I'm on the exact opposite end of the spectrum. I haven't used email outside of work for many years now, and don't miss it one bit. And even at work most communication now happens on Slack. The digital world has evolved since 1997, and email simply hasn't kept up.
I skimmed a couple articles on the blog and my biggest problem with it is that the author is making a social rather than technological argument (which are all anyways nonsensical).
"Liked a movie? Don't call or IM your friend about it, email them a long form review instead."
"Leave all your group texts and instead send your friends a weekly email summary of your life."
I'll give you an up-vote because I think a variety of different viewpoints is important, but I'm very much in the e-mail camp. My biggest reason is simply: it's the only ubiquitous, decentralized, open protocol that I can think of. I can run my own server if I want, an I can interact with anybody with an e-mail address. Sure, there was XMPP for IM, but that doesn't have wide adoption; same with other protocols.
>The digital world has evolved since 1997, and email simply hasn't kept up.
Evolved beyond instant text messages? because that's all email is.
Honestly I hate IM tools. The threading is crap, the search is crap, the startup time is crap. there's no understanding of who can read what or what the edit history of messages are (I've been in IMs with people who will edit their messages days later to gasslight you, that alone is enough to make me hate IM apps.)
That's the obvious stance to take though. The point is that IM has problems, IMO the largest of which is that all prevalent platforms are privately owned services rather than being a protocol like email is. Sure you may have a gmail address, but you can talk freely to any other email address. That's not the case for iMessage vs FB Messenger vs Slack vs Signal vs WhatsApp vs TikTok vs Telegram vs hundreds if not thousands of other independent platforms.
My understanding is that this is the point of Matrix, i.e. to create an open protocol that you can use for IM regardless of who serves your messages.
But the point of saying "just use email" is that we don't need anything new, we just need to shift our idea of what email is. It's only slow and clunky because we still think if it as such. Our email clients and infrastructure are all built around email being something you get around to checking, like a digital version of your physical mailbox. But it doesn't have to be this way. You have a uniquely identifying email address, and everyone you know does too, this should be all we need to have communication that's as responsive and highly compatible as we want/need it to be.
>The digital world has evolved since 1997, and email simply hasn't kept up.
Email has its warts I'll give you that, but since 1997 the world has gotten objectively worse in terms of open, distributed messenging. Everything is a fucking walled garden controlled by some data-harvesting megacorp these days.
I like email because I can roll my own server (and have done so) or I can choose to trust one of several commercial providers and we can all interoperate.
Slack is fine for transient communication. That is, it's fine unless you might need to dig up a particular conversation a year after, or five years. Actually, finding stuff as old as one week can be problematic already.
Maybe for you this is not important. For me it has proved to be key many times.
Also, filtering. You cannot withstand the same stream of info and notifications from Slack as you can from email, because there are no filtering and classification rules. Channels help, but in a limited way.
Slack works well for casual and ephemeral communication. For other use cases, you need a serious tool like email.
Today was an old friend's birthday. We haven't really talked in years. Figured I'd send him a happy birthday note. You know what still works after 15 years? Email. Now, will he _see_ that email? Hope so.
Yeah, this person's position is totally baffling to me.
> group instant messaging is, largely, distracting and of little value (more on this later) and can best be dealt with in weekly ‘batches’, if it’s required at all.
I mean, I dunno about this guy, but I like interacting with my friends. I'll leave a group chat open all day on my other monitor. It's like a break room where you can chat with whoever's around, or all get together and have a nice conversation. Group chats are one of my favourite forms of online social interaction. You don't have to like them, but I can't imagine not at least understanding the appeal.
> people are finding ways to pushback on the ‘instant’ part of instant messaging, to put space and breathing room between when a message is sent and when they ‘deal’ with it.
Uh, yeah! That's part of what makes them work. They slide seamlessly between synchronous and asynchronous discussion. If I want to hear your thoughts at 1pm, I can message you. If you're busy, you can reply later. And if I'm available when you reply, then we can have our conversation synchronously. But if our schedules never align, we'll keep going back and forth until our discussion is over.
Outside of work, I use whatever channel people interact with me on. That's largely SMS, various chat apps, and some e-mail, and a fair amount of voice.
I like talking to people who I value. Like that a lot.
For work, or anything with complexity in any major axis, time, number of elements, etc... I continue to use e-mail.
The best thing about that is being able to go back into those e-mails and recover info. My archive goes almost all the way back, and the little bit I don't have in there really doesn't matter much. Surprisingly, the rest has more times than I can count.
People can contact me, literally decades later, and it's there, I can spool it up, and act on whatever it is almost as if I never missed a beat.
Maybe when the new tools are around and endure in a similar fashion I would reconsider. Kind of hard to do so in such an open, portable format though.
I think the thrust of this article is mostly work related. He talks about being a consultant and seeing people waste so much time on SaaS tools, for example.
Personally I don't mind using "throwaway" services in my personal life - all your examples are things that don't matter - but for important stuff like work I want one place with all my information - not lots of crappy silos that don't integrate that I have to search for that key bit of information.
The list is endless. I have no idea how people can claim they can get away from email.. The only scenario where I can think of it working for me is if I give everything up and go live in the mountains.
All the "evolution" is is getting you to use bespoke rich clients for email-like store-and-forward systems (fb messenger, instagram dm, et c) that show you ads that you can't configure and can't replace.
If "email" simply means "gmail.com" to you then it's natural to assume that you'd think it hasn't evolved.
I'm pretty sure that's not what the author meant in the movie and helmet examples.
> A) Call Leia and show interest in her weekend, and in her as a person, and after some pleasantries are exchanged, mention how amazing the main character is in the movie he watched.
---
> Situation: Kylo has been fascinated with helmets since time immortal. He custom designs and builds his own helmet. Knowing most of his friends don’t share his passion, he is hesitant to wear his new helmet at their next gathering.
> Answer: Send out an email to all his friends and include photos of his new helmet.
The first one heavily implies that Luke just calling his friend is a better and more personal way of catching up, and the second one doesn't say the person should send a weekly email summary, it's saying for big projects one is passionate about, email may be a better choice than instant messaging.
Messengers are just whitelisted users. Email providers or clients simply provide a shit interface for managing that list.
To me it’s like that story about NASA spending millions on a zero gravity pen when Russian astronauts just used pencil.
Someone was looking to impress people with their spam filtering code and never thought “maybe I can just drop all by default and only allow who I want?”
It has nothing to do with hating or not, it just depends on the number of friends and the intensity of incoming communication - not all people are the same. After you cross certain threshold synchronous communication becomes unmanageable and basically prevents you from doing your daily activities as you'd want.
At old job, I remember working with external orgs and my coworkers. Coworkers would pretty much talk over Slack. We would use email/zoom for communication with external orgs. At new job, we use Slack Connect and I think it replaces a lot o that external emailing.
I don't know what there is to keep up. email realizes a basic concept of open, federated, async, text based communication. it has its flaws but it's as useful as it was.
I don't think this kind of Luddism is useful. It's purported by the same kinds of people that, upon seeing a new SaaS, quickly retort: "couldn't you just do that with Google Docs/Word/pen and paper?"
Not to mention that email absolutely sucks. The confusing threads, the forwarding, the constant CC'ing, someone making it or not making it into a list, the spam. It's absolute garbage. In fact, people have been seeking alternatives since the late 80s. IRC was a precursor to Instant Messaging/Slack that many techies favored. Not that async is some perfect communication strategy (it has its own baggage), but it definitely fills some of email's gaps. Personally, I think Google Wave was ~15 years ahead of its time, and we'll see something akin to it soon.
