What emails suck at is communication between multiple people in a work setting. That's why Slack, Teams, and others emerged and got popular.
For example:
- When multiple people respond to the same email, the email "thread" branches out into a tree. If the tree branches out multiple times, keeping track of all the replies gets messy.
- While most clients can show you the thread/tree structure of an email chain, it only works if you've been on every email in the chain. If you get CC'd later, you'll just see a single email and navigating that is messy.
- Also if you get CC'd later, you can't access any attachments from the chain.
- You can link to a Slack/Teams conversation and as long as it's in a public channel, anyone with the link can get in on it (for example you have a conversation about a proposed feature which then turns into a task -> you describe the task simply and link "more info in this slack convo"), you can't do that with Emails (well I guess you could export a .eml file, but it has the same issue as getting CC'd later)
- When a thread no longer interests you, you can mute it in Slack/Teams. You can't realistically do that with emails, as most people will just hit "reply all"
- But also sometimes people will hit "reply" instead of "reply all" by a mistake and a message doesn't get delivered to everyone in the thread.
I oppose. Mails are superior in announcing to multiple people. If people want to participate they can in many ways. It is well structured, well documented and offers coherent discourse. Slack/Teams are for just-in-time dynamic, collaborative conversation that are quickly fading and missing out on all the strengths mails have in terms of permanence, archival, search and general quality. Something that totally gets lost in instant messaging like Discord, Teams and such where context is basically non-existant and may be gone completely in minutes.
Remember Google+ ? What lasted was Gmail and barebone simple Mail.
> Mails are superior in announcing to multiple people
People who are known at time of sending. A slack message can be searched by those joining the team much (much) later, those who move teams, in-house search bots, etc. Mailing lists bridge this gap to some extent, but then you're really not just using email, you're using some kind of external collaboration service. Which undermines the point of "just email".
> > Mails are superior in announcing to multiple people
>
> People who are known at time of sending. A slack message can be searched by those joining the team much (much) later, those who move teams, in-house search bots, etc.
People use slack search successfully? It's search has to be one of the worst search implementations I have come across. Unless you know the exact wording in the slack message, it is almost always easier to scroll back and find the relevant conversation just from memory. And that says something because the slack engineers in their infinite wisdom (incompetence) decided that messages don't get stored on the client, but get reloaded from the server (wt*!!), so scrolling back to a conversation that happened some days ago becomes an excercise of repeated scroll and wait. Slack is good for instant messaging type conversations (and even for those it quickly becomes annoying because their threads are so crappy), not much else. I wish we would use something else.
> Mailing lists bridge this gap to some extent, but then you're really not just using email, you're using some kind of external collaboration service. Which undermines the point of "just email".
Mailing lists are just email. They simply add a group archiving system.
This assumes said email is properly filtered and doesn't get lost in a sea of work spam. I also assert email is actually terrible at context; unless that is part of an existing thread, or again your filtering/sorting is great, you will often spend at least a paragraph just establishing context.
> It is well structured, well documented and offers coherent discourse.
You must have great coworkers who know how to communicate. I cannot say the same for everyone at my company. Email at many of the places I've worked can quickly devolve on more than 3-5 replies.
Worse than the work email spam at some of my previous jobs was the Slack spam - at least the email spam was work-related. Too many people substitute work for a social life and treat Slack like they’re on a group chat with friends.
There's nothing wrong with social chat on Slack. It just needs to be either in a thread or, better yet, in a dedicated social channel.
Saying people shouldn't have social chat on Slack is like people shouldn't have social chat in the office kitchen because it's part of the same office complex.
Google+ dies not because it was a bad product but because google changed strategy and killed it.
Ultimately it’s all subjective - some people prefer email some chat some calls some no comms at all.
If you can communicate well, articulate what you say and want well, and actually read and understand what I write then I will communicate over any medium with you.
If not then I’ll have a bad time regardless of medium
I do agree that email quickly becomes messy, even with mailing lists. It's really much the same issue Slack has, a lack of training. It's just assumed that people will know how to use both email and Slack, but we don't. For email it's a decade old debate, that rational minds lost as Outlook dictated top-reply, forcing you to read threads backwards and discouraging the recipient from inline replies and cutting out irrelevant parts.
Slack is equally terrible, because the interface and threads is actually hard to navigate and I honestly cannot make search work in a rational manor. The more discusions you have in Slack, the worse it becomes.
Slack is the equivalent of shouting across the room. I copied anything that seems important to my notes. Any message that’s more than an handful of screen old can be considered lost.
IMO, that's a benefit of slack. At $LAST_JOB, we had a 30 day expiry on data in slack, which everyone was in uproar over initially. But, it forced us to actually put stuff elsewhere.
I thought so when I started at a company that had that policy but in the end we still mostly ended up with split-brain issues (eg some information is shared in both places, some in only one, some updates get lost) with the added negative that stuff disappeared from Slack.
It's just a hard problem overall when you have email, chat, wiki, docs, and a ticketing system.
And, unfortunately, all these things exist because not one of them is actually good beyond its scope (if it's even good within its scope to begin with).
Sure, emails are not the right tool for multiple people discussing a project, even less - when we want to add new members to a thread, or to leave (by those who were added, but for whom it is not longer relevant).
At the same time, when I was a cofounder & CTO, I used Basecamp, which promoted email-like threads. (There is a chat-like functionality as well, but I made policed to use it only for impromptu things like setting Zoom meetings or so, nor for anything that may be important in the future (brainstorming, ideas, architecture choices, analyzis, etc).
It created a culture of clarity of thoughts I never had before, or after.
And yes, they a year later is was easy to search for why we picked this way of optimizing quantum computing in Rust not another (which pros and cons, possible paths not yet explored, etc), go back to unused UI designs, retrieve research for publication, etc.
Work said "email is not official, use slack." We literally had a meeting where people were complaining about not knowing about recent changes. "We announced it in these 5 channels, we will start announcing it in more."
Like, email works for announcements yo. Naw, let's jeep messaging N other places.
Isn't there one company wide channel? With slack or email, you still need to make a list of people who get the announcement. Slack has been a lot better in my experience for joining a team and looking back at the history
I’ve always thought email needs a new “view mode” that somehow imports the email structure without actually using a separate program like Slack. Something like an expanded workflow view that shows emails as a series of separate nodes flowing in one direction.
The key point being that this is not a separate program, but a different way to view the data already inside emails.
I’m just brainstorming here so apologies if this doesn’t make much sense.
I find a structured conversation far easier to work with personally.
You can respond only to the subthread you want to, and not have the single thread become a mess of quoted and irrelevant replies that you have to scroll past to find the answer you want.
Additionally, shared folders fit well within a team environment and works much like usenet for messaging.
So maybe having some hybrid like Slack/Teams over email? Where UI of such email client is rendering emails as a room/channel and subject is the name of the room (removes RE, FW, ...) and works like room identification?. So you will get IRC like experience. If you will add PGP on top of it, it can be also secure and decentralized.
The ‘reactions to emails’ thing that Outlook does is gross. However I avoid most chat apps and dislike email so I’m probably not a representative user.
Thank you. This is a very insightful comment that pinpoints something I could never quite put my finger on.
So the issue is that you need a git pull or something like it to prevent branching. Chat etc... achieves this through real-time state management. In an async setting you need something else.
> When multiple people respond to the same email, the email "thread" branches out into a tree. If the tree branches out multiple times, keeping track of all the replies gets messy
I think this is mostly due to bad UIs in email clients. Usenet had similar, if not more extensive, branching many Usenet clients made this quite manageable. I don't see why similar clients could not be written for email.
The two big problems are shitty mail clients, and people not knowing how to quote (which gets enabled by the shitty mail clients).
If someone gets CC'd later than typically because the discussion got to a point where the input is needed for the current question - and in a mail thread with proper quoting surprisingly often the quoted email is sufficient context for the added guy to jump in.
What makes a big mess out of things is the nested list of fully quoted emails with top answers at the bottom I now have to go through when getting added to figure out what the fuck they want from me.
At least at my workplace, chats got popular because it was a way for humans to talk to humans without getting drowned out by dozens of automated messages, irrelevant announcements, and other clutter.
text forums are just a web interface for mailinglists, or vice versa. google groups and others can (or could) support both, and usenet news too. they are all just messages. the difference is only the tool you use to display them.
The tree format seems an advantage, if anything. It naturally separates discussions into separate threats. Messaging software would dump all these into a single channel so you could have different conversations happening at the same time interspersed.
Agreed, a single thread is painful if it’s actually spawning off multiple sub-topics. I suppose the better answer is to start a separate thread in Slack in that case but it can flow weirdly where the topic originally arises in one place but is continued elsewhere; it relies on someone linking on the original thread to keep context. In a mailing tree, that context is still there.
All of this depends on having a sane email client though, doing it via outlook or gmail is a nightmare and I suspect this is the root of many people’s aversion to email.
It is quite frustrating that we have these discussions over and over again. Asynchronous communication is great - but it is not better than synchronous communication in some universal way. It depends. Personally I am very sensitive to interruptions - so I lean towards asynchronous. But when you are doing something and you really need to get some information from someone to proceed - then getting his response immediately means that your work is not interrupted. The other person is - but it is a trade off. In a team you have to make these trade-offs. It can be hard - because it takes from one side and gives to the other - people would like to be able to interrupt others and not be interrupted themselves. And it is even more complicated by the fact that some jobs and some people are more sensitive to interruptions and others are less - so it is hard to make fair rules about it. But it is a real trade-off to be made.
UPDATE: Or take interactivity - a conversation is really powerful way of communicating. How a computer geek could even claim that asynchronous communication is always better - is he still using batch processors to run his jobs typing everything upfront and they waiting for the full run before he can fix his syntax errors?
It's purely a cultural thing, people from some cultures find it rude to get to the point, so they need to have this "hi, how are you" -preamble every time, even if the other person is on a completely different timezone, which makes every chat take 2 days.
I'm a big proponent of the whole "just start with your question" thing but anytime someone replies to a "hello" with just a link to that page, they immediately come across as a jerk.
I like to put this as my slack status for a while when I join a new job. It tells my coworkers I mean business, and sets healthy communication patterns right out of the gate.
Interesting. I write messages in Teams about the same way I write emails. Some people prefer splitting each sentence in a separate message, some keep the whole body as one.
Email just nudges to send whole body at once because it usually doesn't have a synchronous chat UI.
Also, even if responses are just 20 second after each, there is this constant context switching, which takes more time and attention that if we took literally any other method (in person, email or call).
