Read: Inbox zero vs. inbox 5,000: a unified theory

But what if all that received wisdom is wrong? Maybe the workplace has given email a bad rap. Office jobs made email a chore. But at home, email is something else: a heap of opportunities, mostly sent by businesses instead of friends and family. The problem isn’t getting through it, but figuring out which offers, notices, and invitations deserve attention and which can be ignored. Most popular email software, including Gmail and Outlook, is built for enterprise use first, which infects home email with the Sisyphean despair of the office. That’s finally changing, thanks in part to Yahoo and AOL, two old-school internet icons sold off for parts after newer tech darlings overtook them. Harnessing a legacy as consumer companies, they hope to wrest email from work’s oppressive grip by redesigning it for use at home.

Email first appeared in the 1970s, but it didn’t become widespread until after the internet was commercialized a quarter century ago. Instant, mass correspondence was a novelty—recall the jokes your uncle might have forwarded to his whole address book in the 1990s—and then it was a utility.

After the smartphone became ubiquitous, personal communication moved to messaging and apps. Texts and instant messages became a much better way to communicate with family and friends than email. Photo and file sharing, which used to account for a lot of personal email messages, was replaced by apps and social media.

That shift could have killed personal email entirely, but it ended up entrenching the technology even further. Everyone has an email address. That makes it an easy identifier: Rather than creating a new username for every app or website or service or shop, you can just plug in your email address, as constant and as innate as a fingerprint. It also makes email the easiest way for every organization, from global online retailers to local municipal offices, to get stuff into the hands of their customers and constituents.

As a result, almost all the email that people receive at their personal addresses—up to 90 percent of it—is sent by commercial sources. Bank statements and utility bills. Receipts and shipping notices from online purchases. Promotions and coupons from big-box stores and local restaurants. Newsletters and related subscriptions. When individual people do send messages, they are more likely to represent institutions anyway: a notice from the kids’ school, or an update from the homeowner’s association, for example. Unlike office emails, most of these messages can be ignored entirely without much consequence. The new problem is helping people figure out which ones deserve attention and action.

This new age of consumer email isn’t owned by Microsoft or even Google, but by Verizon, the old-guard telecommunications conglomerate. Over the past five years, the company has acquired the dregs of the dot-com economy that Facebook and others eviscerated. In 2015, it bought AOL for $4.4 billion. The next year, it scooped up Yahoo for another $4.5 billion. For technology-culture elites, these companies are a joke. An aol.com or yahoo.com email address is an embarrassing sign of digital frumpiness. But that’s not the case for the average consumer. Yahoo and AOL helped many ordinary folks first get online, or find their bearings there. “People just don’t feel strongly about the domain of their email account,” Josh Jacobson, the product lead for Yahoo Mail, tells me. “They don’t see it as representing who they are.” Email is just a service that they’ve used for a long time.