Will the author's next big revelation be "How to use a hammer for everything?"
Usually when I talk to people about the “confusing threads” in email, it turns out that they are using a broken client like Gmail. Threading in email is great. Your email client is broken and not respecting the protocol:
In my current job we've had 3 ticketing systems in the last 5 years.
We now use Slack and Jira but we still archive certain important emails for some things because, well, the archive of email and the fact that someone sent an email is something we can trust a lot better than the rest.
> Not to mention that email absolutely sucks. The confusing threads, the forwarding, the constant CC'ing, someone making it or not making it into a list, the spam. It's absolute garbage.
This says to me that you have bad tools for email, not that the protocol or concept sucks.
If you use email like a rube, it is expected to be absolute garbage. The same goes for Facebook or Twitter or Reddit, though: you have to change a lot of settings to get a decent experience.
Agree about Google Wave, but I want to point out that we already see its evolution in just about every real-time collaborative system today – from Google Docs to Slack to Figma and more. "The next Google Wave" isn't going to show up soon, it is already here and widely in use.
Sometimes I get a glimpse of my wife's email account ... And it is no surprise she doesn't use email.
She gets dozens of emails a day. None of them are spam exactly. Every single website you've ever signed up for your in your life sends out email "for engagement purposes". Drips, reminders, flash sales, weekly roundups.
A dozen different job boards from when she was looking for work a few years ago. Several dozen shopping websites. Four or five pregnancy apps. And more and more and more.
You could argue that normal, non-technical people should know better. That they should be vigorously jumping through hoops to cancel all those email notifications from services they no longer use.
Don't they know there's fine print (in light gray text!) at the bottom telling you how to unsubscribe? Don't they know there's a tiny button in GMail that will (sometimes) unsubscribe for you?
But I expect that my wife's email is like a lot of people's. It is almost entirely impossible to find any signal among all the noise in it.
> Not to mention that email absolutely sucks. The confusing threads,
I mean, the threads are only confusing if people keep insisting on using shit email clients.
> the forwarding, the constant CC'ing,
Think of it as defining a chatroom. Most of the time it can be handled just fine automatically by your email client, but you can also have more finegrained control if you wish.
> someone making it or not making it into a list,
?
> the spam.
This I will agree with.
> Will the author's next big revelation be "How to use a hammer for everything?"
Yeah, I don't agree with the author that email should be used for everything. But for non-instant, asynchronousm, flexible, decentralized, cross-platform communication it's pretty damn near perfect.
Email works O.K for one-way communication (e.g. mailing lists or bill notification). Maybe sometimes infrequent one on one communcation
When its comes to having a converstation, particularly with multiple people, I can't think of anything worse. I always dread tracking down information when I have to dig into achived mailing lists
Isn't this exactly like adding/mentioning someone in a chat room? Problem is that in a chat room all communication is public and you're seeing/getting notified of every single small message. This is hugely inefficient. For e-mails, one can define filters to park e-mails where you're on CC to read later. You don't have this flexibility with Chat/Slack - the tool defines much more how you should be reading the incoming stream of messages.
Gmail alone currently handles over 50% of US email traffic, with Microsoft and a handful of other service providers taking up a good chunk of the other half. These large providers all use internal blacklists and filtering rules, which cannot be queried, and no support is available if you get blackholed.
Worst of all, Gmail especially isn't great about tagging messages as spam; a good chunk of messages sent from outside the Gmail network simply disappear. As a Gmail user, there is nothing you can do to verify that you're getting all of the legitimate mail traffic that is being sent to you.
Further, if you're trying to send any kind of business correspondence over email, you have to contend with a massive industry of scammers that are also targeting people with lookalike messages.
I love the email protocol, but from a broader service standpoint, email is terribly broken right now.
> Worst of all, Gmail especially isn't great about tagging messages as spam
My experience is the exact opposite of yours - I find Gmail's spam detection absolutely amazing. I get essentially zero spam in my inbox, and perhaps 4-6 false positives in the spam folder a month.
>As a Gmail user, there is nothing you can do to verify that you're getting all of the legitimate mail traffic that is being sent to you.
What other communication service/protocol would allow you to do this?
I run my own email server. The most important people in my life have accounts on my own server. No gmail needed or wanted. I can answer all of those questions of delivery for myself.
We get so much spam from gmail that gmail has earned itself an increased spam score just because its gmail. Its unlikely that my users see much from gmail, unless they want it.
From my experience Microsoft is the worst one about disappearing messages. You send a message to an Outlook user, they say it's delivered, but then the recipient just never gets it. At least putting it in spam means they can eventually find it if they check there.
This is an extremely important point, and I find it weird to see so few people mentioning it.
I run my own mail server and have been for years. My e-mails use SPF, DKIM, DMARC, I have a reverse DNS record set up, a score of 100/100 on mail-tester.com... yet Microsoft refuses to accept my emails. They are sent to the spam folder of my recipients.
I tried contacting their support about it, I'll let you guess how well it went. A man from a warm country told me to join some sort of Microsoft partner program, for which I would have to pay.
This is a disgrace. E-mail is behind closed gates now, because of bullies such as Microsoft.
Ok, emotional me really hated this site, so rational me will try to calm down a bit and explain why.
I started with the "Dislikes about email are Questionable" post, which was perhaps my mistake, but every point in that post had a dripping "I'm sorry peasant, you're doing it wrong" vibe to it.
I can fully understand why someone may choose to use email over other forms of communication, but to be incredibly dismissive of problems other people have with the medium, while furthermore often not even addressing some of the root frustrations people have, is incredibly condescending.
Take the "email is unreliable" point. You can write all the missives you want about how email is the most reliable form of communication known to man, at the end of the day a huge number of messages can get "sent" which never make it to the intended recipient for a myriad of reasons. And furthermore, pretty much everyone has had an experience where this has happened.
I started with that post as well, and had a similar reaction.
Also I find it misses most of the real points against email and focuses on the relatively minor ones.
- email enforces much higher latency communication, which maybe good sometimes, but most of the time is not helpful
- much more difficult to actually keep track of a threaded conversation with multiple concurrent subtrees, it's a stack when instead you want a tree like Zulip / Slack threads. quote replying a subthread in an email tree without disrupting convos in the rest is a painful experience even in the nicest clients.
- file attachment and embed preview experience is worse than most modern IM apps
- no emoji reactions, these are huge for efficient async communication without spamming everyone with notifications
I wonder why no one ever mentions my big problem with solutions other than email: archiving and backup.
Let's play dumb here, back with POP3 if you configured it to leave the messages the server already had a copy. If you use IMAP you can still have a local copy. (I'm not saying these are valid backup strategies, but if all else fails it's still a decentral copy).
But more importantly, importing and exporting to different email clients and hosts (and even different IMAP server) is varying degrees of work, but it is doable EASILY by default. I can't be the only one keeping 15-18 years of email history and regularly referring back and searching for stuff there? (could be 5 more years but I was careless and didn't properly backup and maybe it's still on some medium...)
Even with matrix, the completely open new hip thing I don't see a good archival strategy by anyone except "somehow keeping logs" like on IRC. Maybe DB backups if it's your own instance. Not cool, but at least possible. And don't even get me started on all the other messengers here. Sometimes the backup works (via Android and maybe iOS) but not always and it's surely not open or accessible.
