What do you still use email for in 2021?

Question

We use Discord at work for collaboration. My email inbox is a flood of GitHub notifications and newsletters. But I've recently resigned myself into making it into a notification center, rather than using push notifications.How does it work for you?

mantlepro · Accepted Answer

Email has increasingly become my preferred method of communication over the past few years.
As the popularity of other instant messaging platforms ebb and flow, email has remained one of the few ubiquitous methods for discourse, messaging, and notification.
In addition to its ubiquity, I like that email enables slow thinking / maintaining focus and doesn't require an always-on internet connection.
I also like that it's decentralized; though some of the bigger players have certainly gained enough users to control the ecosystem a bit, Fastmail, ProtonMail, Posteo, Gandi, and others, as well as self-hosting are all available.
In terms of client software, mu4e has been absolutely fantastic for searching, and indexing (via mu), threading, marking, replies, etc. making email work even better. mutt was also a favorite MUA for many years before my journey into Emacs.
For responding to SMS messages via email, voip.ms gets the job done as a SMS/email gateway, helping to consolidate the majority of my asynchronous messages into the same platform.

LinuxBender · Answer

Email? Conversations with businesses. Anything that requires an audit trail. Verification/Activation of any account. Reaching out to former colleagues. Contacting code maintainers. System notifications. Billing reminders.I could probably tie system notifications into Discord but I prefer email, as I control both the client and servers. I am probably just used to having control but I prefer to keep it that way. It would be interesting if some day Discord supported federation and self hosted leaf-node servers with granular control over what channels are replicated.

simonblack · Answer

Email works for most of us in business because it can handle long messages, it can handle images, and is recognised as 'legally usable'. (Just as faxes were used in an earlier era.)
It is widespread, whereas Discord, Zoom, Skype, etc. are not available in lots of businesses. It's no good having Discord if the person you want to communicate with doesn't have it too.
It is also good enough and easy enough for non-techo users.

quickthrower2 · Answer

Receiving invoices from local tradespeople, emails from schoolteachers for my kids, login/auth type stuff and occasionally corresponding with friends and family. Also a handy way to send a link to someone if it&rsquo;s too cumbersome to type or say out.

vardaro · Answer

I have a Google Workspace account with multiple users. Some of which are devoted to being trash collection inboxes. I try to expose my personal email as little as possible

samtuke · Answer

As well as for regular stuff, I'm now using email as a WhatsApp replacement with a few friends, with the delta.chat mobile apps.

What do you still use email for in 2021?

We use Discord at work for collaboration. My email inbox is a flood of GitHub notifications and newsletters. But I've recently resigned myself into making it into a notification center, rather than using push notifications.
How does it work for you?

Receiving invoices from local tradespeople, emails from schoolteachers for my kids, login/auth type stuff and occasionally corresponding with friends and family. Also a handy way to send a link to someone if it’s too cumbersome to type or say out.

I have a Google Workspace account with multiple users. Some of which are devoted to being trash collection inboxes. I try to expose my personal email as little as possible

As well as for regular stuff, I'm now using email as a WhatsApp replacement with a few friends, with the delta.chat mobile apps.