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Comment by mappu | Hacker News Reader

Just chiming in to say I agree with this take. My work communication is 95%+ Slack, including shared channels with external vendors. Family and friends are all in private group chats on Telegram, Messenger, and Discord.

At $DAYJOB we sponsored a hire from another country recently, and their new landlord wanted an email address instead of adding them on WeChat/WhatsApp. It was a culture shock. They created their first email account in 2020 at age ~30.

Email has been EEE'd by the big players - e.g. Gmail conversations and labels don't work properly in plain IMAP (extend) and they block messages from independent mail servers (extinguish).

Email is obviously still popular, but I think it's fair to say most people do not use it. Email is for receipts. I think its demise is closer now than at any point in the past.

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>My work communication is 95%+ Slack, including shared channels with external vendors

>I think its demise is closer now than at any point in the past.

Quite the opposite here (we're b2b in Europe), most of business communication is via email. It's the easiest way to contact a business because virtually everyone uses it, as opposed to the hugely fragmented market of Telegram/Whatsapp/Discord/Slack/Messenger/whatever is the new shiny thing this week.

Our SaaS is about eLearning, we have thousands of clients in US, Europe and Asia, from all sorts of industries. A company usually registers all their employees in our system, and every employee has a profile where they can specify their email (which is optional). I worked with tech support and although I don't have exact statistics, my impression was that the majority of employees have emails assigned, it was the norm, rather than an exception. I've noticed it's usually retail where employees only have a phone number.

We do use Telegram/Whatsapp for announcements, but I don't see email go away any time soon. I can't imagine myself having an official business correspondence on Discord.

> I can't imagine myself having an official business correspondence on Discord.

https://www.whatsapp.com/business

>WhatsApp Business is a free to download app available on Android and iPhone, and was built with the small business owner in mind. WhatsApp Business makes interacting with customers easy by providing tools to automate, sort and quickly respond to messages.

So it's a way for small businesses to communicate with customers. Not what I was talking about (business-to-business interactions)

I did a warranty replacement on a Dell monitor entirely on Whatsapp. I have to say it was a super slick process. Even down to taking a picture of the problem and the serial number and not having to attach it to an email or upload it into some ticketing system. So it's not just small businesses.

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