I'm actually not using email for a lot of private communication these days, but mostly because most of my communication to friends isn't really worth saving (except for logs in matrix/irc channels), I've never been a fan of formal emails between friends. But it's perfect to ask a random question to a semi-stranger. Surely beats Twitter DMs by a mile.
Instead of installing and/or visiting 100 different apps and services daily, I just redirect all notifications to my email (Reddit, HN, Discord, Matrix, Zulip, Mattermost, Slack, Discourse, Matrix, YouTube, StackExchange, VoIP.ms, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, bank, forums, etc).
For news websites I refresh all the time, I set up weekly digests. For important keywords and mentions, I set up instant alerts.
It’s easy to setup rules and filters for emails. Except for specific emails that trigger a notification on my phone (confirm registration, verification codes, security alerts, IM messages, important people), I only check my email once a day, and make sure to process it down to inbox zero (with the occasional email snooze).
Having a single inbox to worry about has improved my quality of life a lot.
Feel free to share or ask about specific tools for email digests, mention/reply notifications, and keyword alerts.
I'd disagree. E-Mail is useful for invoices, customer contact, first point of contact or 2nd point of contact if someone tried to reach out per Facebook etc. and a serious business relation needs to be formed. However at work we switched to Slack a while back and it was such a relieve! Trying to organize projects per mail was just horrible. Especially when you got non technical staff involved that doesn't correctly forward or answer email and uses reply-all and reply interchangeably, or switches between personal and shared accounts without noticing it. Slack is not perfect but for us it did the job and still does.
One aspect I miss with Slack/Teams/IM is a good ability to postpone stuff. For example, I receive an e-mail I know I need to do something in 1-4 months. So I keep that mail in my inbox and as long as something is in the inbox, there is some work pending/due.
I have not yet found a good way to do that in Slack (reliably) and not relying on another tool.
E-Mail in that way is just great as a message is just a text file. You can put it wherever you want and reorganize it the way you want.
Try to attach a slack conversation to an issue tracking system. Won‘t work. Do it with e-mail: it‘s just a text file.
Try to post-pone stuff or organize information in folders. Won‘t work. Do it with e-mail, hell I can even move messages from one account to another.
My point is: Slack will never replace e-mail, it is just an extension of ways we communicate. And that‘s is biggest advantage and disadvantage: it‘s a tool that makes communication sometimes easier, but is‘s also another tool I need to regularly check besides all other communication tools I already have.
It was in response to Google promoting AMP for email (aka: you don't get a permanent copy of the content) - but more generally, the advantages of email aren't so much in the right now, they're in the long term searchable and immutable archive.
See also the nice immediate triage features of heyhey - there's some nice stuff in there, but long term their users are going to find that they're living in the moment and not building the value that's stored in the data to the same extent that users of more traditional mailboxes do.
I want to point out something from one of the articles which is so far from the truth that it somewhat undercuts the authors credibility:
> For instance, if WhatsApp goes down, not only can you not send/receive messages, you won’t be able to see your old ones, and no one else on your network will be able to either. You could argue that a single email provider has the same effect, but you’d be wrong. If Gmail goes down, I can still send emails to Gmail recipients and I can still see past messages from Gmail users.
Obviously you will be able to see all your WhatsApp messages when WhatsApp goes down. The same is true for Facebook Messenger and many other applications, because everything is saved locally. It's even possible to send WhatsApp messages while being offline which will then be delivered later on.
> Obviously you will be able to see all your WhatsApp messages when WhatsApp goes down. The same is true for Facebook Messenger and many other applications, because everything is saved locally. It's even possible to send WhatsApp messages while being offline which will then be delivered later on.
I wonder how long this has been the case. My experience in the past is that these applications are not usable without a stable internet connection. That said, email clients have a concept of an outbox where messages that were sent are placed until an internet connecton is established. At that point, those messages are actually sent to their recipients.
If Instant Messaging were a Thing, I'd be happy to use it. But it's not.
IM is twelve things. And they're a different 12 things at different times. And you need to have clients for all of them installed and check all 12 of those clients regularly for messages.
Email, on the other hand, really is a Thing. I can check my mail and be done.
Fix that for IM and I'm there. Or rather, fix that again for IM and convince all the major players not to drop support for the common protocol again and you'll get me back.
Evernote uses a custom email address to route whatever media, link or text you want to send, to the specific notebook you select in your email subject. This is one of my favorite uses of email.
You are given a unique email address that is linked to your account and defaults to your default notebook.
The formatting of the email subject lets you choose any notebook as the destination for your email. You can also create a new notebook by simply adding a new notebook name after the "@" symbol.
You can add in hashtags to the email subject, after @notebook. These tags are included in the note and immediately searchable.
Simply add #planning or whatever existing tag you find useful. You can also create a brand new tag straight from email.
Using “!” then the full date and you can activate reminders.
Does anyone have any other apps or workflows that use this type of content-addressing?
Is that an accurate description for what this is? a content addressable macro?
I'd love it if Roam had a similar feature for emailing content into a specific block.
I found this short blog post that outlines this email feature if anyone is interested in checking it out :
I love this idea - I am so totally uninterested when yet another forum/IM solution is suggested to me. email works and (most) everyone has it. The last thing I want to do is install yet another client app or sign-up to some online website app. Enough already!
Email is hardly a thing in India for general use. One of my interns hates email so much that he built a bot which IMs him the contents of his email to Telegram.
There is simply no alternative for information exchange which is so ubiquitous, not locking you to specific vendor who loves to do data farming on you. Extremely reliable and flexible.
For years there have been different projects claiming to be "email kiilers", however email is still there and most of those projects have been long forgotten.
Sadly email is starting to die as the universal protocol for communication it used to be. My organisation has now implemented so many filters and blocks that a huge range of simple things are just broken now. It's pretty hard to send an attachment through other than a few predefined doc types that wont get physically removed by the spam filter. Every link gets re-written in some horribly mangled way and virtually clicked that often causes undesirable side effects. Giant warnings and labels get inserted into the body text telling me this or that is suspicious, and subject lines are frequently rewritten, breaking the feeble semblance of threading that my poor email client attempts.
And meanwhile people are flocking to walled garden proprietary systems like Slack etc and saying how great they are. But half of it is to escape the monstrous mutilations that have been applied to email.
Email might be like the venerable cockroach that will survive nuclear war, but it's not a healthy cockroach.
I've had this idea on a back burner for a while, however having looked at your site, it's clearly being used by people for landing pages that get linked to from spam emails.
If that's how these services get abused, I'm glad now I didn't waste any time on my version :(
My biggest gripe with email today is that it's become normal, at least in my current line of work, to leave emails unreplied. You write detailed and thoughtful messages, with direct questions and point of discussions, and you get an ack on IM or passing by the corridors
I'd like to plug in a small tool that I run. It's called EmailThis and it brings bookmarking/read-later functionality(similar to Pocket and Instapaper) to your email inbox.
This ticks me in the right place. Where I work we're already using Gsuite like the rest of the world, and then for some reasons the director board decided to move _everything_ company communication to FB's Workplace. And when pandemic hits, everybody have to actively watch for announcements/notices on Workplace, because it's the only place that they send out messages. So why not just send notices to all@company.com email address and everybody got it instantly if the message is too important? They post it on Workplace and mark it Important, then FB sends a brief emails to everybody teasing half of the post. Again, why not just use email?
Email is the only protocol that has widespread adoption in probably every programming language. Clients are ubiquitous. Filtering allows you to receive many mails without getting out of hand.
