It’s reliable, it’s simple, it’s free, and virtually everyone who uses the internet has one. Email won’t be replaced for a LONG time.

It's why SMS still exists too. It's from an era where everyone just used open standards instead of trying to create their own thing for money. Big tech conglomerates like we have now didn't exist. The state of the tech industry and it's proprietary standards is absolutely fucked.

Thousands of years after humanity has destroyed itself with nuclear weapons...

As the sun peeks through the gray clouds and lights up a solar panel...

A long-forgotten server hums to life...

And sends an email...

"Attention Required: Your Order is Delayed"

Sidenote: Remember when having an email address was enough, you didn't have to have a fucking phone number as well? Stop trying to de-anonymize the internet, you're making more problems than you're solving

It’s because it isn’t a silo?

Discord, Slack and a bajillion similar apps do not meld with other apps. Email just happened to hit critical mass before “let’s try to get a monopoly” became the slogan of all tech, and collectively Big Tech is too stupid/hostile to replace it with some cooperative protocol.

iMessage is another pure example of this.

Mail has the big advantage of being totally cross platform. And it works, basically everywhere.

It's an ongoing debate in one of the projects I work with if we should move to a more forge oriented development process. For all it's faults email does provide a good record of discussion as well as evidence of review.

Reality is everyone has an email, and everyone will keep having an email. My 10 year old has an email so they could sign up to epic and steam. You basically need it to use the internet at all. So of course it will survive.

Outside of business though, when was the last time you sent an email to someone you know?

I guess that's why someone decided to build a chat app on the email protocol and infrastructure.

https://delta.chat/en/

I hope the Fediverse will prove similarly resilient.

I still have a weird email friend who refuses to chat over any apps and I totally can respect that. :)

I work in B2B IT support, and email is designed to be very async, and for the most part it still is. What I can say with certainty is that business folks expect email to be instant like synchronous platforms are... It's not, it never will be... It's gotten about as close as it can be, but it is not, and will never be, instant delivery, no matter how much they want it to be.

IRC and forums as well to a lesser extent.

You can do it from a terminal. Us Linux kids will never let it die.

asynchronous

Any form of text based communication is asynchronous

IMAP is useful. POP can crawl back to the bowels of hell from whence it came.

Also Usenet. Still around after decades. As long as people are hosting news servers, it will stay. The original decentralized protocol.

Something could replace it easily if they tried to use the open standards and decentralized system like email has. But tech companies have gone too greedy, they won't make anything that works with other tech companies. Every one of them are trying to pull users to themselves. Now we have people with account in 5 different websites to communicate with different people instead.

It is sad how far the technology has come. It'd allow so much improvements in quality of life and yet it'll all being used to extract more money, making life shittier.

It seems like a category error to compare email to Discord or Slack. The latter two are distinct companies and not protocols.