I see a difference with enforced email use and voluntary, for work. At my company everyone uses email because it is mandatory. Human-human conversation happen there without issues. But as soon as I try to contact some random company on email as an individual, like as a shop about product details or packaging, or contact some org to find out about services - it's dead silence in return. But when I find their chat/messenger they do respond to it. The only people still responding to emails from external sources in my experience are property agents, and even there the response time is slower than in chats.

I'm not saying that the alternatives are better than email (e.g. at my job, Slack has replaced email for communication, and Gitlab/JIRA/Confluence/GoogleDocs is used for everything that needs to persist). The focus has shifted away from email for communication (for better or worse).

A point that I don’t think is being appreciated here is that email is still fundamental to communication between organizations, even if they are using something less formal internally.

One’s nephew might not interact in a professional capacity with other organizations, but many do.

We use Slack for all of our vendor communications, at least the ones that matter.

Even our clients use slack to connect, it is many times better then emails.

I don’t doubt that vendors in some industries communicate with customers via Slack. I know of a few in the tech industry. The overwhelming majority of vendor and customer professional communication happens over email.

B2C uses texting. Even if B uses email, C doesn't read it. And that is becoming just links to a webapp.

B2B probably still uses email, but that's terrible because of the phishing threat. Professional communication should use webapps plus notification pings which can be app notifications, emails, or SMS.

People to people at different organizations again fall back to texting as an informal channel.

The overwhelming majority of B2B communication is email.

I have sent 23 emails already today to 19 people in 16 organizations.

Last week a B lost me as their C because they didn't provide an e-mail address and their chat was too dumb to understand a simple question.

Unfortunately Slack is what is used at places I've worked at.

I prefer Slack over email... coming from using Outlook for 20+ years in a corporate environment, slack is light years beyond email in rich communication.

I'm trying to think of 1 single thing email does better than slack in a corporate communication.

Is slack perfect? Absolutely not. I don't care that I can't use any client I want or any back end administration costs or hurdles. As a user, there is no comparison.

I absolutely loathe it but I respect that many like it. Personally I think Zullip or Discourse are a better solutions since they provides similar interface to Slack but still have email integration so people like me who prefer email can use that.

The thing I hate the most is that people expect to only use Slack for everything, even where it doesn't make sense. So they will miss notifications for Notion, Google Doc, Calendar, Github, because they don't have proper email notifications set up. The plugins for Slack are nowhere near as good as email notifications as they just get drowned out in the noise.

And with all communication taking place in Slack, remembering what was decided on with a certain issue becomes impossible because finding anything on Slack is impossible.

I agree notifications in Slack are limited...

But no better than email again. You just get notified if you have a email or not [depending on the client you're forced to use]. I have many email rules that just filter out nonsense from github, google and others so my inbox stays clean.

> But no better than email again. You just get notified if you have a email or not [depending on the client you're forced to use]. I have many email rules that just filter out nonsense from github, google and others so my inbox stays clean.

I guess I find them useful because that way I get all my notifications across all channels in one spot if you set them up properly. Github and google docs also allow you to reply directly within the email, so I don't even need to open up website.

In Slack the way it was setup was global, so I got notified for any update even if it didn't concern me.

I can think of a few:

- Long form discussion where people think before responding.

- Greater ability to filter/tag/prioritize incoming messages.

- Responses are usually expected within hours, not minutes.

- Email does not have a status indicator that broadcasts whether I am sitting at my desk at that particular moment to every coworker at my company.

1 & 2 are human behaviors, not a technology. You can argue that a tech promotes a behavior but this sounds like a boundaries issue, not a tech issue.

#2 I agree with you, again Slack is not perfect but better than email [my opinion]

#4 Slack has status updates, email does not. So you can choose to turn this off, again boundaries.

Real time chat environments are not conducive to long form communication. I've never been a part of an organization that does long form communication well on slack. You can call it a boundary issue - it doesn't really matter how you categorize the problem, it's definitely a change from email.

Regarding #4, I can't turn off my online/offline indicator, I can only go online or offline. I can't even set the time it takes to go idle. These are intentionally not configurable in slack. I have no desire to have a real time status indicator in the tool I use to communicate with coworkers.

It's been five years since I expect my email to be read. If I lack another channel to the person, I'll wait some decent period and send a "ping" email. But for people I work with routinely, I'll slack or iMessage or Signal or even setup a meeting. Oddly, my young adult children do actually use email more so than e.g. voice calls. We'll have 10 ambiguous messages trying to make some decision and still they won't pick up my call. It's annoying because a voice call causes three distinct devices to ring audibly, but messages just increment some flag in the UI after the transient little popup. And for work email I'm super strict about keeping it factual only with as close to zero emotion as my Star Trek loving self can manage. May you live long and proper.

There are certain actions I have to use email for, and it feels a little bit more like writing a check each year.

And all these email subscriptions, jeez, I don't want that. People who are brilliant and witty and information on Xitter or Mastodon in little slices and over time I still don't want to sit down and read a long form thing once a week.

Yes, articles is what RSS is for. Could also set up a dedicated e-mail account / filter for that I guess...