I'm not one for using emails for everything. Sometimes the UI / UX just doesn't go great with things like synced up messaging and besides, email leaks metadata all over.
Having said that, for extremely casual messages where I'm not worried about metadata (talking to my parents, a relationship that is already apparent), I would not mind chatting over something like DeltaChat (which is on-and-off working on trying to do XMPP Conversations-style multiple account sign on in one single app) over the alternative of a group text or FB Messenger message. Metadata exists either way, might as well be on an email system I will retain long-term-access to it. The likes of Signal force you to either manually screenshot messages or copy/paste them message by message, there is no bulk unencrypted backup for mundane things like serendipitous conversations about dinner plans for funny family stories. But since DeltaChat is still somewhat locked in to a single account (preventing me from using say work and personal), I'm doing the no-change-choice and continuing to tolerate Signal.
I get really peeved when social networks don't support email notifications for posts/updates, as opposed to just replies: I'd rather manage people's posts in an inbox, where I can pick through at my leisure than in an algorithmic feed. I used to stress about seeing all the updates since the last time I was on a given site.
Before you go using Email for everything, check to make sure your audience can actually get your email and that it's not going to spam.
---
10 years ago, I briefly worked for an for a small business that built wordpress plugins. They had an internal message board for communication and, unknown to me, they also used email. It took me six weeks to find out that I had missed hundreds of internal emails, many of which were directed at me. This was due in part to lack of on boarding and mismanagement by my boss (who was also managed the email system).
Now you may ask, why weren't you reading your email, did you not check it? You see, I checked my email religiously, couple of times an hour. But here is what happened.
This company used gmail for domains. And one thing that gmail does is it hides the spam label (or doesn't put a number next to spam). I had assumed, that since I had a brand new email address and that label was either missing or didn't have a counter next to it. I wasn't getting any spam. I was getting some internal email, so I didn't think much of it.
What I didn't know at the time was the internal email addresses were on the same domain as the marketing emails. They did a lot of unsolicited marketing, as such gmail automatically marked their domain as spam. Nearly every single email from the company was going into my spam folder.
Worse nobody said said anything about me missing these emails (including those from the owner/CEO and the CFO). Maybe they said something to my boss, but as he wasn't happy I had been assigned to his group he probably "forgot" to mention it to me. Anyway, I am sure missing several hundred emails was one of the reasons I wasn't retained passed my probationary period.
The big takeaways:
1. Don't do marketing from the same domain as internal email
2. Use a different domain for internal email
3. Always check the spam folder.
4. If you consistently don't hear from someone through email, ask them if they are receiving your email.
I've been hacking on a project to make email a little more asynchronous as I took use it for everything. I love email, but the constant inbound pings make it a direct line to me/my time. In that sense, email is broken and I'm hoping to help change that and allow people to focus more effectively. Paced Email * is a service that buffers emails and send them to you in one go at a time of your choosing either daily, weekly or monthly. The aliases can be created on the fly too e.g. johndoe.hackernews@daily.paced.email.
We decided to start shoto as newsletter instead doing an app because of some of the reason mentioned on the site. Everyone has an email account to begin with and they check their emails daily. I personally love email.
There is a more modern alternative* to Email:
Matrix
It improves significantly in security (easy E2EE) and usability (and of course functionality) while still keeping advantages like decentralization.
How the protocol is used is up to you and the Matrix client (which atm is mostly chat, but I am sure one could give you a more email-like client).
*ignoring the ubiquitous presence of email, which is kind of the main selling point - Matrix is still in the tens of millions
Is Matrix really that widely used? I'm a fan—I want to set up my own server one of these days when I get the time—but I get the feeling that it's still kinda niche. Who's using it? This is exciting!
I went to the post about answers to common objections but I was surprised that I did not find one of the bigger ones. Email is a pretty big disaster for communication that needs to stay secret, even encrypted mail. (https://latacora.micro.blog/2020/02/19/stop-using-encrypted....)
Like most people, I use both. Email however has better tooling IMO around high volumes. IM starts becoming a problem once you reach volumes of ~2K messages per day.
As soon as you have few hundred channels or groups in non business oriented messengers like whatsapp, missing critical/important messages cannot be avoided. Skipping certain lists/groups, training your spam filter etc is at least available when you use email.
If it were not for Google and Microsoft effectively gatekeeping SMTP I'd support the OP's proposition but it's been years since I gave-up running Postfix + Dovecot on Linux VM's simply due to the mindless thuggery of Outlook/Hotmail and Gmail. Google has effectively become the unelected dictator of the internet.
Today was the first time I asked my son (10yo) to email me something. His response was "yuk". I think that's the new generation's attitude towards email - old and dated, and that unless they need it for work, would prefer other means of communication.
I don’t want to dismiss the author’s point. But here is a related point:
Choosing what tool to communicate is a social decision, not a personal one. You can’t prove the tool X is more effective way to communicate by just using it yourself.
Agree with your point, and email does succeed here just because it's ubiquitous. You don't need to check do you what whatsapp? Telegram? Oh I don't use this or that because of privacy, etc.
Email give you a FREEDOM to use anything you want with it because it was developed at times when data farming wasn't the main goal for big tech.
That's why in most cases we just ask for email address.
Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can. - jwz's Law of Software Envelopment
or.... use the appropriate medium/channel/whatever for what ever it is you're doing.
My family has a group whatsapp chat. It's mostly for sending pics of my nieces and nephews and random conversations. Email would be terrible for that.
Ditto, the literally decade old skype chat I've with friends.
You can cook a meal with a campfire. If you put enough effort into it, you might even get a better result than cooking in a kitchen. But I am not going to light a campfire every night.
To put this into context and understand where the puck even is, my daughter (18 y old, freshman in college), last sent me an email in 2017. Before that, one in 2016, and one in 2015
> Using email as a reminder and productivity task list
I am using emails as a reminder tool for a long time and it’s very efficient as the first thing I do in the morning is to check my inbox. I have even built an app to email myself in one tap or with Siri : https://boomerang-app.io
It's funny this came up today, since I have a 1 hour section of my workday blocked of for my bi-annual email filter refactoring.
Email is by far the most broken software experience of my life. I've been thinking that for a while.
Now by broken, I don't mean the software doesn't work as intended. I mean that the software can't let me manage things the way I want.
The alternatives (eg MS Teams) by very much not perfect, but at least get me closer than I can with an email client.
Here are some specific things I find suck:
1. There isn't any that indicates why I'm receiving this email. Sometimes that's not obvious. Could it be I'm BCCed? Or maybe I'm on a mailing list, that's on a mailing list, that's on a mailing list? Or maybe it's both!
1a. If I receive an email due to being BCCed, my email filters won't work at all.
1b. In the case of a mailing list containing a mailing list, I have to manually create separate rules for both the parent and child lists and keep them in sync.
2. Email filters scale poorly. Hence why I end up needing to refactor them twice a year. This analogy is a bit of a stretch but: email filters are like programming where everything must be in a giant switch statement, but you are also allowed if statements and goto for extra control flow. It's not a perfect analogy, it breaks as you look more closely at the details, but I think both result in similar problems cropping up.
3. You are stuck choosing between highly limited server rules that affect all clients, or client only rules that only change things for the current client. I want to be able to look at my email from my desktop client, my phone, or a web browser and see the same thing in all 3 places. So I am stuck with the crippled server rules.
4. Smart folders come close to being able to replace the majority of my email rules, but not quite. The implementations I've played with are all missing something. I do think they'd be an improvement in the cases they are applicable.
