Email is still (and IMO always will be) the defacto method of communication for anything professional, regardless of whether it's 1994, 2026 or 2095. I'm not even totally convinced that something else could come along and usurp it; it would have to be something so easy, so ubiquitous, fully-supported across every piece of software and internet that you encounter, while serving as a form of identity and "fixed geography" (think about how email addresses serve similar purposes as postal addresses), trustable, comprehensive, and completely open and free (not as in beer, but as in protocol-level free) ... and even then, the value prop would have to be cheaper, seamless to migrate all existing email-related stuff to, and backwards compatible with / significantly more compelling than email itself, to convince the world to adopt it.

I'd love to see it though, because email really is long in the tooth at this point.

> Everybody I know uses IM systems like Wechat, WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal.

Great, instead of having a single, standard and interoperable way to communicate (albeit with its defaults), now we need to have 5, 6, 7 different closed systems that can't speak with each other, most of which require a working smartphone in order to even have an "address". What a wonderful evolution...

IM is fine for quick, ephemeral communications ("I just arrived at the restaurant") or automated processes ("Your authentication code for $BANK is 9975"), but for meaningful, thoughtful communication between human beings, email works better for me. The main advantages:

- I use my own domain, so I'm not tied to any single provider

- I can keep a copy of everything (I still have some emails from 30 years ago)

Do you have a job?