IMO, this is because every email is a named, searchable thread. Sure Slack, MS Teams, Discord, etc... have threads but they sort of get washed away in the stream of messages imho.
I dunno, there's something about email that makes a lot of people write more thoughtful and comprehensive messages. Not everyone, obviously. But it feels more like writing a letter - you're not expecting a reply within minutes.
I've pressed people who chat this way with me to change, and usually it seems people get it once they get shown how unproductive this kind of conversation is.
Just ask me your question. Feel free to start with pleasantries if that's your style, but get to your point or the ask on the first message.
We had the right technologies in the past, but we mismanaged them.
Email, Usenet and IRC was great.
Email, however, went dogshit due to spam. From simply having the office mail-server, everyone went to Gmail and Office, who didn't always want to accept legitimate email. Thus, encouraging more folks to move to it.
Now we're in a situation where everyone is "forced" to use crappy interfaces, email is htmlified shit, and more and more companies require you to use the official client. Which in the case of Office365 means a very, very crappy web solution if you're on for example Linux. IMAP is often simply turned off due to whomever decides security has decided that's a bad idea.
Mailing lists used to be great. But got broken in a variety of ways due to spam filtering among other things.
Usenet was great once upon a time, with internal newsgroups etc. That died too.
IRC was, and is, an excellent way of having instant messaging. Unfortunately it wasn't business friendly enough so only the geeks used it. It was a great way to coordinate, though.
Each had a unique set of pitfalls. Out of the 3 Usenet seems to be functionally dead for it's original purpose. Perhaps there was no possible outcome where usenet would scale along with the internet.
The email spam issue is trivially solvable with a contact whitelist, which is a UI issue. Email as it is right now is definitely very usable, but keep me the hell away from anything from Microsoft.
IRC is alive and small. On the optimistic side it outlived Skype. Maybe 25 years from now IRC will still be working and Discord will be dead. There has been a lot of buy in on Matrix, but I'm unconvinced the protocol is going to thrive long term due to design choices made.
Reddit is doing what Usenet did. In my ideal world, reddit would be part of the fediverse along with Usenet & Twitter and the UI would close to hn.
I’m obviously biased (as proj lead for Matrix) but I genuinely think Matrix is in a good place going forwards. There’s a lot of legitimate complaints about the transition to Matrix 2.0, and trust & safety still needs a tonne of work - but the core protocol and featureset feels pretty good. Critically, we just showed we can successfully land pretty major changes to the core federation protocol to improve it (https://matrix.org/blog/2025/08/project-hydra-improving-stat...), which feels pretty liberating in terms of having carte blanche to fix the other remaining warts.
What design choices are you worried about? (To confirm that they are on the radar).
That sounds like basically right (I agree with it all, I'm too the kind of person that enjoys all those advantages of email). So here I'm thinking from putting myself in the skin of the others:
All this seems so much "me, me, me, me". People sending you a quick Whatsapp to let you know "tomorrow in Town sq. at 12h" don't want to have to use a clunky interface (sadly email apps are not up to par with instant messaging apps, not even close); they don't care either about your desire to have a unified inbox, and a long term archive. Agreed if it's for "important" things, but mostly instant messaging replaced email for day to day things that in an analog world would have been just said by landline phone.
Relatedly, having a long term archival might come as a bit creepy, even. In apps this happens too, but at least I can say something extremely controversial and delete it for both people a couple minutes later. Or send a "view once" mesage.
Regarding confidentiality, coincidentally not even 2 weeks ago a friend was telling me about a case of hos company sending an invoice, and being man-in-the-middle'd so the attacker just changed the bank account number and the customer thus paid to the wrong account. Nobody uses GPG, sadly. So at this point, for very important stuff I'd consider Whatsapp less confidential but more secure than email, ironically.
Back to being me; I see a problem of usabilily. Even I admit that sending a whatsapp is much more convenient and practical than opening up K-9 Mail to _compose_ an email. You don't _compose_ a IM, you just hit a contact, jot it down, hit send, and there's extra social convention tools such as a blue tick indicating that maybe you can even stay put there because probably the other person may reply immediately.
> Relatedly, having a long term archival might come as a bit creepy, even. In apps this happens too, but at least I can say something extremely controversial and delete it for both people a couple minutes later. Or send a "view once" mesage.
I agree but in practice Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp etc are quite long term already. I can easily look up my chats from 15+ years ago on Fb.
But there is indeed a cultural unease, and it relates to the other top h post about social cooling. As you said, people want an online equivalent of phone calls and in person discussion. It's creepy and in some places even illegal to record phone calls or live conversations.
On the other hand, written letters used to be private but meant for archival. Many people inherit a big box of neatly organized letters received from friends and family when grandma etc die.
Email is a bit more letter-like in this.
But these norms are in flux and especially for different generations the intuition can be different.
> Regarding confidentiality, coincidentally not even 2 weeks ago a friend was telling me about a case of hos company sending an invoice, and being man-in-the-middle'd so the attacker just changed the bank account number and the customer thus paid to the wrong account.
That sounds like a quite sophisticated attack. By far most Mail these days should be transport encrypted. The attacker thus must have control (legal or illegal, at least to fake a wrong MX DNS record) over either side and then manipulate the invoice and then need a bank account which can receive the payment, while hiding their traces. Seems quite sophisticated and targeted as an attack.
> Nobody uses GPG, sadly.
User experience there was never good. Signal/WhatsApp probably are the most userfiendly e2ee systems around: automatic key exchange with ability to verify. (While proprietary clients require trusting those, which is a big ask especially with Whatsapp/meta)
I have no idea of how that went; now you have picked my interest and I'll be asking him to follow up. It did not occur to me that it needs to be too sophisticated of an attack (didn't stop to think through it too much, admittedly). Just thinking of how we collectively mostly never encrypt email seemed like the most obvious way to understand how that was possible. The email provider of either the company or the customer must have been compromised. But the bank account?
Not knowing any details my first assumption would be that somebody mistyped a number, either in the template or while preparing the transfer and being hacked is just an excuse.
Alternative is some generic phishing with a complete fake invoice, which somebody assumed to be true.
Now if it is serious and an invoice was changed (independently from transport considerations) that alone is quite some effort: the original message has to be held back and analyzed, then it has to be manipulated (replaced) and then the message has to be sent on.
If you get to that level of sophistication it's a lot more likely the source was hacked.
There are a few other scenarios, like invoice being sent wrongly and some random person manipulating it before sending on, but if you aren't prepared by having a bank account for that purpose it's quite a risky thing to do. My private account can be traced to me ...
> sadly email apps are not up to par with instant messaging apps, not even close
E-mails have exactly the same properties as any instant messaging. Receive notifications, ability to answer instantly from a pop-up. What exactly are you missing? Or have you deliberately made email clunky on your own devices?
The main reason I prefer email over messaging is that it allows me to correspond with the widest range of people. I work in academia and publishing and have various personal interests, and I want to be able to interact with people in many countries and walks of life. There is no single messaging service that would make that possible.
Also, I want people to be able to contact me unsolicited. Many interesting jobs and opportunities have come my way over the years because someone I didn’t know reached out to me by email.
I do wish that email was standardized with better formatting conventions, though.
I've often thought about building a messaging platform aggregator that takes conversations from Whatsapp/messenger/discord/Instagram DMs/etc and provides a unified interface for them. I suspect there's a bunch of legal and annoying auth things that make this impossible. But at its core these things are just arrays of strings
This used to be fairly common, back in the old days. Programs like Pidgin unified many messengers into a single app.
For a while, many messengers actually shared underlying protocols (e.g. Google Talk & Facebook were both using XMPP at some point, and you could even cross-message).
Nowadays this is much harder. There's some exceptions (Telegram) with open client protocols, but I wouldn't wanna try and implement something like Discord, it'll be a never-ending tarpit.
They just don't want to fight people trying to build a full alternative client for Discord as a bunch of their paid-for stuff is just clien side javascript.
On the meta platforms I am intricately familiar with the Whatsapp API and it is literally not possible unless you are effectively going to effectively run WhatsApp Web in a browser instance and interact with it which is against ToS.
Whatsapp API works on the basis of conversations, the conversation has to be initiated by another party and only exists for 24hours from the last message from the other party. Sending messages unprompted is not possible unless it’s a templated message.
I can believe this exists to counter spam, and let’s not ignore the fact that WhatsApp messages through the API costs more per message than SMS.
In my experience restrictive and developer hostile API structures are indicative of exploiting a monopoly position rather than some provided excuse like 'countering spam'
WhatsApp is far from a monopoly and I wouldn’t call their api developer hostile, it’s actually reasonable to work with, what you can do with it though is quite restricted to what a business would want to do with WhatsApp and is billed accordingly.
I think this is more an argument for protocols over products. I wish XMPP had remained as popular as it has. The standard has now only slowly evolved, but it probably could have continued to meet the needs of our society as a compliment to email.
I've been having a bad time with email of late. It's been the method of communication between us and another company (a pretty creaky old product). I thought they were replying strangely and ignoring my questions "did they even read what I said!?". It turns out for whatever reason they hadn't been getting some of my emails.
Now I can't trust that anything has been received unless I get an acknowledgement, so I have to keep pestering for replies. Basically lost trust in the protocol because it's dependent on the the other person's mailserver behaving they way you expect it to.
Well, E-Mail is inherently async and allows a sequence of relays with no back channel to confirm delivery.
With other protocols (except snail mail) I get a confirmation that recipient was valid and the message for delivered. With some I even get a marker it was read.
With e-mail, with luck, I get a cryptic not standardized response mail, if something went wrong. Sometimes even only a lot later as delivery is retried for a few days in some cases.
The core technologies may be simple, but email really is an entire stack of protocols, mechanisms, and conventions. And therein lies the problem. It's not one well designed solution but one workaround layered on top of each other to make it work reasonably well.
> Rather than having flow and concentration interrupted by incoming message notifications, with email I can easily decide when to fetch and process messages.
Asynchronous communication describes the client-server-client model, and both chat and email fall into this category, especially since there are peer-to-peer chat programs. What the author states sounds to me like a problem with the notification model and fetching beyond the user's control. Chat is not inherently in "flow."
Chat is inherently in flow because you can’t manage the read/unread status per message, and you can’t move messages to different folders. When I check for email, I might have a dozen new messages, clearly listed one per line, and I can pick which to read now and which to read later. I have a clean overview with the mailbox listing and the read/unread status. I can easily overview 50 or so messages without having to to scroll. I can archive the messages I’m done with, while keeping those around I still want to handle.
