What seems to missing from this discussion is fundamental understanding of the mediums used for communication and why you might choose one of the other. We all

What seems to missing from this discussion is fundamental understanding of the mediums used for communication and why you might choose one of the other. We all know about them and yet skirt around the obvious issues with articles like this. Email generally gets through way faster than a mail letter but is often thought of as being similar. (E)mail gets the text through and no more in general although it can carry pictures and other media. (E)mail is store and forward - it will tolerate delays and eventually arrive. A phone call/direct conversation is immediate and generally requires more setup cost in time and effort. If the other end is unavailable it wont work at all. Telephone calls may suffer from lag and drop outs. Vocal comms do allow subtle extra information without needing crass emojis etc. Vocal comms are much faster. There are other factors such as delaying tactics and the like. For example if your work stack is too much, you can simply ignore emails for a while but an incoming call has to be answered or not at that point in time. To be fair, most people understand that non answer means try again later even if you know they could have answered at that time. Emails can be sat on. Emails can also be fibbed about: "Sorry, my spam filter must have eaten it" or "Your GMail is not sending to my Hotmail". Email is also often treated as IM. The thing about IM is it is instant by design and is supposed to be a two way chat. smtp isn't. On balance: for me, I prefer telephony or direct contact than email unless it is impractical or I need a record - even then I still can record a conversation.