Ask HN: Do you still use email?
In recent years, I have noticed that fewer and fewer people in my circle of friends use e-mail. I also use it less and less personally and have switched to alternatives. Is this just a subjective perception of mine or are there similar tendencies among you?
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[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 124 ms ] threadI send and receive email from businesses and people I have business relationships with.
One example: when I was in high school, Facebook seemed like a natural choice to use for our graduating class to communicate things like reunions and whatnot. A little over a decade later, and that FB group is only capable of reaching a very small number of people. It's too bad we didn't just set up a mailing list.
My last three gigs were at ~2000-to-5000 person corps and it wasn't uncommon for me to get 100 e-mails a day which I mostly filtered with rules. Previous corps used TFS to coordinate workflow and had no officially sanctioned chat system.
IM is also not really a great replacement for email.
Could you expand on this? I haven't actually noticed anything detrimental, and resource usage has actually been falling as the dev team makes improvements - though in fairness I'm running it on a beefy server that also hosts Plex, Polaris, and more.
a, fragile, depends on a lot of external libs (eg. hazmat, which needs sslv3 compiles openssl)
b, eats a lof of resources when using medium size and above federated rooms
And there are no other servers ready for production.
1 - Transactional emails.
... that's it.
[edit] My other uses for email started dropping off around 2010 and were mostly gone by 2015 or so.
Business email account uses:
1 - Transactional emails
2 - Communicating with vendors and other parties outside the organization.
3 - Communicating with people who like email and are too high-up in the company to be ignored if they insist on using email.
(Of course I am aware that email is required to subscribe to all the other services, so we still depend on being given continued service by Gmail).
But mostly because Do Not Disturb means Immediate Interrupt.
I strongly prefer Slack to email: the ability to search through past conversations, start multi-person conversations, and discuss things on a channel (with searchable history and sub-threads).
This reminds me of a Donald Knuth quote. I forget how it went exactly, but was something like this, "Some people have jobs that require them to be on top of things. My job requires me to be on the bottom of things. So I can't be interrupted by email."
If it’s not in ticket, git or wiki - it’s your fault.
We are tiny, globally distributed team focused on documenting well so maybe thats why it works.
It's a real shame I can't search my emails or CC people in. Oh...
I won't pretend that they're the same thing, but those reasons to prefer ~Slack are things people readily do with email.
With a good email client you can do those things. E.g. you can make rules to move emails into folders, etc.
Sure Slack is probably quicker at doing those things, but I prefer not having to rely on a 3rd party to run my business.
IMO, both Slack and Email have their places. Slack is better for long-running conversations with a lot of rapid back and forth of mostly short messages involving a dozen-ish people. Email is better for making requests expected to be responded to in hours or days and sending longer and more detailed descriptions.
Press up once to edit the last message. Press enter. Press up again nothing happens.
Enter means enter except within a code block when it means shift-enter.
It feels as awful as using Matlab and missing the += from Octave. Like no one tried to use their own product. It makes me sad.
So My email inbox is now somehow cleaner - if I exclude a lot of automated notifications.
If someone needs me, text me. Or better yet, text my wife and she'll let me know about it if it's important.
First, it’s my tool to centralize alerts: Uptime robots, changes in multitude of systems (new release from a provider, …)
Second, communicating outside my startup requires email: Accountant, lawyer, important customers. Going through the customer portal and raising a ticket is insulting for important customers ;) Also, everything which needs to be kept: Salary sheets, warnings/notifications with a legal impact.
Third, everyone despises Facebook so my extended family is 100% communicating through email.
Friends are on Facebook for boomers and Discord for people I constantly interact with. Few friends on Whatsapp, and no business there.
Personal email:
* Digital records
* Email newsletters
* Transactions
* Notifications
Work email:
* Almost everything. I'd collapse in within a week if I couldn't write/read long form communications to discuss complex topics with colleagues.
Buy a ticket to some place? Email. Bill to pay? Email. Doctor appointment? Reminder email, email summary, email bill. Ordered food? Email.
For work I actually receive emails from real people, many times a day.
Open protocols are good. Long live to email. And IRC :).
I wish more people still wrote personal emails to friends and family. I do with a couple of people. I sent a happy birthday email to an old buddy who I hadn't talked to in years and we had a small exchange. I still share some things with family via email, but most family comms are group chat sms now - which would probably be a better experience if we went to a dedicated service. People getting new numbers and adding/removing people to the group sms thread is impossible.
In my social life, it's probably facebook messenger first (most people are on it), discord second, skype third, emails only to older family members. We also send physical mail if we want the communication to feel more "special".
I'm not proud of myself for that, being an old school "open data formats" person. My email still goes through Thunderbird, which faithfully downloads and archives even stuff composed in Gmail. Whereas Whatsapp data is siloed and (to my knowledge) not easily exported from the app to an archivable format.
As for email. Generally used with older folks like my mom, or for stuff with half a dozen recipients like family vacation planning. Luckily pretty much everyone I know of any age is still reachable by email, even if they don't write much of it.
Slack and WhatsApp support pointy-click GUI formatting and markdown-alike formatting for the things I mentioned. I think similar features are common in other options (Discord, Signal, WeeChat, whatever they're calling Riot now, Telegram, I would assume all those have something similar) It's short-form messaging so you can't, say, post a series of images with comments under each one, all in one message... but because of the medium, it's natural to just send that as multiple messages, each with one image and comment, anyway.
Tables, lists, and headings (for obvious reasons, in that case—it's not natural to send messages long enough to need them) aren't present in any chat systems I've seen. I think the more mobile-oriented options (WhatsApp) may not support fixed-width (AKA code) blocks, but Slack and some others do. Slack (and maybe others) also has support for solo or collaborative formatted document creation & sharing, which does allow headings and lists and tables and such, the UI for which isn't all that different from creating an email, except that the results are more consistent for all readers. Those (and pretty much any other documents) can simply be posted in any thread or conversation.
That's what I miss in email. Text-only email is fine for what it is, but HTML email is crap. Something in-between would be nice. Better UI for inlining, say, Markdown, would be great, and could be sent over plain-text email, but that's mostly up to clients to provide a useful reading-and-writing interface for that, so it's hard to get into a workflow of using that sort of thing unless all involved have similarly-capable clients.
As for personal use-cases, I mostly use it for help from Technical Support, inquiries at my academic institution, sometimes might email my friends something important.
For casual chats and disposable communications, there is WhatsApp, etc.