Email will last forever

Well, yes, a categorical claim that something was "only ever" used by people with certain objective features and for a particular reason is factually incorrect if it was ever used by people without those features or for a different reason, so personal experience, while inadequate to establish that it is factually correct, can be quite sufficient to establish that it is factually incorrect.

(You'll note that while I state that the categorical claim is clearly factually incorrect, that it is also quite likely that, while not a categorical truth, there have been at least some dismissals that fit the pattern that it falsely claims is the exclusive pattern for all dismissals of email as "impersonal" -- the error isn't in saying that some people describe email as impersonal for the particular reason described, but in claiming that that is the only reason email has ever been described as "impersonal" by anyone.)

> then comment on subjectivity

The comment on subjectivity was on a different statement (a claim of what is superior and what matters, both of which are inherently subjective) not the categorical fact claim. Recognizing the difference between subjective statements and fact claims is pretty important to being able to participate in a productive discussion of pretty much any topic, IMO.

> Are you being serious, or kidding?

The former.

" A quick look at my files finds messages from from 1976 that use that format:

  29-SEP-76  1935 FTP:CERF at USC-ISI Data Communication Conference/ Sept 1977
  Date: 29 SEP 1976 1802-PDT
  From: CERF at USC-ISI
  Subject: Data Communication Conference/ Sept 1977
  To:   walker
  cc:   cerf, wd at SU-AI

  22-AUG-76  0857 FTP:LEFAIVRE at RUTGERS-10 MORE ON THE LISP COMPILER
  Date: 22 Aug 1976 (Sunday) 1155-Est
  From: LEFAIVRE at RUTGERS-10
  Subject: MORE ON THE LISP COMPILER
  To:   DIFFIE at SU-AI

                   Whit

Email - not so much. Want a local email server? There's Postfix - yuckkk. The overhead of spam - yuckk. The lack of tooling, the lack of configurability, the DNS complexity. The fact that it requires a SAAS to do shared inboxes. Yuck.

Email could be so much better.

OTOH creating email clients is hard. I wrote a web server and wanted a webmail client. Basic SMPT messaging is straightforward enough, but MIME is a confusing tangle of protocols and rules that is difficult to understand and implement correctly.

I mostly succeeded but it took a long time. Part of the problem is the complexity means protocols are often violated and my webmail client has to deal with loads of exceptions to protocol rules to work in the real world.

But that's hardly limited to email. Look at http, it has arcane rules too, and some of the common security issues on the net are the result of "sloppily" implementing programs using http. (You know, XSS attacks, SQL injections and so on.)

Email has warts but what doesn't. Certainly email "replacements" will have warts too, especially as they are extended to cover the breadth that email has encompassed.

Email is the ultimate "killer app" you can digitally deliver anything to anyone via email, and many folks use it for all sorts of different processes and purposes. Solutions that claim to displace email don't really displace email -- they displace common use cases that were handled ad hoc using email as a lowest common denominator. Most of these use cases cry out for a more structured solution.

For example, There are 1,000 services that displace emailing pictures to each other. There is probably an order of magnitude more services for managing tasks, approving things, exchanging quick exchanges, or performing any number of other tasks.

But at the end of the day, for the core function of email -- unstructured written communication, email is the king.