I think it would be better for everyone if email didn’t exist. The only good thing about it is that everyone has it, so it’s a communication means you can depend on. It’s an old system that was modeled after mail, because, at the time, its designers couldn’t think of something better. It took over and is now a deep rooted tradition.
Of course you can’t get rid of email. However, usage of email is often an indication of an area that needs automation. Instead of sending an invoice to your customer by email, it might be better to have invoicing software that sends it automatically. Instead of sending internal email messages, it might be better to use a company communication system like Slack.
Sometimes email is used as if it was telex. When a ship arrives at an area and is available for chartering, ship owners send to agents an email that describes the ship type and capacity. The email is typically a single line in some kind of code that dates from the telex days. I don’t have an actual example handy, but it was something like “UNICORN ARR FEB10 PIR 152T 17KN”. In this imaginary example, Unicorn (the name of the ship) is arriving on 10 February at Piraeus (presumably it will unload there and is then available for chartering); the ship can carry 152 tonnes and has a speed of 17 knots. The code usually contains a bit more information and is not standardized, making processing these emails hard to automate. Agents typically read several such messages per minute (many of those are duplicates coming from different sources). Now if some kind of loadboard for ships existed instead of this, it would probably benefit everyone.
Trucking businesses might not be doing something that old-fashioned, but probably they use email more than they should be.