I still use IRSSI as an IRC client, running in a screen session, through SSH, from multiple machines or even from my phone. The TUI in gnu screen over SSH setup is really handy for securely accessing a continuously-running application from anywhere you happen to be. I could use irccloud or some other web based thing, sure, but I like hosting my own services and having auth and device whitelisting uniformly handled the SSH way. Yet a chat client doesn't work well as a set of CLI commands as opposed to a TUI. Email from TUI might not be too bad either. There are lots of cases where I think it'd fit.