email is used as a conferencing tool, as a group or company bulletin board, a calendar, for documentation and archiving and record keeping, for file transfer, a

email is used as a conferencing tool, as a group or company bulletin board, a calendar, for documentation and archiving and record keeping, for file transfer, and as an all-around general-purpose data store. Which means that email is used to hide information, to obfuscate schedules, render data inaccessible for local or corporate or legal requirements, and to generally derail the progress of a business. This in addition to its usefulness for malware redistribution, pharmaceutical and other advertisements, lost customer communications, spear-phishing and related tasks. Until the costs of email are recognized and email is off the desktop as a preferred application and the replacement tools are deployed and in use, this mess will continue. But in my experience, the folks that are chartered to make these same decisions can be of the worst offenders with email.