In a chat, the read/unread status is not per-message. It’s much harder to discern separate exchanges within the same channel, and to handle them out-of-order when some are more urgent or relevant than others. They also take up substantially more visual space than a mailbox listing, so you have a much smaller “peephole”, making it more difficult to get an overview of what is going on in a channel. All this has the effect that people treat chat channels as a single continuous flow of messages that you catch up with in the order they come in; and the messages that scroll out of view, which happens fast, tend to go out of mind as well.
Ok, good points and I agree with messages as atomic unit of communication in mail vs message history per contact as atomic unit of communication in mail. This creates a mental state of communication flow (like a conversation) and inherently a different form than mail (more like receiving a mail in your postbox and can able to stack them singular).
I’ve often wondered why forums never took off at any of the companies I’ve worked at. Has anyone else worked at companies that had forums?
All I worked at had email and chat, and some had wikis, but never forums, despite having crucial advantages over email (anyone who joins later can search them) and wikis (they’re conversations rather than mutable, outdated documents) and chat (they can’t interrupt you).
Forums is fundamentally community based, where everyone is expected to pitch in. While companies are socials, there's not a lot of community going around. There are projects, but the deciders form a very small subset of the involved people.
By the way, for email, the etiquette would be to include the context of the discussion in the invitation for the new person coming in. Or send the archive of the discussion to the person. But for the latter to happen would require a much better email client than what most people are using.
At my current job (1000+ employee tech company), I pretty much never receive emails from humans. Plenty of automated notifications and the odd marketing mail, but everything else is Slack and Zoom.
I think it's way better. Email has so many limitations, especially as soon as you're in a group discussion.
A decade or two ago it wasn’t uncommon to use a single messaging program for multiple networks. I have fond memories of using Pidgin for a long long time.
This was a single program which spoke to all the networks, not a set of tabs rendering disparate web views. A single contact list, and the same UI for all conversations. You’d basically forget who used MSN, who used Yahoo Messenger, who used XMPP, etc…
I’m not sure why we don’t have the same for the current set of trending proprietary networks. Sure, they make it harder for third parties to connect, but proprietary networks never really collaborated on making it easier.
Maybe there’s just less folk willing to invest free time in making desktop messaging apps?
In theory, XMPP (or similar protocols) would simplify this nowadays: just have a single client and protocol and connect to proprietary networks via gateways. We have gateways for some networks, but desktop messaging clients have really stagnated.
I love emails. For all mentioned in the post an one more: to write an email, people have to think before writing and email, even if it is just a few paragraphs. I takes focus, it takes asking oneself questions, what makes (in my experience) the quality of conversation way higher than talking with the same people over chat interface. Moreover, there is time for focus on email (both reading and writing) and time to actually work. (Vs chats that put some pressure on being always available which is something that literally makes deep focus impossible.)
Of course, some people treat emails like there were chats, and some people treat chats as if they were emails - yet, what's crucial is what's the reference level.
And yeah, in my experience and opinion, chats make us dumper. Just the same way as clickbaits and memes catch attention easier than in-depth analyzis, they are unlikely to go.
Email still has its use cases in the modern workplace. Sometimes you need a slower, more detailed communication channel, especially when inter-company communications are involved.
But most of the things the OP likes about email make it a nightmare from a legal perspective. Once a company gets sued over labor/trade secret/IP related things, one result is a strict email (and other electronic communication) retention policy. Some retention periods can be as short as 6 months. Apps are deployed that scour your local storage to make sure you aren't archiving emails off-line. This removes many (most) of the archival advantages of email.
> most of the things the OP likes about email make it a nightmare from a legal perspective
Former litigator here: The late Dr. Randy Pausch mentioned this in his Last Lecture; IIRC, he urged people to keep all their emails. [0] That can be a really good idea — keeping emails:
• will help your lawyer reconstruct a timeline of events, build a narrative to tell the jury that's supported by the documentary evidence, and avoid spinning a tale that's undermined by emails that you didn't keep but someone else did;
• will help make sure your people don't have private stashes of emails that have been deleted from your server but that resurface in response to subpoenas — or search warrants.
• will help corroborate the stories told by your witnesses: Judges and jurors tend to be skeptical of hindsight testimony because of faulty memory and the temptation to shade the truth or even lie — recall how the House's January 6 committee hearings made such extensive use of emails, and also texts. If you didn't keep copies of emails, you won't have that evidence available;
• will refresh your witnesses' memories so they don't testify incorrectly about something (whether in deposition or at trial) and have to correct their testimony — which hurts their credibility.
Moreover: Your opponent's lawyer will likely send you a "litigation hold" letter, meaning you have to suspend all document-deletion programs — and if you don't, "spoliation of evidence" is low-hanging fruit for the opposing counsel to attack you and maybe cause you to lose the case.
Back in the day of limited server storage capability, email "retention" policies (spelled: purging policies) had at least some business justification. That's far less the case now.
To be sure: Footgun emails documenting bad behavior can lead to problems. But the root cause is the bad behavior, not the emails — it's far better to face the facts than to delete the evidence .
>My colleagues and friends know that I prefer to communicate with them via email rather than chat messaging.
For some co-workers and especially for friends & family, the chat UI is much more ergonomic than email. Email usage has extra friction:
- compose new email UI has extra SUBJECT: field you have to fill with junk (like "hey" or "question...") or skip over
- email client UI for multiple messages from the same person in a listview repeats the same metadata headers which is visually redundant pollution. UI settings such as "organize by thread" or "organize by conversation" help but don't fully solve it.
With chat apps, the back & forth conversation is visually cleaner without all the metadata clutter.
I would argue if you really can’t come up with a subject then you probably shouldn’t be asking at all.
I got used to Zulip at my previous job and people made the same argument about “Topics” (which are basically subjects); but they forget that the messages are read more often than they are written. A little friction in writing for an easier time reading and skimming is absolutely worth it.
Being in the IT business for a few decades, email is superior to anything else for record keeping. Especially with Thunderbird I find it almost too easy to find information I need, and addendums neatly threaded.
And, it is quite difficult for the other part to hide/delete stupidness they send, which thankfully saved my behind twice.
Chats are good for now-communication, but energy- and time consuming when you need to look up something that happened months ago.
Gmail is dogsh*t at search. It's so bad. I can search the EXACT word I want and not a single email will come up, or it will bring up the most irrelevant emails.
Same experience and it’s so bad I sometimes question my sanity. At least I have a notmuch index setup on a server I can fall back on but it’s just so bizarre a “search” company can’t produce an app which can search properly emails!
Nice. Note though that you don't necessarily have to limit everyone else to email; some messaging platforms allow one user to post something using a webpage for example, and cause that to send email to another user, and vice versa. One data point: GitHub's issue tracker can forward issues as email, and you can reply to those back via email, and your response will end up as a new comment on the issue.
> Rather than having flow and concentration interrupted by incoming message notifications, with email I can easily decide when to fetch and process messages.
But emails also notify and therefore interrupt. If you want to turn notifications off in your email or only poll new mails when you choose you can also mute notifications (or turn on dnd) or close the chat app.
Email sucks for chat like communication. It is great for long detailed messages. Having both is the best of both worlds.
I have work email and personal email. I have work chat (Slack) and personal chat (WhatsApp with friends, Keybase with my partner). Choosing which chat app is also a great tool for making sure I am dealing with the right audience. I don't want to accidentally message my boss about stuff I send to my partner.
I had a colleague that would come back from vacation, see 1000+ emails, and just mark all unread emails and hit delete. And say "If it's any important, they'll just mail me again".
Not saying that it's a good way to do things, absolutely not, but it did open my eyes to the fact that some people will just indiscriminately delete emails, no mater how important they could be.
Well, odds are none of them is important. And they are probably right in that if it's important, the sender will look for them again.
This person just got 1000 emails in the time of a vacation. How viably is it not to completely ignore that? It's even surprising that they bothered to look and cleaned up in a way that implies they aren't ignoring them on the daily work.
I don’t like the friction of forcing a specific messaging app or protocol on people so just default to what everyone is using (WhatsApp) TBH I don’t really get the moral outcry over using it (or any other messaging app).
Whatapp and other chatapps are popular because they are instant and have overcome the initial adaption issues that arrise with new messaging platforms. The interface of email its backend is too dated for instant chat messaging. Why were the MSN and yahoo messenger apps so popular in the early days of the internet? They were an evolution of written communication methods. Unfortunately, email is just a legacy product that no one wants to improve. So we all have to end up working around its limitations.
As much as I want to create a non-meta alternative to Whatsapp or a better email infrastructure, there is no compelling enough differentiator for most users. Just look at the privacy benefits of Signal, yet, people don't care. Just look at the aesthetic benefits of iMessage, yet people don't care. They just want an easy to use and responsive cross platform method of communication.
A good solution is a unified messaging app, able to combine all platform's messaging, but these often become defunct because of API issues or T&C breeched.
Mbox is not that easy to process, especially if 1986 time span is taken into account. There is base64 encoding. There is "=" encoding, don't recall whats its name. "Equals" encoding. There are several character encodings if 1986 time span is taken into account, and each character encoding will be encrypted by equals signs. There was KOI8-R. KOI8-R was on BSD and Linux servers, but desktops had cp1251, so 1251 entered e-mail eventually, via e-mail clients autoconfigured to desktop encoding, or via webmail interfaces autoconfigured to web encoding which could likely be cp1251 and not likely koi8-r. Then utf-8 came in.
"Unified Inbox" (and therefore "Unified Archive") only works if you are the annoying person who forces everybody else to contact them on their system of choice.
Of course it's convenient when everybody accomodates for you.
This makes my brain hurt.
Few things I hate more than email.
The single worst way to get in touch with me.
As a user of it for more decades than I’d like to recall, I despise email.
Sure, the infinite archive is mildly helpful. But search-ability is marginal in any tool I’m aware of.
The folders, filters and other management suggestions mentioned make it a second job.
Email is a life tax we’re all forced to pay.
It is a problem that is yet to be solved, though many have tried.
For anything that will benefit from back and forth, and isn't that important. I hate email too. I check it like only once a day at work, and my person email, i check even less.
I have it the other way around. I have all messenger notifications silenced except email. This way when people message me I only see their messages whenever I feel like checking if I got any messages. All importart stuff goes into my email, and I can see the push notification immediately.
If I did this, my notifications would never stop.
I get tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of emails every day. Even heavily filtered, I can only afford to check work email a couple times a day. Most that make it past the filters are still ignored and immediately archived.
