I agree that it's clickbaity to question whether e-mail was a mistake, when it has clearly succeeded in being adopted around the world. After decades, nothing b

I agree that it's clickbaity to question whether e-mail was a mistake, when it has clearly succeeded in being adopted around the world. After decades, nothing better has replaced it - and indeed, it will continue to be a fundamental part of the Internet. That said, I've recently had to migrate a bunch of email addresses and what a pain it's been. The architecture is kind of a Rube Goldberg machine, seemingly overcomplicated. Add to that the incredible difficulty of hosting your own email server, I wish there would be some innovation to overhaul/redesign it with simplicity and ease of use in mind. > E-mail is not chat. E-mail is not a todo-list. E-mail is not a tool for massive collaboration. That sounds like a challenge: why can't we use e-mail for all those activities? I guess it would be too difficult to "bolt on" such functionality on the existing infrastructure.. The fact that people are (trying to) to use it in all these different ways suggests there are architectural limitations - not necessarily a mistake, but room for improvement or an opportunity to rethink it from the ground up. --- Edit: After having read the article, I think that the limitation of e-mail may actually be an advantange. I love asynchronous communication because there's not an expectation to "be on call" and answer immediately. If e-mail was redesigned to support activities like chatting and real-time collaboration, it would lose the "async" nature of it, and people would just expect instant replies. I can't stand using chat during work, it's an invitation for anyone to interrupt my thinking process. So, stay clunky e-mail, please take your time!