IMO email is dead and spam killed it. Who uses email anymore? It’s basically business communication (but all the biz communication I’ve done in the past years has been through telegram / signal / whatsapp / etc.) and registering to websites.
Once we figure out a way to handle website registration that’s not tied to email (whatever that means) I’m not sure email will be useful for anything.
Most useful conversations have moved to messaging apps.
Email is incredibly heavily relied upon and with great success. People get their pay receipts, their rental applications, notifications of mentions on social media, speeding tickets, music and gig notifications, reminders to get their pet to the vet, X-ray reports, prescription reminders and I could go on.
Not to mention the huge boom in email digests and blogs over the past 5+ years.
I haven't seen - _any_ businesses communication conducted over signal or WhatsApp - ever. I'm not saying it doesn't happen somewhere but it's certainly not common place. And telegram? I didn't even realise that still existed!
> Most useful conversations have moved to messaging apps.
That's not a future I'd like to ever live in.
Why? Because all of those are proprietary solutions that don't interoperate with anything and their behavior and existence depend on the whims of a single corporation. No thanks.
Email is standard, interoperable, owned by nobody, accessible to everyone. It's the optimal way to communicate.
So many people completely miss this point. If whatever is supposed to replace email it will have to be very similar in features. That is
1. Permissionless (open for anyone to send messages or operate a server)
2. Asynchronous
3. Resilient
4. Searchable
No IM solutions I know can do that at all. Matrix would come closest but asynchronicity and resilience are still troublesome on that part and all clients are more geared towards IM instead of async longform discourse
While one could heavily overgeneralize and say that "everyone uses google for mail" (iirc they own like 20% of the email market) they certainly don't own the protocol or its development.
I think it is exactly these sentiments that do most harm.
I mean, that is completely false at every level (technical and operational).
Sure, gmail is a big player but there are many others. Most importantly, there are thousands of smaller players. All of which interoperate.
I can't tell if you say that sarcastically or from a position on being uninformed about how email works. If the latter, do take some time to understand email infrastructure at a high level because it is a case study in beautiful interoperability of open standards. Something we must all keep in mind for the future of the Internet.
Email has been resilient and an open communication mechanism from everyone since the 70s precisely because it cannot be owned by anyone, it is an open interoperable standard.
There will never be anything equally long-lived and feature rich from a single corporation. Corporate interest don't align with that. Proprietary solutions will always be about locking you in and limiting interoperability.
Nome of the service you mention have the async nature of email.
If I want you to be aware of a long article I'll send it to you in an email because if I message it, most people will open it, see it takes more than 2 minutes to read and close it and never go back to it.
Really? WhatsApp is end-to-end encrypted unlike something like email or slack. If your company doesn't understand that they should hire a security team.
Once we figure out a way to handle website registration that’s not tied to email (whatever that means) I’m not sure email will be useful for anything.
Most useful conversations have moved to messaging apps.