That sounds like basically right (I agree with it all, I'm too the kind of person that enjoys all those advantages of email). So here I'm thinking from putting myself in the skin of the others:
All this seems so much "me, me, me, me". People sending you a quick Whatsapp to let you know "tomorrow in Town sq. at 12h" don't want to have to use a clunky interface (sadly email apps are not up to par with instant messaging apps, not even close); they don't care either about your desire to have a unified inbox, and a long term archive. Agreed if it's for "important" things, but mostly instant messaging replaced email for day to day things that in an analog world would have been just said by landline phone.
Relatedly, having a long term archival might come as a bit creepy, even. In apps this happens too, but at least I can say something extremely controversial and delete it for both people a couple minutes later. Or send a "view once" mesage.
Regarding confidentiality, coincidentally not even 2 weeks ago a friend was telling me about a case of hos company sending an invoice, and being man-in-the-middle'd so the attacker just changed the bank account number and the customer thus paid to the wrong account. Nobody uses GPG, sadly. So at this point, for very important stuff I'd consider Whatsapp less confidential but more secure than email, ironically.
Back to being me; I see a problem of usabilily. Even I admit that sending a whatsapp is much more convenient and practical than opening up K-9 Mail to _compose_ an email. You don't _compose_ a IM, you just hit a contact, jot it down, hit send, and there's extra social convention tools such as a blue tick indicating that maybe you can even stay put there because probably the other person may reply immediately.
> Relatedly, having a long term archival might come as a bit creepy, even. In apps this happens too, but at least I can say something extremely controversial and delete it for both people a couple minutes later. Or send a "view once" mesage.
I agree but in practice Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp etc are quite long term already. I can easily look up my chats from 15+ years ago on Fb.
But there is indeed a cultural unease, and it relates to the other top h post about social cooling. As you said, people want an online equivalent of phone calls and in person discussion. It's creepy and in some places even illegal to record phone calls or live conversations.
On the other hand, written letters used to be private but meant for archival. Many people inherit a big box of neatly organized letters received from friends and family when grandma etc die.
Email is a bit more letter-like in this.
But these norms are in flux and especially for different generations the intuition can be different.
> Regarding confidentiality, coincidentally not even 2 weeks ago a friend was telling me about a case of hos company sending an invoice, and being man-in-the-middle'd so the attacker just changed the bank account number and the customer thus paid to the wrong account.
That sounds like a quite sophisticated attack. By far most Mail these days should be transport encrypted. The attacker thus must have control (legal or illegal, at least to fake a wrong MX DNS record) over either side and then manipulate the invoice and then need a bank account which can receive the payment, while hiding their traces. Seems quite sophisticated and targeted as an attack.
> Nobody uses GPG, sadly.
User experience there was never good. Signal/WhatsApp probably are the most userfiendly e2ee systems around: automatic key exchange with ability to verify. (While proprietary clients require trusting those, which is a big ask especially with Whatsapp/meta)
I have no idea of how that went; now you have picked my interest and I'll be asking him to follow up. It did not occur to me that it needs to be too sophisticated of an attack (didn't stop to think through it too much, admittedly). Just thinking of how we collectively mostly never encrypt email seemed like the most obvious way to understand how that was possible. The email provider of either the company or the customer must have been compromised. But the bank account?
Not knowing any details my first assumption would be that somebody mistyped a number, either in the template or while preparing the transfer and being hacked is just an excuse.
Alternative is some generic phishing with a complete fake invoice, which somebody assumed to be true.
Now if it is serious and an invoice was changed (independently from transport considerations) that alone is quite some effort: the original message has to be held back and analyzed, then it has to be manipulated (replaced) and then the message has to be sent on.
If you get to that level of sophistication it's a lot more likely the source was hacked.
There are a few other scenarios, like invoice being sent wrongly and some random person manipulating it before sending on, but if you aren't prepared by having a bank account for that purpose it's quite a risky thing to do. My private account can be traced to me ...
> sadly email apps are not up to par with instant messaging apps, not even close
E-mails have exactly the same properties as any instant messaging. Receive notifications, ability to answer instantly from a pop-up. What exactly are you missing? Or have you deliberately made email clunky on your own devices?