I think the parent meant identical in concept, not in the technical format. All the valid points you raise could be fixed with a new format and related conventions without changing what email is conceptually (e.g. distributed threaded long-form asynchronous decentralized communication with Subject/To/Cc etc.), as opposed to turning it into a chat system.
> I think the parent meant identical in concept, not in the technical format.
That might be true. But I feel like a lot of email proponents have this idea that email is actually pretty good, when in reality, email is an unmitigated disaster and sorely needs drastic changes on the technical front.
Email is not a disaster in user communities with established conventions, such as B2B (and intra-B) communication and open-source/unix-oriented mailing lists. People in those communities see how systems like Slack and Discord and Signal are completely unsuitable to replace the email mode of communication, and therefore there is a pushback against those who push for such a replacement.
Yet for 99% of regular people, email is a complete disaster, and the people who are in extremely insular communities (such as certain FOSS projects) don't realize just how broken email is. There _is_ need for a replacement, since email plain doesn't work.
I’m all for improving/replacing email with something that is the same in spirit and doesn’t constitute a regression for the user communities I mentioned (which at least in the B2B case are quite large). Making email Signal-like isn’t that, however.
Sure, I agree. A requirement for a replacement would be that it's federated, and that it's asynchronous (i.e not chat). Signal is neither.
I just wish that the people who care about federation and asynchronicity weren't also the people who delude themselves into thinking that email is fine the way it is. (Case in point: my comment about the problems with email is downvoted, presumably by the exact kind of people I'm talking about.)