5. Emails don't contain any hints at what kind of email they are. I believe they could, via headers, but they don't. An email is an email is an email. Well, every client I've used has special handling for meeting invites. I think this should be expanded. I find in practical use there are a few "types" or "kinds" of emails. Things like a broadcast vs a question vs a meeting invite vs a request for volunteers vs etc. Having a bunch of different types of messages baked in with different defaults for each, would likely remove half the email rules I have.
6. Marked as read and notifications are too simple. But here I at least understand that addressing the issue gets complex very quickly[0]. Maybe being able to snooze an email would help me here, but I've never used a client with snooze. Do these clients with snooze generally let you see the queue of snoozed items and process them early if you'd like to?
7. I can't block people. Creating a rule that auto-deletes emails is not quite the same as blocking.
Besides these technical ones, there are a few cultural ones as well.
1. Email has a culture of BCCing people "to be polite". As mentioned in 1a above, my rules don't work on these emails, so they end up being less polite in practice.
2. Email has a culture of including everyone who might be relevant just in case. Mostly this just drives the signal to noise ratio down. It is end of business hours for me now, and I've received 175 emails so far today. I maybe needed to read 15 of those.
3. Since email rules exist, people will default to blaming the receiver for not having a rule. If I spam @everyone or @here in MS Teams or Slack people blame me for spamming. In email land, I find people will first get mad at the receivers for not liking the spam I am sending them. Bizarre!
4. A portion of the email world takes a hardline stance on email by asynchronous communication. Sometimes you need a synchronous conversation. Sometimes you have something that is urgent. Yes, I'm aware flow exists and can be quite brittle for some people. It is sometimes worth breaking it.
That was quite cathartic to write. Email has been the least pleasant piece of my software life for years now. With work, I just have to deal with it as best as I can (you'll notice most complaints above are work centric). But outside of work I definitely try to minimize my usage.
I love email, it's great for long letters and so. That said, I have trouble (further) adopting and especially recommending a fundamentally insecure and flawed medium like email in 2021 when clearly technically superior channels of communication exist. Signal, Matrix etc are not 1:1 replacements for email at all, but when it comes down to it, they are simpler and more secure.
If you go back to the beginning of email you’ll see it was the simplest invention possible. you@domain.com was just your user account on an actual Unix computer. Mail messages were appended to a text file in a folder for each user. Somebody could get your IP address/email if they had your machine in their host file, but at that time you didn’t have to worry about spam, viruses, or eavesdropping. You didn’t even need POP or IMAP, since messages were sent directly to the machine that you had access to. This is still possible, but nobody has a static IP or hosts their own mail server.
paxys|4 years ago
I skimmed a couple articles on the blog and my biggest problem with it is that the author is making a social rather than technological argument (which are all anyways nonsensical).
"Liked a movie? Don't call or IM your friend about it, email them a long form review instead."
"Leave all your group texts and instead send your friends a weekly email summary of your life."
Do you just hate having friends in general?
daveslash|4 years ago
swiley|4 years ago
Evolved beyond instant text messages? because that's all email is.
Honestly I hate IM tools. The threading is crap, the search is crap, the startup time is crap. there's no understanding of who can read what or what the edit history of messages are (I've been in IMs with people who will edit their messages days later to gasslight you, that alone is enough to make me hate IM apps.)
teawrecks|4 years ago
My understanding is that this is the point of Matrix, i.e. to create an open protocol that you can use for IM regardless of who serves your messages.
But the point of saying "just use email" is that we don't need anything new, we just need to shift our idea of what email is. It's only slow and clunky because we still think if it as such. Our email clients and infrastructure are all built around email being something you get around to checking, like a digital version of your physical mailbox. But it doesn't have to be this way. You have a uniquely identifying email address, and everyone you know does too, this should be all we need to have communication that's as responsive and highly compatible as we want/need it to be.
na85|4 years ago
Email has its warts I'll give you that, but since 1997 the world has gotten objectively worse in terms of open, distributed messenging. Everything is a fucking walled garden controlled by some data-harvesting megacorp these days.
I like email because I can roll my own server (and have done so) or I can choose to trust one of several commercial providers and we can all interoperate.
nine_k|4 years ago
Maybe for you this is not important. For me it has proved to be key many times.
Also, filtering. You cannot withstand the same stream of info and notifications from Slack as you can from email, because there are no filtering and classification rules. Channels help, but in a limited way.
Slack works well for casual and ephemeral communication. For other use cases, you need a serious tool like email.
sethammons|4 years ago
bccdee|4 years ago
> group instant messaging is, largely, distracting and of little value (more on this later) and can best be dealt with in weekly ‘batches’, if it’s required at all.
I mean, I dunno about this guy, but I like interacting with my friends. I'll leave a group chat open all day on my other monitor. It's like a break room where you can chat with whoever's around, or all get together and have a nice conversation. Group chats are one of my favourite forms of online social interaction. You don't have to like them, but I can't imagine not at least understanding the appeal.
> people are finding ways to pushback on the ‘instant’ part of instant messaging, to put space and breathing room between when a message is sent and when they ‘deal’ with it.
Uh, yeah! That's part of what makes them work. They slide seamlessly between synchronous and asynchronous discussion. If I want to hear your thoughts at 1pm, I can message you. If you're busy, you can reply later. And if I'm available when you reply, then we can have our conversation synchronously. But if our schedules never align, we'll keep going back and forth until our discussion is over.
bluefirebrand|4 years ago
And it's a fine way for government or businesses to contact me, just like mail was.
But just like mail letter writing declined after the invention of the telephone, e-mail has declined after the invention of IM
ddingus|4 years ago
I like talking to people who I value. Like that a lot.
For work, or anything with complexity in any major axis, time, number of elements, etc... I continue to use e-mail.
The best thing about that is being able to go back into those e-mails and recover info. My archive goes almost all the way back, and the little bit I don't have in there really doesn't matter much. Surprisingly, the rest has more times than I can count.
People can contact me, literally decades later, and it's there, I can spool it up, and act on whatever it is almost as if I never missed a beat.
Maybe when the new tools are around and endure in a similar fashion I would reconsider. Kind of hard to do so in such an open, portable format though.
fungiblecog|4 years ago
I think the thrust of this article is mostly work related. He talks about being a consultant and seeing people waste so much time on SaaS tools, for example.
Personally I don't mind using "throwaway" services in my personal life - all your examples are things that don't matter - but for important stuff like work I want one place with all my information - not lots of crappy silos that don't integrate that I have to search for that key bit of information.
raspyberr|4 years ago
BatteryMountain|4 years ago
The Banks
Medical Aid
Insurance/Vehicle Insurnace
Hosting Companies
Mobile service (voice + 4G)
Crypto Exchanges
All of Google/Microsoft/AWS hangs off email accounts.
Local Government/municipalities.
Entertainment: steam, netflix, online-shops, spotify
Android/iOS stores
The list is endless. I have no idea how people can claim they can get away from email.. The only scenario where I can think of it working for me is if I give everything up and go live in the mountains.
sneak|4 years ago
If "email" simply means "gmail.com" to you then it's natural to assume that you'd think it hasn't evolved.
txru|4 years ago
> A) Call Leia and show interest in her weekend, and in her as a person, and after some pleasantries are exchanged, mention how amazing the main character is in the movie he watched.
---
> Situation: Kylo has been fascinated with helmets since time immortal. He custom designs and builds his own helmet. Knowing most of his friends don’t share his passion, he is hesitant to wear his new helmet at their next gathering.
