Can we please just kill email already?

I'm so tired of email. It is fucking ancient technology at this point. And yet seemingly every service is reliant on it. It's been especially irritating me recently as more and more platforms use it in lieu of a password, or as MFA. Let's talk about why it's great, why it sucks, what it's applications are, and a variety of alternative options for all of those usecases.

Why it's great

Honestly, email is a relic from old days when no central service existed, and thus, the best thing I can say about email is that it's decentralized, which is unique from virtually every other form of commonly-accepted communication, outside of SMS.

However, it's nearly-meaningless because the vast majority of people have their email hosted through Google, or maybe Microsoft. What that often means is that if you're NOT hosting your email through one of these providers, those providers will often just decide that your email is spam, and send it straight to the spam folder, or even just refuse to deliver it entirely.

Why it sucks

Incomprehensible

Is it just me or is it very often just confusing as hell? I mean you have a thousand lines of information for what is often a few word reply. Often times it can take me several seconds to digest what the fuck it is I've even been sent. Nevermind the 3 or 4 images and wall of text every person seems to need to send along with every single message in the form of a "signature".

Compare this with the extremely clean and succinct interface that is a modern chat messenger.

Reply all

Every so often an email will be sent to literally everyone at my company somehow. Inevitably this results in an absolute flood of hundreds of emails in a matter of minutes, many of them absolute morons sending emails to ask other people to stop sending them emails, thereby perpetuating the very problem they're complaining about. Then of course there are the absolutely hilarious participants who think it's funny that everyone is being harassed and need to send emails to everyone making some sort of terrible observation about how funny it is.

In any chat app, you would be able to simply leave the chat room and that would be the end of it.

Sometimes someone will email me, and I will CC someone else in my reply to loop them into the conversation. Then the other party does not "reply all", leading to that person being left out of the conversation again, then I have to manually forward them the information again, which creates a new thread in their inbox.

In any chat app, you simply add them to the conversation, and they can't accidentally be removed by another ignorant user.

Privacy

There exists lots of personal identifiers that advertisers and governments will use to build databases about you. One of the most prolific is the email. There's no identifier more-closely tied to your digital identity than your email address. Think about every account you've ever made in your life. Every single fucking one of them will ask you for your email. Why? Because virtually every single site on the web will use it as an identifier to sell information about you to a data broker, who will then aggregate that info with all your other info to sell to advertisers like Google and Meta.

Security

Almost no email platforms incorporate any sort of encryption, meaning every communication you've ever had via email is probably stored on your provider's server in plaintext, and even if you opt into a host that does provide it, it definitely is still stored on the servers of the people and other entities you communicate with, because 99.9% of them will not have it.

Difficulty of hosting

You can self-host your own email, but it is a GIANT pain in the ass, and I've already detailed more complications above.

Applications and alternatives

What do we use email for? And what can replace it?

"Newsletters"

You know when you go to any fucking website and there's a pop-up asking for your email address so they can send you "updates"? (realistically, ads). This is what RSS is for. Use RSS.

Basic communications

Easily replaced with your preferred chat app.

Platform communications/notifications

Say you sign up for LinkedIn, just as a random example, they need some way to notify you when you received a message or something. Realistically, you could just log in periodically, probably daily really, and check your messages, but most users and companies are going to want a way to push that information to you. Fair enough.

This can be done via browser notifications. Although I concede that may not be "urgent" enough.

This can be done through chat apps. Really probably the best solution here.

Straight up 1-way notifications can be sent through UnifiedPush, an alternative notification platform for mobile devices. Probably one of the most underutilized pieces of technology we have today. No app required.

Spam Mitigation

I've seen this posited as an explanation for requiring email sign-up/verification. No one has been able to explain to me how this works or why a very simple bot couldn't bypass it, so it's hard for me to understand why it's necessary, and thus what would be a good alternative.

Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA)

Now we get to what prompted me to write this in the first place. I went to sign into an account today, only to find out that my password was no longer any good, and I am demanded to sign in via a "magic link" sent to my email. Only problem is that "magic link" did not arrive to my inbox for multiple hours. What a bunch of fucking clowns.

Strava has also implemented something similar. They do allow me to bypass it, but, very annoyingly, they will ask me every single fucking time I sign in, to "switch to passwordless".

This very fucking blog. One day I updated the software (without paying attention to release notes) and suddenly was locked out of my own fucking account because they added mandatory Email verification, but I never set up email at all, because it's fucking stupid. I had to go in and modify the configuration just to restore access.

Now, I get it! People are stupid and they don't know how to use a password manager. But don't bring us all down to the lowest common denominator. Give us the option of using a password.

Realistically, there are only 2 methods that should be used for MFA: Passkeys and Temporary One-Time Passwords. Ideally the latter, since no one can seem to come to a consensus on how to implement passkeys. Especially in a business setting, this should be mandatory.

Google is actually really great about this, and gives you a plethora of options for securing your account, but in a Workspace account, they need to be made available by your fucking admin.

Conclusion

Email is dumb and pointless and archaic and people need to get with the times, because it's driving me absolutely fucking insane.