I miss email

I miss email as a personal communication tool. Surely I still use it, but it is 20% paper trail for transactions, and 80% cold-messaging from companies I don't know—or plain old spam, if there's even a difference.

A few years ago, when I left Facebook, I tried to leave WhatsApp, but at least in Mexico that's opting into social isolation. I asked my friends to use iMessage to reach out to me, and half of them did, but a few years later only one of them does it religiously (thanks, Carolina).

Today, if I need to reach one of my friends there's a cognitive layer I have to get through: where to do it. Most of them are on WhatsApp, but others are on iMessage, Slack, Discord, Instagram DMs. Also most of them are on several of these platforms, but they each clearly have a preferred one where my message would reach them faster.

Email was simple. There were no walls. An email address is an email address. It was the default platform. Once you were a power user, and most of my friends are nerds, so that's most of them, you got a domain and then you could port your email to whatever provider you wanted. I've had mine in Gmail, Hey Email, Apple, and even a simple and basic client from DreamHost. I'm currently back on Gmail and planning to move to a paid platform for whitelist capabilities.

Email also promoted longer messages. More context. Most times you weren't in a hurry, or even when you were, if you typed just a couple of sentences it felt like something was missing. So you shared more.

My friend Mariana and I used to send each other long life updates once or twice a year over email. I still remember those messages and they make me smile. If I did this today, after sending the email I would need to reach out to the recipient on another platform just to let them know I did, so they can go dig the email out of the pile of trash that for sure is littering their mailbox.

This is not a call to action, but a simple rant. Or, in the best case, a wish. A wish for email to come back, or at least a cry for real connection.

But really, it's probably just a case of an old man yelling to the clouds.