Email is not the problem. Misusing it is.
Every few years someone declares email dead and proposes a replacement. Slack. Teams. Basecamp. The replacements fragment your communication into channels, threads, and workspaces that don't talk to each other, require everyone to be online at the same time to get value, and take your company's institutional knowledge hostage behind a subscription.
Email is 50 years old and it keeps winning because it was designed around a simple principle: you send a message, the other person reads it when they're ready, and both of you have a permanent record. That principle turns out to be exactly right for running a business.
The search argument
When decisions happen in email, they're searchable. Not "sort of findable if you remember the channel name" — actually searchable, with full context, across years of history, on every device, including offline. You can find the reasoning behind any decision made three years ago in seconds.
When decisions happen in Slack, they're effectively gone after 90 days on a free plan, buried in channels on a paid plan, and inaccessible offline on any plan.
One protocol, every client
Because email runs on open standards (IMAP/SMTP), every person on your team can use the client they prefer. Apple Mail, Thunderbird, Outlook, a terminal client, a web interface. They all speak the same protocol. Nobody is forced into a single interface, nobody needs a license, and switching clients doesn't change the underlying data.
Compare this to Slack: if Slack changes its pricing, goes down, or gets acquired, you have no exit. Your communication history is in their format, on their servers.
For email hosting, we use purelymail.com — around $10 per year for unlimited custom domains with full IMAP/SMTP access and no per-user fees. You bring your own domain; they handle the server. It is the least interesting part of this stack, which is exactly what you want from infrastructure.
Asynchronous by design
Email doesn't have a presence indicator. It doesn't show you who's online. It doesn't expect a response in minutes. These are features, not limitations. They allow people to do focused work without a constant stream of interruptions, and they normalise the idea that not every message needs an immediate response.
When something genuinely requires real-time communication, use the phone or Delta Chat. But that should be the exception, not the operating mode of your entire company.
"When 99% of your company's decisions happen in email, you can find the context for anything in seconds. That alone has saved us from re-litigating decisions, from onboarding confusion, from the frustration of knowing a decision was made somewhere but not being able to locate it." — Rodrigo, La Nao
Mailing lists: a decision archive
A mailing list is technically simple: one email address that routes messages to a group. But the real value isn't the routing — it's the archive that comes with it. Every message is indexed, threaded, and given a permanent URL. Your team's decisions accumulate into a searchable record that grows more valuable over time.
This is what Slack promised and never delivered. Slack's history disappears on free plans and is effectively unsearchable at scale on paid ones. A mailing list archive is just a website. It works in any browser. It works offline if you export it. It will be readable in twenty years.
What a permanent URL is actually worth
When every discussion thread has a stable link, you can reference past decisions anywhere — in a spreadsheet, in a wiki, in a future email. Your project management system can link directly to the conversation where a decision was made, not just describe it. Context stops being something you have to reconstruct and starts being something you can point to.
Onboarding without handholding
When a new employee joins a Slack workspace, they see a blank screen. Whatever happened before they arrived is either gone or inaccessible. When a new employee joins a mailing list with a web archive, they have access to the full history of every discussion their team has had. You can also export the archive in standard .mbox format and load it directly into their email client for offline access from day one.
Keeping the archive in CC
For important projects, keep the team mailing list address in CC on relevant emails. This is the simplest possible way to ensure decisions don't get siloed in individual inboxes. The email goes to the person, and a copy goes to the archive. No extra steps, no separate systems.
We use groups.io for hosted mailing lists. Each list comes with a web archive, threaded email delivery, and moderation tools — no server to maintain. A free plan covers most small teams. The web archive alone is worth it: every thread gets a permanent URL you can link to from anywhere.
Chat: for urgency only
Real-time chat is useful. It's also, when used as the primary communication layer of a company, one of the most reliable ways to ensure your team never does deep work. A constant stream of messages that each demand a quick response is not communication infrastructure — it's a distraction machine with a history tab.
We use synchronous chat for two things only:
- Genuinely urgent matters that can't wait for an email and can't be handled with a phone call — time-zone conflicts, language barriers, someone who needs an answer in the next ten minutes.
- Short, live problem-solving when two people are available at the same time and need to think through something quickly together.
Everything else goes in email.
Auto-delete enforces the rule
The easiest way to prevent chat from becoming a knowledge silo is to set messages to delete automatically after one week. This sounds drastic. In practice it's clarifying: if a decision is worth keeping, it goes in an email. If it doesn't go in an email, it wasn't a decision — it was a conversation.
Delta Chat: all the familiarity, none of the lock-in
We use Delta Chat rather than Slack, WhatsApp, or Telegram. Delta Chat looks and behaves like any modern messaging app — group chats, file sharing, read receipts — but it runs entirely over standard email protocols (SMTP/IMAP). There are no new accounts, no central servers, no company data touching a third-party platform. It uses the email credentials your team already has.
It also works offline, supports end-to-end encryption, and doesn't charge per user. When you stop using Delta Chat, your email history is untouched.
How we set this up
On the mailing list we share our email configurations, folder structures, groups.io setup, and Delta Chat configuration for mobile and desktop — including the specific setup we use at La Nao.
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