You mean from random people? Don't post your personal email publicly then. I have masked emails posted publicly and while I do get occasional spam, it's more like 2-3 emails a month.
It really just depends on your email client. I use elm and my inbox, received and sent folders are stored in flat files, so i can just use vim or other linux tools to quickly search for any email from the past 25 years. In many chat apps you cant even search at all. I find email by far the most efficient method of communication.
Sadly the searchability on IM platforms is even worse than that of email. Discord (among others) often can't find the very text that's right in front of you.
Also, email is free to the sender but costly (in time) to the recipient. This is reflected in the quantity of messages, but also in their verbosity. People rarely expend the effort to edit or be concise. Both are costly to readers.
I have come to hate email so much there are weeks where I will check my email perhaps just once or twice in a week. Every 2-3 months I try to clean up my inbox by going through it and unsubscribing to all the rubbish I am opted into without my say-so. But since we use Gmail, this is a really, really, really slow process. Gmail is a terrible product that has no evolved meaningfully over the 20 or so years it has existed. And it doesn't get any better when idiot product managers feel it is more important to add more AI nonsense than try to fix a product that is very poor at doing the thing it is supposed to do.
(If anyone knows of a tool that helps me rapidly clean up my gmail, please let me know).
But the worst thing about email is that nobody knows how to write emails anymore. Everyone just quotes the while thing and adds their comments on top. People no longer trim down the email and intersperse their comments throughout the response. Mail reading software no longer aids you in doing this - cleaning up the quoting for you (not that many mail readers did this before).
And when you don't want to quote the email you are responding to, people include the whole mess anyway and just pop their response at the top. Rather than understanding that a threaded mail reader (as most mail readers are today) will provide the reader with the context they need just fine. There's no need to repeat dozens of older responses.
I miss email from 25-30 years ago. When 90% of what landed in my inbox was actually for me, written by other human beings. Most of which knew how to produce a response to an email without it just being a sloppy mess.
I wish people who wrote mail clients were more intelligent product designers and more thoughtful people. That they would understand that catering to people's poor habits was, and is, a bad idea and that a better idea would have been to make proper email quoting at least a path of considerably less resistance.
> (If anyone knows of a tool that helps me rapidly clean up my gmail, please let me know).
I’ve used Leave Me Alone (leavemealone.com) for cleaning up my subscriptions. It scans your past messages for subscriptions, sorts them by most frequent messages, and allows to unsubscribe (and delete) with one click. It’s a nice tool for this purpose.
There are various tools to mass unsubscribe. Gmail also recently added the option to surface your subscriptions and unsubscribe. Gmail added the various email categories too.
You can get back to the world you dream of. Every email I receive into my inbox is an email I want to receive :)
I think the problem is bigger than that, nobody knows how to write anymore. In the past, people wrote in handwriting ('cursive' in America) on plain paper (with no guide lines) and with a fountain pen. We didn't keep what they put in the bin, so there is some survivor bias, however, when I look at letters my ancestors wrote, I am amazed at how few corrections there are.
As I understand it, we have two thinking modes, there is the quick thinking by reaction and then there is the more convoluted 'slow' thinking where we use logic and reason. I am not convinced that too many of us have the skill of putting 'slow thinking' into written words, or the desire to put complicated ideas to paper.
So, what changed?
SMS and Twitter did have a text limit of 140 characters. This was not good if you need 140 characters just to introduce what you have to say, however, it didn't take long for people to adjust. Spelling was no longer important, neither was punctuation or sentence structure.
Soon this 'communication with grunts' replaced eloquence, and we degraded our collective literacy. Nowadays you can't write beautiful emails to people as it is a bit of an imposition, you have spent maybe hours crafting words, they only have seconds to respond due to the all-pervasive 'busy lives' excuse, and they definitely don't have the ten minutes it takes to read your carefully written words. Hence, writing in full just means you get ghosted at best.
Clearly there are more books being written than ever. School assignments also get done, same with work-related documents. However, the craft of writing has become even more professionalised, even though everyone can open some type of word processor, pick up a dictionary and write something awesome without having to get the old fountain pen out.
As for the post, what if I was the son of the author, and I had to tidy up his affairs after some tragic accident? All of those emails would be gone, lost to posterity and only the emails from the bank read (because money). All of that obsession on having every email organised for the last four decades would be for nothing, outside of the mind of the author.
Most people used to be illiterate a few generations ago and then only had a handful of books in the house, like the Bible and some other staples, and their letters were full of spelling mistakes, and clumsy writing and bad letter shapes. This is also seen in reddit translation requests of postcards and letters.
Your impression is based on immense selection bias. Maybe your ancestors were in the top percentiles, nobles, aristocrats, or even just doctors, academics and priests. But up until the early 20th century the vast majority were farmers and then they were factory workers.
Great writing and abundant reading was always very niche.
Selection bias means that we don't have the sheer volume of printed material that there once was, as in pulp fiction novels, not to mention the newspapers and magazines that used to be in such abundance.
Where you lived made a difference. A rural Catholic area was not what you wanted. In the city with protestant ethics, things were a little different, more than one book was permitted.
Fortunately there is a lack of aristocracy in my known ancestry, so factory workers over the last century, and reading was the thing for them, including all of the difficult books, even though none of them had much in the way of education, just basic schooling and working for Ford in ye olde factory.
Agreed that before the 1900s there were literacy issues. However, empire has always needed vast armies of clerks and record keepers, so literacy has always been important, just not for everyone.
Dissecting their email and interspersing your response, especially if expressing some disagreement, can come across as passive aggressive nitpicking, instead of taking in the whole message and charitable interpreting the entire intended message.
Not saying that it is meant that way, but I know many take it that way.
I agree, this is context dependent. If the email clearly touches upon multiple topics and is separated into several questions, it can be better to answer point by point. Still, to me, ripping my message apart and inserting the comments feels a bit off, as if you were my prof or teacher grading and commenting and critiquing my paper.
Of course, answering inplace makes it harder to weasel out of answering some of the points. In that sense it's more honest and straightforward to write it inbetween.
> ultimately no way not to offend people who are dying to be offended
This is absolutely true. One should not assume too much based on small things like this, assume good intentions until clearly proven otherwise instead of reacting to minor "clues" and "signs". But on the other hand when producing text, it's also good to know how they are culturally interpreted around you. You can say all that is a "you problem" but I don't think that thinking leads to a good life.
It's quite rare I communicate via email anymore, (outside of work where it is still the main medium). I like the (relatively) open/decentralised nature of it, but I can't deny that chat apps like WhatsApp have a good UX for casual group discussions. Not to mention that all of my friends use WhatsApp, so I would struggle to use email as my primary communication method even if I wanted to.
It means I kind of wonder what my personal email is for, other than a means to sign up to third party websites. There have been a few threads about RSS lately and it seems a lot of HNers hate email newsletters. I don't have a problem with them and if I'm receiving content on a fixed schedule, like once a week or even once a day, I think it's a good medium. I even get my RSS feed updates by email.
Other than that, the top of my personal inbox right now is mostly marketing emails, notifications (like "we have changed our T&Cs", "you have a new message on LinkedIn" etc) and "what's on" emails from local theatres, cinema, etc (which of course is also marketing, but it's marketing I've specifically asked to receive).
What emails suck at is communication between multiple people in a work setting. That's why Slack, Teams, and others emerged and got popular.
For example:
- When multiple people respond to the same email, the email "thread" branches out into a tree. If the tree branches out multiple times, keeping track of all the replies gets messy.
- While most clients can show you the thread/tree structure of an email chain, it only works if you've been on every email in the chain. If you get CC'd later, you'll just see a single email and navigating that is messy.
- Also if you get CC'd later, you can't access any attachments from the chain.
- You can link to a Slack/Teams conversation and as long as it's in a public channel, anyone with the link can get in on it (for example you have a conversation about a proposed feature which then turns into a task -> you describe the task simply and link "more info in this slack convo"), you can't do that with Emails (well I guess you could export a .eml file, but it has the same issue as getting CC'd later)
- When a thread no longer interests you, you can mute it in Slack/Teams. You can't realistically do that with emails, as most people will just hit "reply all"
- But also sometimes people will hit "reply" instead of "reply all" by a mistake and a message doesn't get delivered to everyone in the thread.
I oppose. Mails are superior in announcing to multiple people. If people want to participate they can in many ways. It is well structured, well documented and offers coherent discourse. Slack/Teams are for just-in-time dynamic, collaborative conversation that are quickly fading and missing out on all the strengths mails have in terms of permanence, archival, search and general quality. Something that totally gets lost in instant messaging like Discord, Teams and such where context is basically non-existant and may be gone completely in minutes.
Remember Google+ ? What lasted was Gmail and barebone simple Mail.
> Mails are superior in announcing to multiple people
People who are known at time of sending. A slack message can be searched by those joining the team much (much) later, those who move teams, in-house search bots, etc. Mailing lists bridge this gap to some extent, but then you're really not just using email, you're using some kind of external collaboration service. Which undermines the point of "just email".
> > Mails are superior in announcing to multiple people > > People who are known at time of sending. A slack message can be searched by those joining the team much (much) later, those who move teams, in-house search bots, etc.
People use slack search successfully? It's search has to be one of the worst search implementations I have come across. Unless you know the exact wording in the slack message, it is almost always easier to scroll back and find the relevant conversation just from memory. And that says something because the slack engineers in their infinite wisdom (incompetence) decided that messages don't get stored on the client, but get reloaded from the server (wt*!!), so scrolling back to a conversation that happened some days ago becomes an excercise of repeated scroll and wait. Slack is good for instant messaging type conversations (and even for those it quickly becomes annoying because their threads are so crappy), not much else. I wish we would use something else.
How would you search from mail threads you weren't CC'd on?
MS Exchange had sort-of solved that problem with Public Folders. Basically shared email folders across an organization.
The older solution is NNTP/Usenet. I wish we had a modern system like that.
> Mailing lists bridge this gap to some extent, but then you're really not just using email, you're using some kind of external collaboration service. Which undermines the point of "just email".
Mailing lists are just email. They simply add a group archiving system.
you just use a shared inbox for the team
This assumes said email is properly filtered and doesn't get lost in a sea of work spam. I also assert email is actually terrible at context; unless that is part of an existing thread, or again your filtering/sorting is great, you will often spend at least a paragraph just establishing context.
> It is well structured, well documented and offers coherent discourse.
You must have great coworkers who know how to communicate. I cannot say the same for everyone at my company. Email at many of the places I've worked can quickly devolve on more than 3-5 replies.
