I previously touched on the limitless power of email, but that was mostly regarding its power to send and receive nearly anything, versus the artificial limits placed on most all other internet-based communication platforms.
It blows my mind that people would choose, willingly, to use communication systems that limit you on how many past messages you can store, and what searching you’re allowed to do.
Searching old messages in iMessage and WhatsApp is barely tolerable. Even when you know the term, you can’t filter the results. I recently had to search for a message I knew was discussed that would have had the word “key” in it. After receiving the results, iMessage only let me choose from which conversation I wanted to filter down by.
Needless to say, I got nothing but a reverse date-ordered list of messages with the word “key” in it. Apparently, I and my family member talk about this a lot. However, I knew in that same conversation I had used a few other words, but not in the same single message. I could not say, for instance, “key” and “landlord” if both words were not in the same message, even though they might have been in the same general conversation.
I could not add a date range (e.g. “June 1, 2024 to July 31, 2024”). No, I would have to scroll, scroll, scroll, like a small child, until I got to the summer of 2024.
I’ve done similar searches in Slack. Depending on the size of your enterprise, you might be waiting a while. And while you can do many more filters in Slack, you still wind up with a significant set of false positives. And that’s after you wait for their bloated app and slow API to deliver some results.
Worse, all modern messaging systems don’t let you export the searched list of results.
And none of them let you keep what modern email clients call a “Smart Folder” to auto-collect any messages that mention a word. If I had a project called “Libertas Extrema” (and who’s to say that I don’t?), I could set up a Smart Folder in my email client to auto capture copies of any email that mentions one of those words, and then sort and filter those as I might need to later.
Granted, Smart Folders are an email client feature, not the email standard itself, but that’s the beauty of email being an internet standard: anyone can build a tool over it to manage the communication of it.
Don’t like the Slack interface and want to build your own? Good luck.
But of course, search itself is limited on any platform if storage is controlled by a centralized third-party rather than yourself.
Now many will stop me and say, “hey, hey, hey there Lawrence. Even the all-powerful Gmail limits how much one can store”. Well, yes and no.
Gmail doesn’t control the email standard—just the amount of email in one’s current inbox. I can at any time export all my email, or a subset of it, and store it in any medium I like: the cloud, a hard drive, thumb drive, etc. For instance, I could decide every year to archive all the emails from the five-six years ago off of Gmail and place them somewhere else.
Try that with WhatsApp. I hear it’s technically possible, but it’s largely unreadable outside of text editors. And you certainly can’t just “use” the WhatsApp messages in whatever reading app you use.
However, with my email, I can just sling them into a folder on my hard drive and reference that with my email client locally.
Not only that, I can even reply to an email from 5 years ago in the same system I store my archived older emails, just as if it was still sitting in my inbox.
So, say what you want about your modern messaging tools, but email can always store more messages, limited only by your storage medium, not some monthly payment to a SaaS messaging service.
And once you have 30 years of email—which I do—you can search all of it lighting fast.
Storage and Searching is Email Superpower 7. No one can compete.
Just Use Email 