I agree about email. And the main thing, and what distinguishes it from Telegram, etc., is that it is a protocol, not an app. You can use any client you want, or write your own.

Telegram is one of the few messengers that actually enables you to use any Telegram client available, or write your own[1].

The protocol that is de facto Telegram is called MProto[2], and is publicly available.

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[1]: https://telegram.org/apps

[2]: https://core.telegram.org/mtproto

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edit: The main difference between email and Telegram, is that anyone can host email servers, while Telegram manages theirs.

edit2: MProto being widely available to study, one could perhaps reverse-engineer their own server - but that hasn't been a desire to accomplish this from what I can see. Much of the value-proposal of Telegram is their Service as a whole.

Telegram is centralised and siloed, where email isn't. You just can't compare the two.

> You just can't compare the two.

You just did.

I was responding to the claim that Telegram wasn't providing a protocol or ability for developers to author their own clients.

And point taken—I didn’t know about this, so Telegram was not an ideal example. But, as you point out, it still is not quite a decentralized as email, and, as a protocol, does not have email’s universal character. But thanks for the interesting information.

You can back up all Telegram chats including Media, of course this doesn't replace email, but the difference is just a client to parse the data and log it in a message style front end.

Overall, email is killer, I would love to move everything toward emails that I can filter, or as the OP posted, a Unified inbox.

I wonder if there is a patent on it.

> You can back up all Telegram chats including Media, of course this doesn't replace email, but the difference is just a client to parse the data and log it in a message style front end.

While this is true, there's no automatic process and it's limited to the desktop client. Email is much more convenient because of this. I can't "forget" to backup my emails for the past month or year. I know they'll be on my email server until I delete them.