Benefits of choosing email over messaging

Emotional reactions & personal preferences

• Some commenters viscerally hate email, calling it a “life tax” and the worst way to reach them; others say it’s by far their most efficient communication method.
• A common pattern: messaging for casual / fast back-and-forth, email for “important” or long‑form matters. Usage varies by job and company culture.

Availability, spam, and cost asymmetry

• Big complaint: anyone can email you; it’s free for senders but costly in recipient time, leading to spam and long, unedited messages.
• Others counter that with good hygiene (not exposing addresses, using aliases, unsubscribing, filters), personal inboxes can be almost spam‑free.

Search, clients, and UX

• Email search is widely criticized (especially Gmail), but several people say good clients + plain-text mbox/Maildir + external tools make decades of mail trivially searchable.
• Messaging apps often have even worse search and tiny “peepholes” on history, encouraging a transient, streaming mindset.
• Subject lines and threads are seen as both friction (for casual chat) and a major advantage (for skimming and organizing).

Email vs workplace chat for groups

• Critics say email breaks down for multi-person work discussions (branching threads, CC’ing late, lost attachments, no easy “mute”).
• Others argue mailing lists, shared folders, and better mail UIs already solved most of this; Slack/Teams just re‑invented poorly threaded Usenet.
• Slack/Teams praised for easy linking to conversations, onboarding newcomers to past context, and filtering out automated email noise—but also blamed for “Slack spam,” poor search, and ephemeral, hard‑to‑find decisions.

Archival, permanence, and legal aspects

• Email’s long-term archive is valued for personal memory, technical decisions, and legal defensibility; chat histories are often short‑retention or inaccessible.
• Some note corporate retention policies now deliberately limit email archives because of litigation risk, eroding that benefit.

Etiquette and writing quality

• Complaints that people no longer know how to write or quote emails; top-posting giant blobs is common.
• Inline replies and trimmed quoting are praised for clarity but can feel nitpicky or confrontational.
• Instant messaging norms (one‑word messages, “hi” with no question, stream‑of‑consciousness splits) are seen as highly interruptive.

Protocols, interoperability, and unified inboxes

• Several lament the loss of unified multi-network messengers (Pidgin, etc.) and blame hostile or restricted APIs.
• Tools like Beeper or Delta Chat are cited as partial “all-in-one inbox” or “chat over email” attempts, but limitations and ToS risks remain.
• Some frame the debate as “protocols (email/XMPP/Matrix) vs proprietary products,” with email’s openness still its main structural advantage.