And messaging is arguably getting even worse, what with twitter DM, Facebook chat, Google whatever it's called, Slack, the list goes on...

It's frankly why we still use email for things that it's not really suited for

I think I'd like to call it The Great Messaging Fragmentation. It's been happening ever since I needed Pidgin (then Gaim) to keep in touch with my friends. Now there's a business reason to fragment even further, it's not going to get any better and I don't think there's a way to improve things. I'll be over here on IRC if you need me.

At least with Pidgin I could participate with any modern networked computing device. We have now reached a point where the most popular messaging networks are exclusively tied to smartphones (e.g., WhatsApp).

What worries me most though, is that some businesses and governments no longer appear willing to use e-mail for external formal communication at all. When I asked my bank (ING in the Netherlands) how I could e-mail them with a question, they stated that e-mail is no longer an option (not even via a web-form), and that I would have to use Twitter direct messages, Facebook, or a web-based chat-page for any digital communication with them.

E-mail may not be hip, but I do get to keep an archive with sent and received communications that I can easily backup and keep for future reference, just like I do with paper mail (at least the important stuff).

> When I asked my bank (ING in the Netherlands) how I could e-mail them with a question, they stated that e-mail is no longer an option (not even via a web-form), and that I would have to use Twitter direct messages, Facebook, or a web-based chat-page for any digital communication with them.

Wow, that's pretty ignorant to say the least.

> interoperable and we can easily send e-mails to users of any server without breaking our heads and wondering whether their servers and clients will understand that

Not sure this holds true anymore in practice. Try to set up your own email server, your emails will probably get sent to spam by gmail, yahoo etc. Sure, it is technically possible, but it is time consuming and still risky to use it for business. At least you can still use your own domain and switch providers (google apps, outlook etc).

> Try to set up your own email server, your emails will probably get sent to spam by gmail, yahoo etc.

That problem is so overstated it's not even funny. Your email will get sent to spam if your IP adress is blacklisted, or if you send spam. It's actually gotten harder to get blacklisted over time, as people has gotten more tolerant towards semi-spam ("newsletters" and stuff) and people are generally more conservative in blacklisting whole networks these days.

Don't misbehave. Don't be a bad net citizen. Get your net and DNS in order, and the default Debian set up of postfix will do you just fine. I do it and most of my customers over the years have done it too. Some outsource their spam filtering, a few outsource their whole email, but most outside the small startup world still tend to keep their own mail server.

I just recently had weeks of headaches over getting my server's email sent to spam. After setting up a brand new domain, with SPF, DKIM, etc., I woke up one morning to find my domain wasn't resolving.

Eventually I learned it was because Radix, my TLD registry, had noticed my domain on the Spamhaus Domain Blocklist. Who knows why it was added; I definitely hadn't been sending spam. Radix, being proactive, placed a 'serverHold' DNS status on my domain name, preventing it from resolving.

Luckily Spamhaus has an automated form for dealing with false positives. Eventually Radix removed the status. (Though, a week later it was back up, for no reason. Had to badger them for over a week to get the status removed again. Would not recommend them.) It's very lucky I wasn't trying to do anything with that domain like run a business, or rely on @<domainname> addresses to work.

TL;DR the problem is definitely not overstated.

I think that's a good example of overstating the problem right there. Who knows why it was added? Well, it certainly wasn't because you hadn't outsourced your email.

Your registry could (and probably would) have put your domain on hold independently of where your MX points. Nothing short of choosing another TLD will protect you from your registry playing games with you.

> Don't misbehave. Don't be a bad net citizen. Get your net and DNS in order

That's not the kind of things I want to worry about. Most companies have business to run with problems of their own, thinking about DNS config and all the rules to be a good citizen (besides obvious spamming) sounds like headache and unneeded complexity to most companies. Not to mention backups, having to pay dedicated admins etc.

> most outside the small startup world still tend to keep their own mail server

Not sure about that:

https://www.google.com/work/search/customers/

https://products.office.com/en-us/business/office-365-custom...

The problem is well documented, here is one post from last year:

https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2015/sep/15/email/

There is IRC, which still has a reasonable number of users but isn't "global" in the way email is, SIP which could be used for IM but often wasn't, and Microsoft even attempted(but failed) to standardise MSN Messenger's protocol:

https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-movva-msn-messenger-protoc...

XMPP came closest to offering something serious enough. But most turned their backs on it and didn't propose anything better either.

It's not that people intentionally turned their backs on it (Facebook and Google did, for combined business and technical reasons). It's that people will use whatever's easiest to use at the time, with a heavy bias to going where their friends are, whether that's iMessage (with the associated hardware cost), Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp or even IRC.

I keep wondering if it is became of the era it was made in.

email was store and forward by necessity. IM was anything but.