Nobody replies on the emails nowadays. You are lucky if the mobile number mentioned matches with Telegram, Whatsapp or whatever else, or it's phone call only. I'm talking about small to medium businesses - shops, hotels, restaurants etc.

"Nobody..."

That's quite broad. How about some specific examples.

Small shops and small hotels in eastern Europe. I simply stopped trying to contact via email after several inquiries without any response. While messengers for some reason are very popular. If I already talking to someone in person and I need to send files to them then in 100% of cases they will ask to send it via some messenger. Latest cases - car insurance asked for photos, notary asked for my passport, legal consultant asked for my docs - all via messenger. No, wait, there was one case when I was asked to write an email (not a reply to email send to me, but I had to write first) by a hospital. Guess what - they didn't reply and I had to print and give them paper copies of the stuff I emailed previously.

Email is great, I use it at work all the time, internally in the company. But in the outside world it's just not working, unfortunately.

Yikes. It sounds like there is an expectation that every member of the public has these apps installed or can otherwise use them. It's difficult to fathom that any organisation could claim "Sorry, we do not have email."

Not to discount the speed and convenience of messenging apps, but if someone is playing fast and loose with the law and trying to avoid a "paper trail", then avoiding email and using "ephemeral" messenging might be a strategy.

It was once claimed, by Facebook, that "[1 in 7 people worldwide is on Facebook. More importantly,] 6 out of 7 people are not on Facebook." Perhaps more than 1 in 7 people have an email account. Just a guess.