Definite stance: email remains the best mode of asynchronous communication 1-on-1, being a mighty standard that doesn't prescribe any particular clients. However, its game-winning design didn't very well up-scale to multi-user conversations, where each of history, timing, and synchrony are long-standing problems. Mailing lists were a complicated way of solving some of those problems. My current favorite solution is Zulip, which really is just a beautifully polished mailing list implementation.