Worse than the work email spam at some of my previous jobs was the Slack spam - at least the email spam was work-related. Too many people substitute work for a social life and treat Slack like they’re on a group chat with friends.
> Worse than the work email spam at some of my previous jobs was the Slack spam
It’s annoying if not muted and you need to work. Why not do that?
A workplace with no chat and zero talk would be pretty grim.
If the company Slack doesn't have a #memes channel, I don't want to work there.
There's nothing wrong with social chat on Slack. It just needs to be either in a thread or, better yet, in a dedicated social channel.
Saying people shouldn't have social chat on Slack is like people shouldn't have social chat in the office kitchen because it's part of the same office complex.
And if they did that, I’d have nothing to complain about. That’s never been my experience though with Slack at work.
That’s unfortunate but it’s not a universal trend.
The problem here isn’t Slack, it’s poor Slack etiquette. However you can change etiquette at a company level.
@here I need an update on a ticket
@here were doing some it maintenance over the weekend in the middle of the night on a system no one uses
Google+ dies not because it was a bad product but because google changed strategy and killed it.
Ultimately it’s all subjective - some people prefer email some chat some calls some no comms at all.
If you can communicate well, articulate what you say and want well, and actually read and understand what I write then I will communicate over any medium with you. If not then I’ll have a bad time regardless of medium
I do agree that email quickly becomes messy, even with mailing lists. It's really much the same issue Slack has, a lack of training. It's just assumed that people will know how to use both email and Slack, but we don't. For email it's a decade old debate, that rational minds lost as Outlook dictated top-reply, forcing you to read threads backwards and discouraging the recipient from inline replies and cutting out irrelevant parts.
Slack is equally terrible, because the interface and threads is actually hard to navigate and I honestly cannot make search work in a rational manor. The more discusions you have in Slack, the worse it becomes.
Slack is the equivalent of shouting across the room. I copied anything that seems important to my notes. Any message that’s more than an handful of screen old can be considered lost.
IMO, that's a benefit of slack. At $LAST_JOB, we had a 30 day expiry on data in slack, which everyone was in uproar over initially. But, it forced us to actually put stuff elsewhere.
I thought so when I started at a company that had that policy but in the end we still mostly ended up with split-brain issues (eg some information is shared in both places, some in only one, some updates get lost) with the added negative that stuff disappeared from Slack.
It's just a hard problem overall when you have email, chat, wiki, docs, and a ticketing system.
And, unfortunately, all these things exist because not one of them is actually good beyond its scope (if it's even good within its scope to begin with).
Sure, emails are not the right tool for multiple people discussing a project, even less - when we want to add new members to a thread, or to leave (by those who were added, but for whom it is not longer relevant).
At the same time, when I was a cofounder & CTO, I used Basecamp, which promoted email-like threads. (There is a chat-like functionality as well, but I made policed to use it only for impromptu things like setting Zoom meetings or so, nor for anything that may be important in the future (brainstorming, ideas, architecture choices, analyzis, etc).
It created a culture of clarity of thoughts I never had before, or after. And yes, they a year later is was easy to search for why we picked this way of optimizing quantum computing in Rust not another (which pros and cons, possible paths not yet explored, etc), go back to unused UI designs, retrieve research for publication, etc.
Work said "email is not official, use slack." We literally had a meeting where people were complaining about not knowing about recent changes. "We announced it in these 5 channels, we will start announcing it in more."
Like, email works for announcements yo. Naw, let's jeep messaging N other places.
Isn't there one company wide channel? With slack or email, you still need to make a list of people who get the announcement. Slack has been a lot better in my experience for joining a team and looking back at the history
I’ve always thought email needs a new “view mode” that somehow imports the email structure without actually using a separate program like Slack. Something like an expanded workflow view that shows emails as a series of separate nodes flowing in one direction.
The key point being that this is not a separate program, but a different way to view the data already inside emails.
I’m just brainstorming here so apologies if this doesn’t make much sense.
I find a structured conversation far easier to work with personally.
You can respond only to the subthread you want to, and not have the single thread become a mess of quoted and irrelevant replies that you have to scroll past to find the answer you want.
Additionally, shared folders fit well within a team environment and works much like usenet for messaging.
So maybe having some hybrid like Slack/Teams over email? Where UI of such email client is rendering emails as a room/channel and subject is the name of the room (removes RE, FW, ...) and works like room identification?. So you will get IRC like experience. If you will add PGP on top of it, it can be also secure and decentralized.
Delta Chat certainly could emerge in that direction. https://delta.chat/
The ‘reactions to emails’ thing that Outlook does is gross. However I avoid most chat apps and dislike email so I’m probably not a representative user.
Thank you. This is a very insightful comment that pinpoints something I could never quite put my finger on.
So the issue is that you need a git pull or something like it to prevent branching. Chat etc... achieves this through real-time state management. In an async setting you need something else.
> When multiple people respond to the same email, the email "thread" branches out into a tree. If the tree branches out multiple times, keeping track of all the replies gets messy
I think this is mostly due to bad UIs in email clients. Usenet had similar, if not more extensive, branching many Usenet clients made this quite manageable. I don't see why similar clients could not be written for email.
The two big problems are shitty mail clients, and people not knowing how to quote (which gets enabled by the shitty mail clients).
If someone gets CC'd later than typically because the discussion got to a point where the input is needed for the current question - and in a mail thread with proper quoting surprisingly often the quoted email is sufficient context for the added guy to jump in.
What makes a big mess out of things is the nested list of fully quoted emails with top answers at the bottom I now have to go through when getting added to figure out what the fuck they want from me.
Found only “emerge” while searching these comments for the exact term “merge”.
The bifurcations of communications is unmanageable.
Why is my own timeline is still manual, while presumably all the datacenters can combine, search and sort (merge) dated datapoints?
I want a Personal Palantir or something, and no, not vibe coded in a weekend.
At least at my workplace, chats got popular because it was a way for humans to talk to humans without getting drowned out by dozens of automated messages, irrelevant announcements, and other clutter.
All those problems with email sound like a treat compared to screenshots of chats I'm not in.
Mailing lists. They've been around since the 80s. They solve all these problems. They are amazing. Use them.
There was GMANE to convert mailing list into NNTP archive. I was big fan of it. Too bad it's gone
I disagree. I might have been born a generation too late but I think mailing lists are terrible, horrible way to communicate.
My favourite is text forums - I guess shows when I was socialised online
text forums are just a web interface for mailinglists, or vice versa. google groups and others can (or could) support both, and usenet news too. they are all just messages. the difference is only the tool you use to display them.
The tree format seems an advantage, if anything. It naturally separates discussions into separate threats. Messaging software would dump all these into a single channel so you could have different conversations happening at the same time interspersed.
Agreed, a single thread is painful if it’s actually spawning off multiple sub-topics. I suppose the better answer is to start a separate thread in Slack in that case but it can flow weirdly where the topic originally arises in one place but is continued elsewhere; it relies on someone linking on the original thread to keep context. In a mailing tree, that context is still there.
All of this depends on having a sane email client though, doing it via outlook or gmail is a nightmare and I suspect this is the root of many people’s aversion to email.
Hey lets you mute a thread.
It is quite frustrating that we have these discussions over and over again. Asynchronous communication is great - but it is not better than synchronous communication in some universal way. It depends. Personally I am very sensitive to interruptions - so I lean towards asynchronous. But when you are doing something and you really need to get some information from someone to proceed - then getting his response immediately means that your work is not interrupted. The other person is - but it is a trade off. In a team you have to make these trade-offs. It can be hard - because it takes from one side and gives to the other - people would like to be able to interrupt others and not be interrupted themselves. And it is even more complicated by the fact that some jobs and some people are more sensitive to interruptions and others are less - so it is hard to make fair rules about it. But it is a real trade-off to be made.
UPDATE: Or take interactivity - a conversation is really powerful way of communicating. How a computer geek could even claim that asynchronous communication is always better - is he still using batch processors to run his jobs typing everything upfront and they waiting for the full run before he can fix his syntax errors?
Umm both email and instant messaging are as asynchronous or synchronous as you want to make them...
For some reason, IM encourages people to send superficial quickfire messages, which is very inefficient if one party is busy.
The classic example is
Colleague: "Hi".
One hour passes
You: "Hey - what's up, can I help you with something?"
10 minutes pass
Colleague: "Yeah I was wondering if I could ask you about Foo"
One hour passes
You: "Sure, what do you need to know?"
Next day
Colleague: "I'm trying to export but it's not working."
One hour passes
You: "Okay... Is it giving you any error messages? Please give me as much info as you can in one go!"
etc...
This is why you reply with this: https://nohello.net/en/
It's purely a cultural thing, people from some cultures find it rude to get to the point, so they need to have this "hi, how are you" -preamble every time, even if the other person is on a completely different timezone, which makes every chat take 2 days.
I'm a big proponent of the whole "just start with your question" thing but anytime someone replies to a "hello" with just a link to that page, they immediately come across as a jerk.
I like to put this as my slack status for a while when I join a new job. It tells my coworkers I mean business, and sets healthy communication patterns right out of the gate.
Interesting. I write messages in Teams about the same way I write emails. Some people prefer splitting each sentence in a separate message, some keep the whole body as one.
Email just nudges to send whole body at once because it usually doesn't have a synchronous chat UI.
This.
Also, even if responses are just 20 second after each, there is this constant context switching, which takes more time and attention that if we took literally any other method (in person, email or call).
There is the opposite too, which is just as bad. The stream of consciousness messaging.
‘Hi’ ‘I’m’ ‘Trying to get the’ ‘File’ ‘But’ ‘I’ ‘Need’
Etc etc and it’s 20 messages before you have any idea what’s going on. The deluge of notifications is distraction.
IMO, this is because every email is a named, searchable thread. Sure Slack, MS Teams, Discord, etc... have threads but they sort of get washed away in the stream of messages imho.
This type of communication style would be a problem on any communication medium. The problem needs to be fixed at the user level.
I dunno, there's something about email that makes a lot of people write more thoughtful and comprehensive messages. Not everyone, obviously. But it feels more like writing a letter - you're not expecting a reply within minutes.
I've pressed people who chat this way with me to change, and usually it seems people get it once they get shown how unproductive this kind of conversation is.
Just ask me your question. Feel free to start with pleasantries if that's your style, but get to your point or the ask on the first message.
https://nohello.net/en/
I never answer hellos. That tends to teach people.
We had the right technologies in the past, but we mismanaged them.
