Though its political implications are yet unclear, the publication of an email chain in which Donald Trump Jr. arranged a June 2016 meeting with a lawyer peddling the Russian government’s help for his father’s presidential campaign ought to inspire some pretty obvious tech advice: Step away from the inbox, stupid!

That’s not a partisan slight. I said pretty much the same thing last year about the emails of John D. Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, whose inbox emptied across the internet after he clicked on a link he shouldn’t have.

What was most notable about the Podesta stash — not to mention earlier releases from the Democratic National Committee and Mrs. Clinton’s own server — was the Clinton campaign’s apparent slavishness to email. No thought appeared too big or too small to escape documentation and discussion over a fundamentally insecure communication channel invented more than 50 years ago, and meant for subjects far less weighty than a campaign for the presidency. The Democrats’ email troubles suggested how thoroughly email had seduced us, and how deeply we’d all overcommitted to it — and how desperately we all needed to move to something more secure.

The younger Mr. Trump’s emails only underline that point. But they also suggest what we’ll lose when, inevitably, the world does move on to something better than email — an unmatched historical record of some of the most important stories in the world.