> Outside the workplace

Well good news, workplaces are still a thing and where a lot of economic activity happens.

Email provides ubiquitous, traceable, asynchronous, storable messaging. Until something can entirely supplant it I don't see it disappearing anytime soon.

> Email provides ubiquitous, traceable, asynchronous, storable messaging. Until something can entirely supplant it I don't see it disappearing anytime soon.

Long live email. Anything that replaces it will probably be a closed proprietary protocol and I don't look forward to that at all.

I've often wondered: what's preventing someone from building an IM client on top of e-mail? While it's very inefficient for short messages, we're not using dial-up anymore (and I'd argue it wouldn't be that bad even on dial-up). Furthermore, e-mail could serve as only the slow, max-compatibility path, with some fast path (IMAP public folders? Or even a completely unrelated protocol) when the users are using compatible clients.

Okay, so I guess the idea is not so much IM-over-e-mail, but rather a schema that maps IM operations into e-mail operations.

I've had this thought very often, and (using your comment as motivation) I think I might use this weekend as an opportunity to try hacking something together. Maybe even add SMS fallback using Twilio or something.

Exactly. It's almost as if workplaces matter the most, go figure.

why is that good news?

Email is still my medium of choice when the text body requires nuance and is longer than 3 sentences or thereabouts.

Also, there is ample communication within my personal life where I want to set the expectation of not wanting instant replies.

I still use and prefer Email. If I want instant communication, I use sms or a phone call... And I almost never use those. At work, I use slack for instant communication, but again, I try to keep it to a minimum.

Email is more than instant enough for me.

What are you imagining the hayday of email to have been like? It sounds like you're describing AIM in the 90s, or SMS in the early 00's. Before that there was IRC if you wanted realtime responses. Email has always been async.

Mind you, nobody has ever introduced me to a friend via social media.

Meanwhile, SMS is still going strong. Who needs an app?

There are several advantages of apps over SMS. Cost and accessing the messages from multiple devices being the two main ones I can think of.

Data to back this up? I predict email usage has not decreased.

"a nicer UI"

ok, I feel a little bad adding to the dogpile here, but . . . one of the great things about email is that it's an open standard -- you can use whatever software you want, or even write your own. the very article we're commenting on is about a new email client offering, among other things, an extremely shiny UI. :p

The standard doesn't allow you to implement things for a great UX.

For example, you can't search for people if you don't know their email address. You can't know if an email was successfully delivered or read. The "quoting" of replies is a mess with no standard for doing it.

> because they offer instant responses

Asynchronous communication has some huge advantages. For example you tend to put a little more thought into your words since any clarifications will have to wait for a whole round-trip. It's a different mode of communication.

And of course not being siloed is also an advantage in itself.

I still use email for just about everything, with some SMS and occasional Twitter mixed in.

> personal messages

Exactly. WhatsApp etc are great for exchanging 2 sentence messages with your friends but how do you talk to people outside of your circle?

If you want to message a company or government dept asking about something how would you do that? Worse still how would you contact a specific person that you didn't already know (say an academic at a university)?

Bubble much?

> instant responses

Your post has been seen

Do people use WhatsApp? I've never seen anyone use it.

Everyone outside of the USA uses it, yes.

A bunch of people are going to reply to this saying "I still use email...etc.", they are in the very small minority I'd wager.