Email, Usenet and IRC was great.
Email, however, went dogshit due to spam. From simply having the office mail-server, everyone went to Gmail and Office, who didn't always want to accept legitimate email. Thus, encouraging more folks to move to it.
Now we're in a situation where everyone is "forced" to use crappy interfaces, email is htmlified shit, and more and more companies require you to use the official client. Which in the case of Office365 means a very, very crappy web solution if you're on for example Linux. IMAP is often simply turned off due to whomever decides security has decided that's a bad idea.
Mailing lists used to be great. But got broken in a variety of ways due to spam filtering among other things.
Usenet was great once upon a time, with internal newsgroups etc. That died too.
IRC was, and is, an excellent way of having instant messaging. Unfortunately it wasn't business friendly enough so only the geeks used it. It was a great way to coordinate, though.
Each had a unique set of pitfalls. Out of the 3 Usenet seems to be functionally dead for it's original purpose. Perhaps there was no possible outcome where usenet would scale along with the internet.
The email spam issue is trivially solvable with a contact whitelist, which is a UI issue. Email as it is right now is definitely very usable, but keep me the hell away from anything from Microsoft.
IRC is alive and small. On the optimistic side it outlived Skype. Maybe 25 years from now IRC will still be working and Discord will be dead. There has been a lot of buy in on Matrix, but I'm unconvinced the protocol is going to thrive long term due to design choices made.
Reddit is doing what Usenet did. In my ideal world, reddit would be part of the fediverse along with Usenet & Twitter and the UI would close to hn.
I’m obviously biased (as proj lead for Matrix) but I genuinely think Matrix is in a good place going forwards. There’s a lot of legitimate complaints about the transition to Matrix 2.0, and trust & safety still needs a tonne of work - but the core protocol and featureset feels pretty good. Critically, we just showed we can successfully land pretty major changes to the core federation protocol to improve it (https://matrix.org/blog/2025/08/project-hydra-improving-stat...), which feels pretty liberating in terms of having carte blanche to fix the other remaining warts.
What design choices are you worried about? (To confirm that they are on the radar).
That sounds like basically right (I agree with it all, I'm too the kind of person that enjoys all those advantages of email). So here I'm thinking from putting myself in the skin of the others:
All this seems so much "me, me, me, me". People sending you a quick Whatsapp to let you know "tomorrow in Town sq. at 12h" don't want to have to use a clunky interface (sadly email apps are not up to par with instant messaging apps, not even close); they don't care either about your desire to have a unified inbox, and a long term archive. Agreed if it's for "important" things, but mostly instant messaging replaced email for day to day things that in an analog world would have been just said by landline phone.
Relatedly, having a long term archival might come as a bit creepy, even. In apps this happens too, but at least I can say something extremely controversial and delete it for both people a couple minutes later. Or send a "view once" mesage.
Regarding confidentiality, coincidentally not even 2 weeks ago a friend was telling me about a case of hos company sending an invoice, and being man-in-the-middle'd so the attacker just changed the bank account number and the customer thus paid to the wrong account. Nobody uses GPG, sadly. So at this point, for very important stuff I'd consider Whatsapp less confidential but more secure than email, ironically.
Back to being me; I see a problem of usabilily. Even I admit that sending a whatsapp is much more convenient and practical than opening up K-9 Mail to _compose_ an email. You don't _compose_ a IM, you just hit a contact, jot it down, hit send, and there's extra social convention tools such as a blue tick indicating that maybe you can even stay put there because probably the other person may reply immediately.
> Relatedly, having a long term archival might come as a bit creepy, even. In apps this happens too, but at least I can say something extremely controversial and delete it for both people a couple minutes later. Or send a "view once" mesage.
I agree but in practice Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp etc are quite long term already. I can easily look up my chats from 15+ years ago on Fb.
But there is indeed a cultural unease, and it relates to the other top h post about social cooling. As you said, people want an online equivalent of phone calls and in person discussion. It's creepy and in some places even illegal to record phone calls or live conversations.
On the other hand, written letters used to be private but meant for archival. Many people inherit a big box of neatly organized letters received from friends and family when grandma etc die.
Email is a bit more letter-like in this.
But these norms are in flux and especially for different generations the intuition can be different.
> Regarding confidentiality, coincidentally not even 2 weeks ago a friend was telling me about a case of hos company sending an invoice, and being man-in-the-middle'd so the attacker just changed the bank account number and the customer thus paid to the wrong account.
That sounds like a quite sophisticated attack. By far most Mail these days should be transport encrypted. The attacker thus must have control (legal or illegal, at least to fake a wrong MX DNS record) over either side and then manipulate the invoice and then need a bank account which can receive the payment, while hiding their traces. Seems quite sophisticated and targeted as an attack.
> Nobody uses GPG, sadly.
User experience there was never good. Signal/WhatsApp probably are the most userfiendly e2ee systems around: automatic key exchange with ability to verify. (While proprietary clients require trusting those, which is a big ask especially with Whatsapp/meta)
I have no idea of how that went; now you have picked my interest and I'll be asking him to follow up. It did not occur to me that it needs to be too sophisticated of an attack (didn't stop to think through it too much, admittedly). Just thinking of how we collectively mostly never encrypt email seemed like the most obvious way to understand how that was possible. The email provider of either the company or the customer must have been compromised. But the bank account?
Not knowing any details my first assumption would be that somebody mistyped a number, either in the template or while preparing the transfer and being hacked is just an excuse.
Alternative is some generic phishing with a complete fake invoice, which somebody assumed to be true.
Now if it is serious and an invoice was changed (independently from transport considerations) that alone is quite some effort: the original message has to be held back and analyzed, then it has to be manipulated (replaced) and then the message has to be sent on.
If you get to that level of sophistication it's a lot more likely the source was hacked.
There are a few other scenarios, like invoice being sent wrongly and some random person manipulating it before sending on, but if you aren't prepared by having a bank account for that purpose it's quite a risky thing to do. My private account can be traced to me ...
> sadly email apps are not up to par with instant messaging apps, not even close
E-mails have exactly the same properties as any instant messaging. Receive notifications, ability to answer instantly from a pop-up. What exactly are you missing? Or have you deliberately made email clunky on your own devices?
The main reason I prefer email over messaging is that it allows me to correspond with the widest range of people. I work in academia and publishing and have various personal interests, and I want to be able to interact with people in many countries and walks of life. There is no single messaging service that would make that possible.
Also, I want people to be able to contact me unsolicited. Many interesting jobs and opportunities have come my way over the years because someone I didn’t know reached out to me by email.
I do wish that email was standardized with better formatting conventions, though.
> There is no single messaging service that would make that possible.
messaging protocols can make it possible
I've often thought about building a messaging platform aggregator that takes conversations from Whatsapp/messenger/discord/Instagram DMs/etc and provides a unified interface for them. I suspect there's a bunch of legal and annoying auth things that make this impossible. But at its core these things are just arrays of strings
This used to be fairly common, back in the old days. Programs like Pidgin unified many messengers into a single app.
For a while, many messengers actually shared underlying protocols (e.g. Google Talk & Facebook were both using XMPP at some point, and you could even cross-message).
Nowadays this is much harder. There's some exceptions (Telegram) with open client protocols, but I wouldn't wanna try and implement something like Discord, it'll be a never-ending tarpit.
Discord is (or at least was) easy to "implement" because their bot and user API is mostly the same.
until they ban you under the ToS that says “no third party clients”.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28435490
A bot or a bridge isn't a "client".
They just don't want to fight people trying to build a full alternative client for Discord as a bunch of their paid-for stuff is just clien side javascript.
On the meta platforms I am intricately familiar with the Whatsapp API and it is literally not possible unless you are effectively going to effectively run WhatsApp Web in a browser instance and interact with it which is against ToS.
Whatsapp API works on the basis of conversations, the conversation has to be initiated by another party and only exists for 24hours from the last message from the other party. Sending messages unprompted is not possible unless it’s a templated message.
I can believe this exists to counter spam, and let’s not ignore the fact that WhatsApp messages through the API costs more per message than SMS.
In my experience restrictive and developer hostile API structures are indicative of exploiting a monopoly position rather than some provided excuse like 'countering spam'
WhatsApp is far from a monopoly and I wouldn’t call their api developer hostile, it’s actually reasonable to work with, what you can do with it though is quite restricted to what a business would want to do with WhatsApp and is billed accordingly.
A MASSIVE part of the world would like to disagree.
Whatsapp is to the rest of the world what iMessage is to Americans.
About half of the problems mentioned by the article are solved by the all-in-one-inbox beeper.com, now owned by Automattic.
It allows me for example to avoid Instagram's crack app while still DMing with friends only available on there.
Except "Long term availability" ... I'd love to have my full chat archive under my own control but doesn't seem on the roadmap.
https://www.beeper.com/
Has some quirks, but Beeper is exactly what you are describing: https://www.beeper.com/
Beeper does this already: https://www.beeper.com/
This was Pigeon Messenger, a quarter century ago
Many have tried and hit the very same obstacles you mention. Quite the quagmire.
it exists as client side programs, like https://meetfranz.com/
I think this is more an argument for protocols over products. I wish XMPP had remained as popular as it has. The standard has now only slowly evolved, but it probably could have continued to meet the needs of our society as a compliment to email.
I've been having a bad time with email of late. It's been the method of communication between us and another company (a pretty creaky old product). I thought they were replying strangely and ignoring my questions "did they even read what I said!?". It turns out for whatever reason they hadn't been getting some of my emails.
Now I can't trust that anything has been received unless I get an acknowledgement, so I have to keep pestering for replies. Basically lost trust in the protocol because it's dependent on the the other person's mailserver behaving they way you expect it to.
> Basically lost trust in the protocol because it's dependent on the the other person's mailserver behaving they way you expect it to.
That’s the case of any protocol, digital or not. Email is pretty simple. Simpler than the current web, at least.
> That’s the case of any protocol
Well, E-Mail is inherently async and allows a sequence of relays with no back channel to confirm delivery.
With other protocols (except snail mail) I get a confirmation that recipient was valid and the message for delivered. With some I even get a marker it was read.
With e-mail, with luck, I get a cryptic not standardized response mail, if something went wrong. Sometimes even only a lot later as delivery is retried for a few days in some cases.
The core technologies may be simple, but email really is an entire stack of protocols, mechanisms, and conventions. And therein lies the problem. It's not one well designed solution but one workaround layered on top of each other to make it work reasonably well.
