Email is one of the Internet’s oldest apps — from the days before we used the word “app” even — and despite its drawbacks, most of us still use it every day.

Typically, the apps we download in 2020 have been _________for mere days or months. We are used to the pang of regret when really useful software suddenly winks out of existence. How has email remained a(n) _________ for nearly years? Yes, it is helpful that email is based on a(n) _________ communications medium that stretches back to some of the first examples of written language. But that isn’t the full story.

First, email managed to survive massive upheavals in the way we use computers. In the early 1970s, when email was born, it was almost _________ a tool for researchers, university students and engineers. You would send, receive and store your email on a work computer. With the _________ of personal computers in the 1980s and 90s, email became something you kept on your own private machines or disks — almost like storing old letters in a shoebox. Now we have come full circle. Most of us store our personal mail in the cloud, which is _________ like storing it on somebody else’s work computer.

It is extremely rare to see apps make the leap from one platform to another like email did. They tend to _________ in the journey from web to mobile, or from one game system to another.

As well as _________ dramatic tech changes, email dealt with another major hurdles — spam (垃圾邮件). In the 1990s and early 2000s, people’s inboxes were _________ with so much junk that it was impossible to find the stuff you wanted. You had to install another program — a spam filter — just to use your email program. But in the age of cloud mail, anti-spam systems have become so good that it is __________ to see one of those quaint old subject lines touting (标榜) “VI@grs@!” or “pron” to get around word filters.

And yet, __________ its heroic triumph over tech obsolescence and spam, email isn’t exactly alluring (吸引人的). We use it mostly for official __________, automated reminders and shopping receipts, along with the occasional bit of personal news. Though email communication is practically instantaneous, it feels __________. Why email when you could text?

Perhaps that is the point. Email isn’t a brand-new way to __________ nor is it juiced up with memes and not takes. But we are still opening G-mail or Hot-mail every day because it works and everybody has it. Under the hood, email uses protocol (数据传递的协议) that keeps trying to send data, over and over, hoping that it can outlast network problems. It doesn’t give up. And somehow, by trying really earnestly, it has __________ the computers where it has born and the spammers who tried to defeat it.