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And, importantly, in the case of email, companies can host their own mail servers & thus better protect their data. Can you really imagine companies allowing facebook to host sensitive corporate communications?

Agreed. I prefer email or paper letters for any substantiative communication in my personal communication - at work, email is the communication medium. IM is available, but it far, far, far lags email.

It is as dead as the telegraph.

These posts will only ever get on sites like HN with an inflammatory title. "Email on decline. Less critical." just isn't as edgy.

His core point, however, is obvious and hard to argue with. Just now I was thinking about a number of people who I used to email with regularly, yet we haven't exchanged emails in years now. Instead it's all texts, IMs, Facebook messages (which is like email...but not email), and so on. Email just dropped off the personal radar.

So now my email inbox is full of receipts from online purchases, and lots and lots of newsletters that I largely ignore. Because there isn't the higher draw value of personal content in there, I seldom do much more than scan it.