[twobyfour]

Hell no.

Email is the least-intrusive way for me to be contacted by people outside my organization. Some of them I do want to hear from and will be happy to transfer to a more synchronous or intrusive communication channel. Most I don't. Email is the best medium I have for screening those contacts.

Then there are marketing messages and announcements from platforms I use. I like having those pushed to me in such a way that I can easily ignore all but the 3% that are actually of interest.

And notifications. Yes, if a server is on fire, I want SMS or slack. But if someone's added a new ticket to our issue tracker or needs a pull request reviewed? Email is very effective for going through such notifications one at a time at one's leisure and dealing with each in succession.

Finally, there are the occasions where I want to share a big chunk of text with a bunch of people who may or may not be using the same platforms for other communications. It might be an announcement. It might be a list of questions for a vendor. Whatever it is. Email is very effective for that.

Now, what do you propose we replace all of those use cases with?

[toepitt]

I propose the same thingMr. Paul Graham proposed.

There are better ways to screen contacts outside the organization than being interrupted. Same for marketing messages and announcements. It's important to give different people different abilities, and sort tasks by importance or deadline.

A big chunk of text sent to people is practically spam.

[twobyfour]

And what tools would you recommend using instead of email at this juncture? I have yet to see anything that's a viable alternative for the use cases I mentioned, let alone a preferable one.

And no, a big chunk of text is not anything like spam if it's part of a conversation, nor as an announcement to one's own team or to other parties who have requested it. Length of communication is not correlated with value or desirability.