Think about it, you can pick an e-mail domain anywhere and use any e-mail client on any platform, to send an e-mail to someone anywhere else… We just take that for granted, but if e-mail were newly invented today by a company like say Meta, all the billions of people in the world would have to belong to that same single company in order to send and receive mail to anyone else…
E-mail’s greatest success lies in it’s open standards and decentralisation. It will no doubt me replaced at some point in the future, as all technologies will, but let us hope that instant messaging and social networks go back to being open and decentralised (like they too were once).
See https://www.sparkpost.com/blog/a-look-back-at-50-years-of-email/
#technology #email #decentralisation #openstandards #deletemeta
You missed encrypted attachments - I get lots of my bank statements and similar with encrypted PDF attachments on e-mail. In my own case certainly a good half plus of business communications come either via e-mail or SMS - both being open standards. The point I was actually making was not about us all going back to e-mail, but rather that many mainstream messenger services and social networks cannot be broadly used, as you have to belong to that specific service to be messaged or message someone else. Where it should be more like e-mail is with having more generic open standards to communicate BETWEEN different messaging and social networks, a bit like ActivityPub works across different social networks in the Fediverse.
Some business I see adopt WhatsApp, but many people don’t use WhatsApp so that breaks as a universal messenger to reach everyone.