A bit off topic but deltachat is an amazing secure messenger over smtp
https://delta.chat/pt/
The strengths of email is exactly that is isn’t chat. Implementing chat over email isn’t the solution.
non localized link: https://delta.chat/
This is what I wanted to post as well! Best of both worlds
> Asynchronous communication
> Rather than having flow and concentration interrupted by incoming message notifications, with email I can easily decide when to fetch and process messages.
Asynchronous communication describes the client-server-client model, and both chat and email fall into this category, especially since there are peer-to-peer chat programs. What the author states sounds to me like a problem with the notification model and fetching beyond the user's control. Chat is not inherently in "flow."
Chat is inherently in flow because you can’t manage the read/unread status per message, and you can’t move messages to different folders. When I check for email, I might have a dozen new messages, clearly listed one per line, and I can pick which to read now and which to read later. I have a clean overview with the mailbox listing and the read/unread status. I can easily overview 50 or so messages without having to to scroll. I can archive the messages I’m done with, while keeping those around I still want to handle.
In a chat, the read/unread status is not per-message. It’s much harder to discern separate exchanges within the same channel, and to handle them out-of-order when some are more urgent or relevant than others. They also take up substantially more visual space than a mailbox listing, so you have a much smaller “peephole”, making it more difficult to get an overview of what is going on in a channel. All this has the effect that people treat chat channels as a single continuous flow of messages that you catch up with in the order they come in; and the messages that scroll out of view, which happens fast, tend to go out of mind as well.
Ok, good points and I agree with messages as atomic unit of communication in mail vs message history per contact as atomic unit of communication in mail. This creates a mental state of communication flow (like a conversation) and inherently a different form than mail (more like receiving a mail in your postbox and can able to stack them singular).
I’ve often wondered why forums never took off at any of the companies I’ve worked at. Has anyone else worked at companies that had forums?
All I worked at had email and chat, and some had wikis, but never forums, despite having crucial advantages over email (anyone who joins later can search them) and wikis (they’re conversations rather than mutable, outdated documents) and chat (they can’t interrupt you).
Forums is fundamentally community based, where everyone is expected to pitch in. While companies are socials, there's not a lot of community going around. There are projects, but the deciders form a very small subset of the involved people.
By the way, for email, the etiquette would be to include the context of the discussion in the invitation for the new person coming in. Or send the archive of the discussion to the person. But for the latter to happen would require a much better email client than what most people are using.
We used Stack Overflow for Teams, but when the first batch of questions got asked and reacted to, the activity subdued quickly.
Some time after that we somehow got locked out of our account and it was deemed not worth the hassle to try to get it back.
At my current job (1000+ employee tech company), I pretty much never receive emails from humans. Plenty of automated notifications and the odd marketing mail, but everything else is Slack and Zoom.
I think it's way better. Email has so many limitations, especially as soon as you're in a group discussion.
Same here, 300+ people-ish, 3 countries.
Some Very Official things come via the mail, like event invites etc. Everything else is on Slack or integrated to Slack.
Makes spotting phising mails really easy :D
A decade or two ago it wasn’t uncommon to use a single messaging program for multiple networks. I have fond memories of using Pidgin for a long long time.
This was a single program which spoke to all the networks, not a set of tabs rendering disparate web views. A single contact list, and the same UI for all conversations. You’d basically forget who used MSN, who used Yahoo Messenger, who used XMPP, etc…
I’m not sure why we don’t have the same for the current set of trending proprietary networks. Sure, they make it harder for third parties to connect, but proprietary networks never really collaborated on making it easier.
Maybe there’s just less folk willing to invest free time in making desktop messaging apps?
In theory, XMPP (or similar protocols) would simplify this nowadays: just have a single client and protocol and connect to proprietary networks via gateways. We have gateways for some networks, but desktop messaging clients have really stagnated.
Apparently pidgin is still maintained and has plugins for recent chat systems. Just looked a few days at the version 3 announcement.
I love emails. For all mentioned in the post an one more: to write an email, people have to think before writing and email, even if it is just a few paragraphs. I takes focus, it takes asking oneself questions, what makes (in my experience) the quality of conversation way higher than talking with the same people over chat interface. Moreover, there is time for focus on email (both reading and writing) and time to actually work. (Vs chats that put some pressure on being always available which is something that literally makes deep focus impossible.)
Of course, some people treat emails like there were chats, and some people treat chats as if they were emails - yet, what's crucial is what's the reference level.
And yeah, in my experience and opinion, chats make us dumper. Just the same way as clickbaits and memes catch attention easier than in-depth analyzis, they are unlikely to go.
Email still has its use cases in the modern workplace. Sometimes you need a slower, more detailed communication channel, especially when inter-company communications are involved.
But most of the things the OP likes about email make it a nightmare from a legal perspective. Once a company gets sued over labor/trade secret/IP related things, one result is a strict email (and other electronic communication) retention policy. Some retention periods can be as short as 6 months. Apps are deployed that scour your local storage to make sure you aren't archiving emails off-line. This removes many (most) of the archival advantages of email.
Emails are often front-line evidence in lawsuits. A good example: https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-google-recruitment-ema...
> most of the things the OP likes about email make it a nightmare from a legal perspective
Former litigator here: The late Dr. Randy Pausch mentioned this in his Last Lecture; IIRC, he urged people to keep all their emails. [0] That can be a really good idea — keeping emails:
• will help your lawyer reconstruct a timeline of events, build a narrative to tell the jury that's supported by the documentary evidence, and avoid spinning a tale that's undermined by emails that you didn't keep but someone else did;
• will help make sure your people don't have private stashes of emails that have been deleted from your server but that resurface in response to subpoenas — or search warrants.
• will help corroborate the stories told by your witnesses: Judges and jurors tend to be skeptical of hindsight testimony because of faulty memory and the temptation to shade the truth or even lie — recall how the House's January 6 committee hearings made such extensive use of emails, and also texts. If you didn't keep copies of emails, you won't have that evidence available;
• will refresh your witnesses' memories so they don't testify incorrectly about something (whether in deposition or at trial) and have to correct their testimony — which hurts their credibility.
Moreover: Your opponent's lawyer will likely send you a "litigation hold" letter, meaning you have to suspend all document-deletion programs — and if you don't, "spoliation of evidence" is low-hanging fruit for the opposing counsel to attack you and maybe cause you to lose the case.
Back in the day of limited server storage capability, email "retention" policies (spelled: purging policies) had at least some business justification. That's far less the case now.
To be sure: Footgun emails documenting bad behavior can lead to problems. But the root cause is the bad behavior, not the emails — it's far better to face the facts than to delete the evidence .
[0] https://etc.cmu.edu/about/last-lecture
>My colleagues and friends know that I prefer to communicate with them via email rather than chat messaging.
For some co-workers and especially for friends & family, the chat UI is much more ergonomic than email. Email usage has extra friction:
- compose new email UI has extra SUBJECT: field you have to fill with junk (like "hey" or "question...") or skip over
- email client UI for multiple messages from the same person in a listview repeats the same metadata headers which is visually redundant pollution. UI settings such as "organize by thread" or "organize by conversation" help but don't fully solve it.
With chat apps, the back & forth conversation is visually cleaner without all the metadata clutter.
But that “subject” header makes it paletable.
I would argue if you really can’t come up with a subject then you probably shouldn’t be asking at all.
I got used to Zulip at my previous job and people made the same argument about “Topics” (which are basically subjects); but they forget that the messages are read more often than they are written. A little friction in writing for an easier time reading and skimming is absolutely worth it.
> But that “subject” header makes it paletable.
That's true for some forms of communication, but for social chitchat in an ongoing conversation there isn't much relevance.
Subject becomes especially ridiculous when Mail clients are localized and you get some "Re: AW: RE: Re: AW: fun stuff" as subject.
At work subject tis key. Allows me to ignore 90% of the mails immediately.
Being in the IT business for a few decades, email is superior to anything else for record keeping. Especially with Thunderbird I find it almost too easy to find information I need, and addendums neatly threaded.
And, it is quite difficult for the other part to hide/delete stupidness they send, which thankfully saved my behind twice.
Chats are good for now-communication, but energy- and time consuming when you need to look up something that happened months ago.
Gmail is dogsh*t at search. It's so bad. I can search the EXACT word I want and not a single email will come up, or it will bring up the most irrelevant emails.
Same experience and it’s so bad I sometimes question my sanity. At least I have a notmuch index setup on a server I can fall back on but it’s just so bizarre a “search” company can’t produce an app which can search properly emails!
The worst part is that I pay for the privilege!
I can't even look up chats on my work PC older than a couple days ago because it's automatically deleted. Emails last for at least a few years.
Nice. Note though that you don't necessarily have to limit everyone else to email; some messaging platforms allow one user to post something using a webpage for example, and cause that to send email to another user, and vice versa. One data point: GitHub's issue tracker can forward issues as email, and you can reply to those back via email, and your response will end up as a new comment on the issue.
> Rather than having flow and concentration interrupted by incoming message notifications, with email I can easily decide when to fetch and process messages.
But emails also notify and therefore interrupt. If you want to turn notifications off in your email or only poll new mails when you choose you can also mute notifications (or turn on dnd) or close the chat app.
Email sucks for chat like communication. It is great for long detailed messages. Having both is the best of both worlds.
I have work email and personal email. I have work chat (Slack) and personal chat (WhatsApp with friends, Keybase with my partner). Choosing which chat app is also a great tool for making sure I am dealing with the right audience. I don't want to accidentally message my boss about stuff I send to my partner.
I had a colleague that would come back from vacation, see 1000+ emails, and just mark all unread emails and hit delete. And say "If it's any important, they'll just mail me again".
Not saying that it's a good way to do things, absolutely not, but it did open my eyes to the fact that some people will just indiscriminately delete emails, no mater how important they could be.
Well, odds are none of them is important. And they are probably right in that if it's important, the sender will look for them again.
This person just got 1000 emails in the time of a vacation. How viably is it not to completely ignore that? It's even surprising that they bothered to look and cleaned up in a way that implies they aren't ignoring them on the daily work.
The mbox format is pretty terrible, Maildir would have been a better choice.
I don’t like the friction of forcing a specific messaging app or protocol on people so just default to what everyone is using (WhatsApp) TBH I don’t really get the moral outcry over using it (or any other messaging app).
> I don’t really get the moral outcry
"Dumb fucks trust me".
Something messengers made easy is photo/video sharing. This might be also a little bit tricky with email.
Also most messages I write would be just the subject line (“on my way home”). Bigger topics I would rather have a call than writing them.
