards for what a professional email should look like, citing consistent formatting as a trust signal more than any other generation. And Gen Z, the generation IT teams most often assume has moved on from email, loses messages at the highest rate: 29% say they've lost an important message because a platform deleted it or they switched devices.

Cemal admitted he expected his own generation to skip email almost entirely before he saw the numbers. The instinct was wrong, and the reason matters operationally: younger employees rely on email for exactly the messages an organization can least afford to lose. During the Q&A, Cemal extended the point to mobile: if Gen Z is treating email as a high-stakes, formal channel, IT should check whether mobile email clients carry the same security configuration as desktop, and whether bring-your-own-device (BYOD) policy is quietly creating an unmonitored gap.

What makes a business email feel trustworthy

People aren't passively reading business email. They're scanning for signals, in seconds, that tell them whether what's in front of them is legitimate.

According to the research, full contact details are the single most cited trust signal globally, at 45%. A professional email address on a company domain follows closely at 44%, then a clear sender name at 31%. Taken together, those three are really one signal: proof that a real, identifiable person or organization sent the message.

Brand signals matter almost as much. A professional, branded email signature sits at 23% overall, but climbs to 29% among Gen Z and millennials, the generations most likely to be evaluating business email on a company's behalf. Company logo and branding register at 24%, and consistent formatting across emails at 21%. Only 11% of respondents say they don't trust company email at all, so nearly everyone else is making an active judgment call every time one lands.

On the call, James grouped those signals into three categories: the human element (a name, a way to make contact), the brand element (logo, visual consistency), and the technical element (domain, formatting). All three sit inside decisions IT already controls. Platform matters too: 48% of respondents say the channel a message arrives on changes how trustworthy it feels, and 46% say it changes how professional it feels. Only 13% say the platform makes no difference at all.

That's a pointed finding for any IT team that has spent the past few years pushing formal communication onto Teams or Slack. Recipients are drawing their own lines about which channel feels authoritative for which kind of message, regardless of what internal policy assumes.

AI is raising output and lowering trust at the same time

AI is being used to perform credibility at exactly the moment recipients are becoming more alert to inauthenticity.

Globally, 42% of respondents say they never use AI in their communications, meaning 58% do in some form. Among those who do, the most common use is cleaning up grammar and spelling (21%), followed by making writing sound more professional (20%), sounding more confident (14%), and responding more quickly (13%).

The generational and regional splits are sharper. Only 17% of Gen Z never use AI in their communications, compared with 67% of Baby Boomers. The US is ahead of the UK on adoption too: 35% of US adults never use AI in their communications, against 50% in the UK.

At the same time, 41% of respondents have questioned whether a message they received was genuine. The sharpest version of that tension sits with Baby Boomers: the generation least likely to use AI themselves is also the most likely, at 51%, to doubt whether an incoming message is real. As Elisabeth pointed out, that skepticism isn't coming from firsthand experience of using the tools. It's a sign that uncertainty about AI-assisted writing has spread well beyond the people actually using it.

Cemal connected this to a shift in the phishing threat model itself. The old advice, watch for bad grammar, awkward phrasing, obvious typos, is aging out fast. AI-assisted phishing emails increasingly read as polished and legitimate, which moves the burden off user judgment and onto infrastructure: a verified sender domain and a consistent, centrally governed identity, rather than an employee's ability to spot a badly worded email. For a closer look at how generational attitudes toward AI-written email break down, Exclaimer's AI and email communication sentiment report covers the topic in more depth.

The email signature as a trust and authentication signal

A consistently governed, branded email signature is hard to spoof, even when almost everything else about an email is easy to fake.

Cemal's framing on the call was direct: IT teams tend to treat the email signature as a branding line item, when it also belongs in the authentication conversation. It works alongside protocols like SPF, DKIM, and DMARC, giving recipients a consistent visual identity to check, one that's harder to fake than the words in a message alone. Read more on why a consistent, branded email signature is more than decoration.

The risk cuts both ways: when email signature governance is inconsistent, when email signatures vary sender to sender, domain to domain, device to device, the same signal that's meant to build trust starts to work against it. Recipients notice that inconsistency quickly, while senders rarely do, since nobody reviews their own outgoing email signature the way a recipient scrutinizes an incoming one. That asymmetry is why email signature governance breaks down first in larger organizations.

A practical framework for stress-testing assumptions

Write down what your team currently believes about how each generation uses email. Then test it against the data.

Both speakers converged on the same starting point: audit the assumption before auditing the infrastructure. Elisabeth's version was three questions IT teams should be able to answer with confidence:

• Usage vs. assumption: Do you actually know how employees use email by generation, or is your team working from instinct?

• Trust signals: Does every email your organization sends carry a professional sender domain, a consistent branded email signature, and full contact details, every time, on every device?

• Training calibration: Is your security training matched to the risk profile of each generation, rather than treating every employee the same way?

Cemal's version was more operational: check the authentication stack (SPF, DKIM, DMARC) for gaps, review email signature consistency across every sender and device, and revisit data retention policy by generation, given how differently Gen Z and Baby Boomers lose or keep their messages.

Where this lands for email signature management

The gap this research keeps surfacing sits between what recipients notice and what senders control. Nobody sets out to run an inconsistent email signature program: it happens by default, as every device, every email client, and every new hire adds a small variation that nobody outside IT is positioned to catch in aggregate.

Exclaimer is the global leader in email signature management for Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace. Its cloud solution applies email signature and disclaimer rules centrally, so the trust signals this research identifies show up the same way on every email an organization sends, not just the ones someone remembered to check.

That consistency matters more as AI takes on a larger share of the writing itself. The tighter the loop between drafting and sending gets, the less realistic it is to expect every individual sender to get every detail right on every message, which is exactly the assumption most manual email signature processes still run on.

Watch the webinar on demand

The full session covers this data in more depth, with James, Elisabeth, and Cemal working through the generational and trust-signal findings live.

Watch the webinar on demand for the complete conversation between James Wayne, Elisabeth Goossens, and Cemal Ulgerli, or read the full "When it Matters" research report on which the discussion is based.