Interesting question. Anyone and everyone. I may host my own email server or I might pay someone to host it. Or the government could host it, or my university

Interesting question. Anyone and everyone. I may host my own email server or I might pay someone to host it. Or the government could host it, or my university could host it. Or I could get it for free by agreeing to be served some ads. But who pays for it doesn't matter. I can send you an email even if we use very different providers (from the point of view of both technology and payment). For messaging I don't see this yet. I feel like XMPP was supposed to be the chosen one. I had a google account but chatted to my gmail contacts through my self-hosted jabber server. I wonder if this new generation of messaging apps will get to that point anytime soon.