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Why I Choose Email over Messaging

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My colleagues and friends know that I prefer to communicate with them via email rather than chat messaging. There are many benefits in such a choice. You may want to consider them and adopt the same stance.

Unified inbox

My messages arrive in a single program, where I can process and tag them. With messaging programs I’d have to iterate through Teams, Signal, WhatsApp, Slack, Viber, FaceTime, LinkedIn, Messenger, Google Meet, Discord, Mattermost, Instagram, WebEx, and possibly others, to collect and process the messages sent on each platform.

Unified archive

Similarly, if I want to find a past message I have exactly one place to search: my email archive.

Long term availability

Companies get out of business or become acquired and services can easily be discontinued; for a reminder have a look at the 64 services Google has discontinued. If you ever exchanged messages on ICQ, AIM, MSN Messenger, Skype, Yahoo! Messenger, Google Hangouts, GChat, BlackBerry Messenger, or Campfire your messages are now gone. With email and local message storage you control the lifetime of your messages (provided you perform regular backups). My email archive contains the messages I have sent and received from 1986 onward.

Rich functionality

Email clients offer rich functionality. In the Thunderbird email client, I use the following features:

Folders for categorizing important messages.

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