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.
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.
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.
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
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
>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 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.
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.
> 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)
> 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?
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.
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).
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
> 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.
"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.
> 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."
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 71.6 ms ] threadSure, 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Like, email works for announcements yo. Naw, let's jeep messaging N other places.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://delta.chat/pt/
I think it's way better. Email has so many limitations, especially as soon as you're in a group discussion.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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?
(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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
messaging protocols can make it possible
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.
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.
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?
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...
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.
Of course it's convenient when everybody accomodates for you.
> 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."