Can a chat platform be built on SMTP, and what would be the implications of that? Has that been done? I think email has so many things going for it, and I wonder to what extent it has been rejected as a platform because it is too open.
If it will matter after today, don't talk about it in a chat room
81–90 of 329 posts
Re: If it will matter after today, don't talk about it in a chat room
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The real answer is: just fucking use email. I know of at least one large company that forcibly deletes emails older than N months, as part of their legal retention policy. (I'm assuming it means non-retention to limit exposure to lawsuits.) That would be problematic for persistent documentation.
That sounds like a pathological case. How many companies actually do that?
Usually that varies by legal department.
Attorneys who sue or investigate people for a living want everything forever, and those who get sued want to delete email before it arrives.
Email is a great way to get in trouble, as people tend to say dumb things, even about things that they have nothing to do with!
Re: If it will matter after today, don't talk about it in a chat room
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
That sounds like a pathological case. How many companies actually do that?
Most Fortune 500 companies have a document retention policy that every employee needs to read the generic training video/documents on when getting hired and agree to. This sets a general policy of deleting documents/emails/etc after $X days. This is really a CYA policy to purge old conversations if a big lawsuit comes down asking for document retention in relation to some scandal, and if its older than $X days you're…
Also depending on industry you may by law need to delete things.
Re: If it will matter after today, don't talk about it in a chat room
#84The problem with "trying it with my team for one sprint" is that I now need to have a long conversation with legal. How will the service provider handle the content (discussions, screenshots, code snippets) that my team will upload? Do our current customer contracts contain any clauses that complicate the use of external discussion sites? In the unlikely event that the service offers the option to host it locally --…
> just fucking use email. I get you. But also: - Email doesn't retain context very well. If I dig back through my email I might have all of the emails in a thread, or maybe not. - Likewise, I can't send someone a link to a previous emailed conversation so it makes for poor documentation. I can forward an individual email, but not the comment in context. - Email is not easy to index or post up for reference. You can't…
Basecamp does this well, especially version 2, which integrated with email. With version 2 you could have topics in Basecamp which you could post directly do or email and it was searchable and linkable. It was even possible to post messages which were optionally emailed to clients, with their response becoming part of the thread history. Really the best of both worlds. Unfortunately they removed the email feature in Basecamp 3 (and my company upgraded) so we can't do that anymore, but older projects retain their history.
Re: If it will matter after today, don't talk about it in a chat room
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is it really that bad? I'm just a dumb machine operator that uses Outlook at work, Fastmail for myself, and Gmail because I'm an idiot too, and really can't tell the difference.
>I'm just a dumb machine operator that uses Outlook at work, Fastmail for myself, and Gmail because I'm an idiot too, and really can't tell the difference. Install Thunderbird[0] and use it for a week. You'll be able to tell the difference very quickly. [0] https://www.thunderbird.net
I'm a Thunderbird user, but I don't really think that there's a clear winner in that comparison. Outlook has features that Thunderbird has been missing for over a decade, like reliable send-in-background (and other database operations in background unlike Thunderbird that likes to interrupt you to ask permission) and a far more mature calendar product.
Re: If it will matter after today, don't talk about it in a chat room
#86Conveniently Teams has both chat and threads.
Re: If it will matter after today, don't talk about it in a chat room
#87Re: If it will matter after today, don't talk about it in a chat room
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is really only one fundamental problem with email: its mechanism for managing who takes part in the conversation is all wrong for team communication. The symptoms of this problem are myriad: reply-all storms, cya-by-cc, replying to a 5 month old email rather than starting a new thread, fyi forwards, etc. Which isn't to say that all the advantages you list for email are not true. They are. It's just that most pe…
Some of these are solved by things like a corporate NNTP server or mailing lists, right?
Not really, because it still doesn't give people sufficiently fine-grained control over demands on their attention.
I think the ideal is the approach you get with discussion forums: Create a set of boards organized around topics, and place named, threaded conversations within those boards. People can join a board, in which case they will be able to get a list of new conversations related to that board's topic. They can then subscribe to just the conversations that interest them, and unsubscribe from ones that cease to be of interest.
Re: If it will matter after today, don't talk about it in a chat room
#89I think part of the problem is not all conversations are obviously 'short and shallow' or 'long and broad'. What starts out casual might unearth something that needs going into deeper, and going in deep on something might not have results worth documenting yet.
To me this points out a gap in our software for knowledge archival. The closest concept Slack has is "pinning" a message to a channel, which has very limited use for this. Really what you want is to be able to have a conversation with someone in any manner (casual or formal meeting) and be able to easily extract the conclusions and decisions made into a different location, ideally through an easily discoverable UI in the software already being used.
In an ideal world my chat software has knowledge of the projects I'm working on (through some protocol to something else that acts as a source of truth) and I can select a message/file upload in chat and tell it to archive it against a project. It can easily fill in the details for me about who made this decision and when. Ability to effortlessly organise information arising from a connversation should a priority I think, this might remove the need for having seperate software depending on how "deep" you think a conversation is going to be.
Re: If it will matter after today, don't talk about it in a chat room
#90The problem with "trying it with my team for one sprint" is that I now need to have a long conversation with legal. How will the service provider handle the content (discussions, screenshots, code snippets) that my team will upload? Do our current customer contracts contain any clauses that complicate the use of external discussion sites? In the unlikely event that the service offers the option to host it locally --…
Email isn't searchable by people who weren't on the threads. In an org that uses IM well (they exist!) the chat system actually becomes sort of like a wiki, except a lot more helpful.
If someone told me "that is documented in the chat channel, just search", my response would be "ok. So it's not documented."
Even with the best organization (old content deleted), I don't want to wade through the conversations about it or all the other noise. Chat is temporal, the discussion about something like "should x be updated" is immediately irrelevant after the decision is made.