> Answer: Send out an email to all his friends and include photos of his new helmet.
The first one heavily implies that Luke just calling his friend is a better and more personal way of catching up, and the second one doesn't say the person should send a weekly email summary, it's saying for big projects one is passionate about, email may be a better choice than instant messaging.
thisCtx|4 years ago
Email is thought of as grandpas business tool.
Look at Spike for IOS.
Messengers are just whitelisted users. Email providers or clients simply provide a shit interface for managing that list.
To me it’s like that story about NASA spending millions on a zero gravity pen when Russian astronauts just used pencil.
Someone was looking to impress people with their spam filtering code and never thought “maybe I can just drop all by default and only allow who I want?”
dvfjsdhgfv|4 years ago
It has nothing to do with hating or not, it just depends on the number of friends and the intensity of incoming communication - not all people are the same. After you cross certain threshold synchronous communication becomes unmanageable and basically prevents you from doing your daily activities as you'd want.
anonytrary|4 years ago
t8e56vd4ih|4 years ago
treeman79|4 years ago
I don’t open any work emails anymore. Got tired of the gotcha mentality.
johnchristopher|4 years ago
Isn't that a social counter-argument ?
TylerE|4 years ago
My email account is basically a searchable archive of confirmations and receipts.
PostThisTooFast|4 years ago
[deleted]
dvt|4 years ago
Not to mention that email absolutely sucks. The confusing threads, the forwarding, the constant CC'ing, someone making it or not making it into a list, the spam. It's absolute garbage. In fact, people have been seeking alternatives since the late 80s. IRC was a precursor to Instant Messaging/Slack that many techies favored. Not that async is some perfect communication strategy (it has its own baggage), but it definitely fills some of email's gaps. Personally, I think Google Wave was ~15 years ahead of its time, and we'll see something akin to it soon.
Will the author's next big revelation be "How to use a hammer for everything?"
leephillips|4 years ago
https://lwn.net/Articles/837960/
sien|4 years ago
Can you imagine a company that went all in for Google Wave and then had to deal with Google pulling the entire product?
Email has been there for over 50 years and it's likely to be around for a long time.
The Lindy effect isn't a bad way to look at it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect
In my current job we've had 3 ticketing systems in the last 5 years.
We now use Slack and Jira but we still archive certain important emails for some things because, well, the archive of email and the fact that someone sent an email is something we can trust a lot better than the rest.
sneak|4 years ago
This says to me that you have bad tools for email, not that the protocol or concept sucks.
If you use email like a rube, it is expected to be absolute garbage. The same goes for Facebook or Twitter or Reddit, though: you have to change a lot of settings to get a decent experience.
paxys|4 years ago
freddie_mercury|4 years ago
She gets dozens of emails a day. None of them are spam exactly. Every single website you've ever signed up for your in your life sends out email "for engagement purposes". Drips, reminders, flash sales, weekly roundups.
A dozen different job boards from when she was looking for work a few years ago. Several dozen shopping websites. Four or five pregnancy apps. And more and more and more.
You could argue that normal, non-technical people should know better. That they should be vigorously jumping through hoops to cancel all those email notifications from services they no longer use.
Don't they know there's fine print (in light gray text!) at the bottom telling you how to unsubscribe? Don't they know there's a tiny button in GMail that will (sometimes) unsubscribe for you?
But I expect that my wife's email is like a lot of people's. It is almost entirely impossible to find any signal among all the noise in it.
gspr|4 years ago
I mean, the threads are only confusing if people keep insisting on using shit email clients.
> the forwarding, the constant CC'ing,
Think of it as defining a chatroom. Most of the time it can be handled just fine automatically by your email client, but you can also have more finegrained control if you wish.
> someone making it or not making it into a list,
?
> the spam.
This I will agree with.
> Will the author's next big revelation be "How to use a hammer for everything?"
Yeah, I don't agree with the author that email should be used for everything. But for non-instant, asynchronousm, flexible, decentralized, cross-platform communication it's pretty damn near perfect.
jeppesen-io|4 years ago
Email works O.K for one-way communication (e.g. mailing lists or bill notification). Maybe sometimes infrequent one on one communcation
When its comes to having a converstation, particularly with multiple people, I can't think of anything worse. I always dread tracking down information when I have to dig into achived mailing lists
hrpnk|4 years ago
Isn't this exactly like adding/mentioning someone in a chat room? Problem is that in a chat room all communication is public and you're seeing/getting notified of every single small message. This is hugely inefficient. For e-mails, one can define filters to park e-mails where you're on CC to read later. You don't have this flexibility with Chat/Slack - the tool defines much more how you should be reading the incoming stream of messages.
neogodless|4 years ago
So is misreading SaaS as SAS and thinking of the old query language.
thaumaturgy|4 years ago
Worst of all, Gmail especially isn't great about tagging messages as spam; a good chunk of messages sent from outside the Gmail network simply disappear. As a Gmail user, there is nothing you can do to verify that you're getting all of the legitimate mail traffic that is being sent to you.
Further, if you're trying to send any kind of business correspondence over email, you have to contend with a massive industry of scammers that are also targeting people with lookalike messages.
I love the email protocol, but from a broader service standpoint, email is terribly broken right now.
PaulDavisThe1st|4 years ago
My experience is the exact opposite of yours - I find Gmail's spam detection absolutely amazing. I get essentially zero spam in my inbox, and perhaps 4-6 false positives in the spam folder a month.
>As a Gmail user, there is nothing you can do to verify that you're getting all of the legitimate mail traffic that is being sent to you.
What other communication service/protocol would allow you to do this?
annoyingnoob|4 years ago
We get so much spam from gmail that gmail has earned itself an increased spam score just because its gmail. Its unlikely that my users see much from gmail, unless they want it.
tmk1108|4 years ago
Biganon|4 years ago
I run my own mail server and have been for years. My e-mails use SPF, DKIM, DMARC, I have a reverse DNS record set up, a score of 100/100 on mail-tester.com... yet Microsoft refuses to accept my emails. They are sent to the spam folder of my recipients.
I tried contacting their support about it, I'll let you guess how well it went. A man from a warm country told me to join some sort of Microsoft partner program, for which I would have to pay.
This is a disgrace. E-mail is behind closed gates now, because of bullies such as Microsoft.
inter_netuser|4 years ago
hn_throwaway_99|4 years ago
I started with the "Dislikes about email are Questionable" post, which was perhaps my mistake, but every point in that post had a dripping "I'm sorry peasant, you're doing it wrong" vibe to it.
I can fully understand why someone may choose to use email over other forms of communication, but to be incredibly dismissive of problems other people have with the medium, while furthermore often not even addressing some of the root frustrations people have, is incredibly condescending.
Take the "email is unreliable" point. You can write all the missives you want about how email is the most reliable form of communication known to man, at the end of the day a huge number of messages can get "sent" which never make it to the intended recipient for a myriad of reasons. And furthermore, pretty much everyone has had an experience where this has happened.
nikisweeting|4 years ago
Also I find it misses most of the real points against email and focuses on the relatively minor ones.
- email enforces much higher latency communication, which maybe good sometimes, but most of the time is not helpful
- much more difficult to actually keep track of a threaded conversation with multiple concurrent subtrees, it's a stack when instead you want a tree like Zulip / Slack threads. quote replying a subthread in an email tree without disrupting convos in the rest is a painful experience even in the nicest clients.