But generally the points made in the post are valid and it’s nice to see that it is working for the author.
Whatapp and other chatapps are popular because they are instant and have overcome the initial adaption issues that arrise with new messaging platforms. The interface of email its backend is too dated for instant chat messaging. Why were the MSN and yahoo messenger apps so popular in the early days of the internet? They were an evolution of written communication methods. Unfortunately, email is just a legacy product that no one wants to improve. So we all have to end up working around its limitations.
As much as I want to create a non-meta alternative to Whatsapp or a better email infrastructure, there is no compelling enough differentiator for most users. Just look at the privacy benefits of Signal, yet, people don't care. Just look at the aesthetic benefits of iMessage, yet people don't care. They just want an easy to use and responsive cross platform method of communication.
A good solution is a unified messaging app, able to combine all platform's messaging, but these often become defunct because of API issues or T&C breeched.
> If you ever exchanged messages on ICQ, AIM, MSN Messenger, Skype, Yahoo! Messenger, Google Hangouts, GChat
The death of Google Chat is all greatly exaggerated. They've largely just rebranded it a bunch of times.
Mbox is not that easy to process, especially if 1986 time span is taken into account. There is base64 encoding. There is "=" encoding, don't recall whats its name. "Equals" encoding. There are several character encodings if 1986 time span is taken into account, and each character encoding will be encrypted by equals signs. There was KOI8-R. KOI8-R was on BSD and Linux servers, but desktops had cp1251, so 1251 entered e-mail eventually, via e-mail clients autoconfigured to desktop encoding, or via webmail interfaces autoconfigured to web encoding which could likely be cp1251 and not likely koi8-r. Then utf-8 came in.
Emails are optimized for COA record-keeping, not efficient communication.
Mail is great, but messaging has its purpose.
"Unified Inbox" (and therefore "Unified Archive") only works if you are the annoying person who forces everybody else to contact them on their system of choice.
Of course it's convenient when everybody accomodates for you.
Deltachat
This makes my brain hurt. Few things I hate more than email. The single worst way to get in touch with me. As a user of it for more decades than I’d like to recall, I despise email.
Sure, the infinite archive is mildly helpful. But search-ability is marginal in any tool I’m aware of. The folders, filters and other management suggestions mentioned make it a second job. Email is a life tax we’re all forced to pay. It is a problem that is yet to be solved, though many have tried.
For anything that will benefit from back and forth, and isn't that important. I hate email too. I check it like only once a day at work, and my person email, i check even less.
I have it the other way around. I have all messenger notifications silenced except email. This way when people message me I only see their messages whenever I feel like checking if I got any messages. All importart stuff goes into my email, and I can see the push notification immediately.
If I did this, my notifications would never stop. I get tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of emails every day. Even heavily filtered, I can only afford to check work email a couple times a day. Most that make it past the filters are still ignored and immediately archived.
You mean from random people? Don't post your personal email publicly then. I have masked emails posted publicly and while I do get occasional spam, it's more like 2-3 emails a month.
A day? How on earth did you get in such a situation?
It really just depends on your email client. I use elm and my inbox, received and sent folders are stored in flat files, so i can just use vim or other linux tools to quickly search for any email from the past 25 years. In many chat apps you cant even search at all. I find email by far the most efficient method of communication.
Sadly the searchability on IM platforms is even worse than that of email. Discord (among others) often can't find the very text that's right in front of you.
I think the problem with emaill is more the availability of it. Anyone can send you an email so they mostly wind up as junk that needs to be managed.
One of the most significant problems, agreed.
Also, email is free to the sender but costly (in time) to the recipient. This is reflected in the quantity of messages, but also in their verbosity. People rarely expend the effort to edit or be concise. Both are costly to readers.
I have come to hate email so much there are weeks where I will check my email perhaps just once or twice in a week. Every 2-3 months I try to clean up my inbox by going through it and unsubscribing to all the rubbish I am opted into without my say-so. But since we use Gmail, this is a really, really, really slow process. Gmail is a terrible product that has no evolved meaningfully over the 20 or so years it has existed. And it doesn't get any better when idiot product managers feel it is more important to add more AI nonsense than try to fix a product that is very poor at doing the thing it is supposed to do.
(If anyone knows of a tool that helps me rapidly clean up my gmail, please let me know).
But the worst thing about email is that nobody knows how to write emails anymore. Everyone just quotes the while thing and adds their comments on top. People no longer trim down the email and intersperse their comments throughout the response. Mail reading software no longer aids you in doing this - cleaning up the quoting for you (not that many mail readers did this before).
And when you don't want to quote the email you are responding to, people include the whole mess anyway and just pop their response at the top. Rather than understanding that a threaded mail reader (as most mail readers are today) will provide the reader with the context they need just fine. There's no need to repeat dozens of older responses.
I miss email from 25-30 years ago. When 90% of what landed in my inbox was actually for me, written by other human beings. Most of which knew how to produce a response to an email without it just being a sloppy mess.
I wish people who wrote mail clients were more intelligent product designers and more thoughtful people. That they would understand that catering to people's poor habits was, and is, a bad idea and that a better idea would have been to make proper email quoting at least a path of considerably less resistance.
> (If anyone knows of a tool that helps me rapidly clean up my gmail, please let me know).
I’ve used Leave Me Alone (leavemealone.com) for cleaning up my subscriptions. It scans your past messages for subscriptions, sorts them by most frequent messages, and allows to unsubscribe (and delete) with one click. It’s a nice tool for this purpose.
There are various tools to mass unsubscribe. Gmail also recently added the option to surface your subscriptions and unsubscribe. Gmail added the various email categories too.
You can get back to the world you dream of. Every email I receive into my inbox is an email I want to receive :)
You might also like superhuman.com and similar.
> nobody knows how to write emails anymore
I think the problem is bigger than that, nobody knows how to write anymore. In the past, people wrote in handwriting ('cursive' in America) on plain paper (with no guide lines) and with a fountain pen. We didn't keep what they put in the bin, so there is some survivor bias, however, when I look at letters my ancestors wrote, I am amazed at how few corrections there are.
As I understand it, we have two thinking modes, there is the quick thinking by reaction and then there is the more convoluted 'slow' thinking where we use logic and reason. I am not convinced that too many of us have the skill of putting 'slow thinking' into written words, or the desire to put complicated ideas to paper.
So, what changed?
SMS and Twitter did have a text limit of 140 characters. This was not good if you need 140 characters just to introduce what you have to say, however, it didn't take long for people to adjust. Spelling was no longer important, neither was punctuation or sentence structure.
Soon this 'communication with grunts' replaced eloquence, and we degraded our collective literacy. Nowadays you can't write beautiful emails to people as it is a bit of an imposition, you have spent maybe hours crafting words, they only have seconds to respond due to the all-pervasive 'busy lives' excuse, and they definitely don't have the ten minutes it takes to read your carefully written words. Hence, writing in full just means you get ghosted at best.
Clearly there are more books being written than ever. School assignments also get done, same with work-related documents. However, the craft of writing has become even more professionalised, even though everyone can open some type of word processor, pick up a dictionary and write something awesome without having to get the old fountain pen out.
As for the post, what if I was the son of the author, and I had to tidy up his affairs after some tragic accident? All of those emails would be gone, lost to posterity and only the emails from the bank read (because money). All of that obsession on having every email organised for the last four decades would be for nothing, outside of the mind of the author.
Most people used to be illiterate a few generations ago and then only had a handful of books in the house, like the Bible and some other staples, and their letters were full of spelling mistakes, and clumsy writing and bad letter shapes. This is also seen in reddit translation requests of postcards and letters.
Your impression is based on immense selection bias. Maybe your ancestors were in the top percentiles, nobles, aristocrats, or even just doctors, academics and priests. But up until the early 20th century the vast majority were farmers and then they were factory workers.
Great writing and abundant reading was always very niche.
Selection bias means that we don't have the sheer volume of printed material that there once was, as in pulp fiction novels, not to mention the newspapers and magazines that used to be in such abundance.
Where you lived made a difference. A rural Catholic area was not what you wanted. In the city with protestant ethics, things were a little different, more than one book was permitted.
Fortunately there is a lack of aristocracy in my known ancestry, so factory workers over the last century, and reading was the thing for them, including all of the difficult books, even though none of them had much in the way of education, just basic schooling and working for Ford in ye olde factory.
Agreed that before the 1900s there were literacy issues. However, empire has always needed vast armies of clerks and record keepers, so literacy has always been important, just not for everyone.
Huh I never thought about the quoting thing. I'm definitely gonna clear out the auto quoted bits in my replies from now one.
Dissecting their email and interspersing your response, especially if expressing some disagreement, can come across as passive aggressive nitpicking, instead of taking in the whole message and charitable interpreting the entire intended message.
Not saying that it is meant that way, but I know many take it that way.
if i write specific questions and people reply in totality i find that offensive and manipulative
(adding another point of view)
ultimately no way not to offend people who are dying to be offended
I agree, this is context dependent. If the email clearly touches upon multiple topics and is separated into several questions, it can be better to answer point by point. Still, to me, ripping my message apart and inserting the comments feels a bit off, as if you were my prof or teacher grading and commenting and critiquing my paper.
Of course, answering inplace makes it harder to weasel out of answering some of the points. In that sense it's more honest and straightforward to write it inbetween.
> ultimately no way not to offend people who are dying to be offended
This is absolutely true. One should not assume too much based on small things like this, assume good intentions until clearly proven otherwise instead of reacting to minor "clues" and "signs". But on the other hand when producing text, it's also good to know how they are culturally interpreted around you. You can say all that is a "you problem" but I don't think that thinking leads to a good life.
It's quite rare I communicate via email anymore, (outside of work where it is still the main medium). I like the (relatively) open/decentralised nature of it, but I can't deny that chat apps like WhatsApp have a good UX for casual group discussions. Not to mention that all of my friends use WhatsApp, so I would struggle to use email as my primary communication method even if I wanted to.
It means I kind of wonder what my personal email is for, other than a means to sign up to third party websites. There have been a few threads about RSS lately and it seems a lot of HNers hate email newsletters. I don't have a problem with them and if I'm receiving content on a fixed schedule, like once a week or even once a day, I think it's a good medium. I even get my RSS feed updates by email.
Other than that, the top of my personal inbox right now is mostly marketing emails, notifications (like "we have changed our T&Cs", "you have a new message on LinkedIn" etc) and "what's on" emails from local theatres, cinema, etc (which of course is also marketing, but it's marketing I've specifically asked to receive).