Email is wrongly vilified

"Email is the worst form of communication, except for all the other tools." Paraphrasing an old saying [wrongly attributed to Churchill] about democracy.

There is often a vilification of email often funded by startups that build alternative communication tools. However, email is still used because nothing beats its simplicity, reach and effectiveness. It leads into advanced workflows like nothing else.

I'm especially afraid of the trend of using Slack or Whatsapp as an alternative to email. IM tools are amazing in their own way, but not as an alternative. Emails can be archived, flagged, forwarded, be subject to a range of rules and most importantly you don't have to worry about whether the tool company would survive for you to retrieve. I have archives of over 20 years of emails that I can go back to.

And without properly writing an email agenda before Zoom calls/meetings, these things meander uselessly into tangents. A lot of work that could have been done in a 2 minute email just goes into hour long calls.

Email is a problem when people don't know how to manage it through tools like GTD. I go InboxZero everyday and you don't have to pay for any tool to achieve those. Blindly CC'ing everyone is an issue, and so is not CC'ing the required parties. But, these are issue for communication in general and not tool specific. For instance, rather than CC, in Slack/Whatsapp people just use broader groups to pose messages that need to be seen only by a smaller group. The problem is not going away with a tool switch.

Rather than blaming Email, it is time people figure out how to use it.