- file attachment and embed preview experience is worse than most modern IM apps
- no emoji reactions, these are huge for efficient async communication without spamming everyone with notifications
wink|4 years ago
Let's play dumb here, back with POP3 if you configured it to leave the messages the server already had a copy. If you use IMAP you can still have a local copy. (I'm not saying these are valid backup strategies, but if all else fails it's still a decentral copy).
But more importantly, importing and exporting to different email clients and hosts (and even different IMAP server) is varying degrees of work, but it is doable EASILY by default. I can't be the only one keeping 15-18 years of email history and regularly referring back and searching for stuff there? (could be 5 more years but I was careless and didn't properly backup and maybe it's still on some medium...)
Even with matrix, the completely open new hip thing I don't see a good archival strategy by anyone except "somehow keeping logs" like on IRC. Maybe DB backups if it's your own instance. Not cool, but at least possible. And don't even get me started on all the other messengers here. Sometimes the backup works (via Android and maybe iOS) but not always and it's surely not open or accessible.
I'm actually not using email for a lot of private communication these days, but mostly because most of my communication to friends isn't really worth saving (except for logs in matrix/irc channels), I've never been a fan of formal emails between friends. But it's perfect to ask a random question to a semi-stranger. Surely beats Twitter DMs by a mile.
leephillips|4 years ago
You are not alone.
miguelrochefort|4 years ago
Instead of installing and/or visiting 100 different apps and services daily, I just redirect all notifications to my email (Reddit, HN, Discord, Matrix, Zulip, Mattermost, Slack, Discourse, Matrix, YouTube, StackExchange, VoIP.ms, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, bank, forums, etc).
For news websites I refresh all the time, I set up weekly digests. For important keywords and mentions, I set up instant alerts.
It’s easy to setup rules and filters for emails. Except for specific emails that trigger a notification on my phone (confirm registration, verification codes, security alerts, IM messages, important people), I only check my email once a day, and make sure to process it down to inbox zero (with the occasional email snooze).
Having a single inbox to worry about has improved my quality of life a lot.
Feel free to share or ask about specific tools for email digests, mention/reply notifications, and keyword alerts.
ApolloVonZ|4 years ago
chrisandchris|4 years ago
I have not yet found a good way to do that in Slack (reliably) and not relying on another tool.
E-Mail in that way is just great as a message is just a text file. You can put it wherever you want and reorganize it the way you want.
Try to attach a slack conversation to an issue tracking system. Won‘t work. Do it with e-mail: it‘s just a text file.
Try to post-pone stuff or organize information in folders. Won‘t work. Do it with e-mail, hell I can even move messages from one account to another.
My point is: Slack will never replace e-mail, it is just an extension of ways we communicate. And that‘s is biggest advantage and disadvantage: it‘s a tool that makes communication sometimes easier, but is‘s also another tool I need to regularly check besides all other communication tools I already have.
brongondwana|4 years ago
https://fastmail.blog/company/email-is-your-electronic-memor...
It was in response to Google promoting AMP for email (aka: you don't get a permanent copy of the content) - but more generally, the advantages of email aren't so much in the right now, they're in the long term searchable and immutable archive.
See also the nice immediate triage features of heyhey - there's some nice stuff in there, but long term their users are going to find that they're living in the moment and not building the value that's stored in the data to the same extent that users of more traditional mailboxes do.
(at least if you have decent search)
chki|4 years ago
> For instance, if WhatsApp goes down, not only can you not send/receive messages, you won’t be able to see your old ones, and no one else on your network will be able to either. You could argue that a single email provider has the same effect, but you’d be wrong. If Gmail goes down, I can still send emails to Gmail recipients and I can still see past messages from Gmail users.
Obviously you will be able to see all your WhatsApp messages when WhatsApp goes down. The same is true for Facebook Messenger and many other applications, because everything is saved locally. It's even possible to send WhatsApp messages while being offline which will then be delivered later on.
u801e|4 years ago
I wonder how long this has been the case. My experience in the past is that these applications are not usable without a stable internet connection. That said, email clients have a concept of an outbox where messages that were sent are placed until an internet connecton is established. At that point, those messages are actually sent to their recipients.
jasonkester|4 years ago
IM is twelve things. And they're a different 12 things at different times. And you need to have clients for all of them installed and check all 12 of those clients regularly for messages.
Email, on the other hand, really is a Thing. I can check my mail and be done.
Fix that for IM and I'm there. Or rather, fix that again for IM and convince all the major players not to drop support for the common protocol again and you'll get me back.
macintux|4 years ago
https://explained-from-first-principles.com/email/
fouc|4 years ago
jonnydubowsky|4 years ago
You are given a unique email address that is linked to your account and defaults to your default notebook.
The formatting of the email subject lets you choose any notebook as the destination for your email. You can also create a new notebook by simply adding a new notebook name after the "@" symbol.
You can add in hashtags to the email subject, after @notebook. These tags are included in the note and immediately searchable.
Simply add #planning or whatever existing tag you find useful. You can also create a brand new tag straight from email.
Using “!” then the full date and you can activate reminders.
Does anyone have any other apps or workflows that use this type of content-addressing?
Is that an accurate description for what this is? a content addressable macro?
I'd love it if Roam had a similar feature for emailing content into a specific block.
I found this short blog post that outlines this email feature if anyone is interested in checking it out :
https://link.medium.com/kiGPjqWSbgb
twobitshifter|4 years ago
https://www.rememberthemilk.com/services/email/
adamretter|4 years ago
saimiam|4 years ago
Email is hardly a thing in India for general use. One of my interns hates email so much that he built a bot which IMs him the contents of his email to Telegram.
jesterson|4 years ago
There is simply no alternative for information exchange which is so ubiquitous, not locking you to specific vendor who loves to do data farming on you. Extremely reliable and flexible.
For years there have been different projects claiming to be "email kiilers", however email is still there and most of those projects have been long forgotten.
zmmmmm|4 years ago
And meanwhile people are flocking to walled garden proprietary systems like Slack etc and saying how great they are. But half of it is to escape the monstrous mutilations that have been applied to email.
Email might be like the venerable cockroach that will survive nuclear war, but it's not a healthy cockroach.
arbuge|4 years ago
Disclaimer: it's one of my side projects.
cameronbrown|4 years ago
ronsor|4 years ago
mattowen_uk|4 years ago
If that's how these services get abused, I'm glad now I didn't waste any time on my version :(
aulin|4 years ago
bharani_m|4 years ago
[0] https://www.emailthis.me
a012|4 years ago
sedachv|4 years ago
http://www.faqs.org/faqs/internet-services/access-via-email/
https://archive.org/details/internetbyemail00shir
https://web.archive.org/web/20001109163400/http://www.expita...
gsich|4 years ago
a3n|4 years ago
Snitch-Thursday|4 years ago
Having said that, for extremely casual messages where I'm not worried about metadata (talking to my parents, a relationship that is already apparent), I would not mind chatting over something like DeltaChat (which is on-and-off working on trying to do XMPP Conversations-style multiple account sign on in one single app) over the alternative of a group text or FB Messenger message. Metadata exists either way, might as well be on an email system I will retain long-term-access to it. The likes of Signal force you to either manually screenshot messages or copy/paste them message by message, there is no bulk unencrypted backup for mundane things like serendipitous conversations about dinner plans for funny family stories. But since DeltaChat is still somewhat locked in to a single account (preventing me from using say work and personal), I'm doing the no-change-choice and continuing to tolerate Signal.
ocdtrekkie|4 years ago
asciimov|4 years ago
---
10 years ago, I briefly worked for an for a small business that built wordpress plugins. They had an internal message board for communication and, unknown to me, they also used email. It took me six weeks to find out that I had missed hundreds of internal emails, many of which were directed at me. This was due in part to lack of on boarding and mismanagement by my boss (who was also managed the email system).
