Along with some broader points about responsible AI usage, Fastmail CEO Bron Gondwana reminds us how important email is. In an age where anything and everything can change (or be hallucinated), having your own copy of history is even more important:

In a world where there’s enough AI capability to process the entire web and rewrite every page to remove something, the cost of “changing history” is much reduced, so we can expect more of it.

This is where the immutability of email really shines. An email is your copy, and the sender can’t revise it later. This is frustrating when you’ve sent the wrong thing and have to send a separate correction later, but in the long term it’s insanely valuable.

It makes a huge difference to be able to go back and double-check your memory against an email you saw years ago and know that if they disagree, the email is correct. This is already not the case with web pages — they change, and it’s only becoming worse.