Now you may ask, why weren't you reading your email, did you not check it? You see, I checked my email religiously, couple of times an hour. But here is what happened.
This company used gmail for domains. And one thing that gmail does is it hides the spam label (or doesn't put a number next to spam). I had assumed, that since I had a brand new email address and that label was either missing or didn't have a counter next to it. I wasn't getting any spam. I was getting some internal email, so I didn't think much of it.
What I didn't know at the time was the internal email addresses were on the same domain as the marketing emails. They did a lot of unsolicited marketing, as such gmail automatically marked their domain as spam. Nearly every single email from the company was going into my spam folder.
Worse nobody said said anything about me missing these emails (including those from the owner/CEO and the CFO). Maybe they said something to my boss, but as he wasn't happy I had been assigned to his group he probably "forgot" to mention it to me. Anyway, I am sure missing several hundred emails was one of the reasons I wasn't retained passed my probationary period.
The big takeaways:
1. Don't do marketing from the same domain as internal email
2. Use a different domain for internal email
3. Always check the spam folder.
4. If you consistently don't hear from someone through email, ask them if they are receiving your email.
leephillips|4 years ago
0. Don’t use Gmail.
Use a real email client.
rikkipitt|4 years ago
* https://www.paced.email
unknown|4 years ago
[deleted]
shoto_io|4 years ago
kitkat_new|4 years ago
How the protocol is used is up to you and the Matrix client (which atm is mostly chat, but I am sure one could give you a more email-like client).
*ignoring the ubiquitous presence of email, which is kind of the main selling point - Matrix is still in the tens of millions
ashton314|4 years ago
Barrin92|4 years ago
gcells|4 years ago
As soon as you have few hundred channels or groups in non business oriented messengers like whatsapp, missing critical/important messages cannot be avoided. Skipping certain lists/groups, training your spam filter etc is at least available when you use email.
bgroat|4 years ago
nikisweeting|4 years ago
cutler|4 years ago
e3bc54b2|4 years ago
MaxBarraclough|4 years ago
https://sourcehut.org/blog/2020-10-29-how-mailing-lists-prev...
alfiedotwtf|4 years ago
alex_young|4 years ago
izgzhen|4 years ago
Choosing what tool to communicate is a social decision, not a personal one. You can’t prove the tool X is more effective way to communicate by just using it yourself.
jesterson|4 years ago
Email give you a FREEDOM to use anything you want with it because it was developed at times when data farming wasn't the main goal for big tech.
That's why in most cases we just ask for email address.
Balgair|4 years ago
I'm reminded of this law:
Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can. - jwz's Law of Software Envelopment
How true it is even years later
cgrealy|4 years ago
My family has a group whatsapp chat. It's mostly for sending pics of my nieces and nephews and random conversations. Email would be terrible for that.
Ditto, the literally decade old skype chat I've with friends.
You can cook a meal with a campfire. If you put enough effort into it, you might even get a better result than cooking in a kitchen. But I am not going to light a campfire every night.
twobitshifter|4 years ago
https://www.spikenow.com/ https://delta.chat/en/
unknown|4 years ago
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unknown|4 years ago
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chagaif|4 years ago
weeboid|4 years ago
zelly|4 years ago
jollybean|4 years ago
I do appreciate a Slack channel in the right conditions.
blaydator|4 years ago
I am using emails as a reminder tool for a long time and it’s very efficient as the first thing I do in the morning is to check my inbox. I have even built an app to email myself in one tap or with Siri : https://boomerang-app.io
paulpauper|4 years ago
floss_silicate|4 years ago
magwa101|4 years ago
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magwa101|4 years ago
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PostThisTooFast|4 years ago
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kulix425|4 years ago
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cuddlybacon|4 years ago
Email is by far the most broken software experience of my life. I've been thinking that for a while.
Now by broken, I don't mean the software doesn't work as intended. I mean that the software can't let me manage things the way I want.
The alternatives (eg MS Teams) by very much not perfect, but at least get me closer than I can with an email client.
Here are some specific things I find suck:
1. There isn't any that indicates why I'm receiving this email. Sometimes that's not obvious. Could it be I'm BCCed? Or maybe I'm on a mailing list, that's on a mailing list, that's on a mailing list? Or maybe it's both!
1a. If I receive an email due to being BCCed, my email filters won't work at all. 1b. In the case of a mailing list containing a mailing list, I have to manually create separate rules for both the parent and child lists and keep them in sync.
2. Email filters scale poorly. Hence why I end up needing to refactor them twice a year. This analogy is a bit of a stretch but: email filters are like programming where everything must be in a giant switch statement, but you are also allowed if statements and goto for extra control flow. It's not a perfect analogy, it breaks as you look more closely at the details, but I think both result in similar problems cropping up.
3. You are stuck choosing between highly limited server rules that affect all clients, or client only rules that only change things for the current client. I want to be able to look at my email from my desktop client, my phone, or a web browser and see the same thing in all 3 places. So I am stuck with the crippled server rules.
4. Smart folders come close to being able to replace the majority of my email rules, but not quite. The implementations I've played with are all missing something. I do think they'd be an improvement in the cases they are applicable.
5. Emails don't contain any hints at what kind of email they are. I believe they could, via headers, but they don't. An email is an email is an email. Well, every client I've used has special handling for meeting invites. I think this should be expanded. I find in practical use there are a few "types" or "kinds" of emails. Things like a broadcast vs a question vs a meeting invite vs a request for volunteers vs etc. Having a bunch of different types of messages baked in with different defaults for each, would likely remove half the email rules I have.
6. Marked as read and notifications are too simple. But here I at least understand that addressing the issue gets complex very quickly[0]. Maybe being able to snooze an email would help me here, but I've never used a client with snooze. Do these clients with snooze generally let you see the queue of snoozed items and process them early if you'd like to?
7. I can't block people. Creating a rule that auto-deletes emails is not quite the same as blocking.
Besides these technical ones, there are a few cultural ones as well.
1. Email has a culture of BCCing people "to be polite". As mentioned in 1a above, my rules don't work on these emails, so they end up being less polite in practice.
2. Email has a culture of including everyone who might be relevant just in case. Mostly this just drives the signal to noise ratio down. It is end of business hours for me now, and I've received 175 emails so far today. I maybe needed to read 15 of those.
3. Since email rules exist, people will default to blaming the receiver for not having a rule. If I spam @everyone or @here in MS Teams or Slack people blame me for spamming. In email land, I find people will first get mad at the receivers for not liking the spam I am sending them. Bizarre!
4. A portion of the email world takes a hardline stance on email by asynchronous communication. Sometimes you need a synchronous conversation. Sometimes you have something that is urgent. Yes, I'm aware flow exists and can be quite brittle for some people. It is sometimes worth breaking it.
That was quite cathartic to write. Email has been the least pleasant piece of my software life for years now. With work, I just have to deal with it as best as I can (you'll notice most complaints above are work centric). But outside of work I definitely try to minimize my usage.
[0] - Slack's notification flowchart. As complex as it seems, I don't consider this over-engineered. https://d34u8crftukxnk.cloudfront.net/slackpress/prod/sites/...
andybp85|4 years ago
approxim8ion|4 years ago
twobitshifter|4 years ago