Email for Async/external, some kind of chat for close team Sync. Same thing for 20 years.
I do appreciate a Slack channel in the right conditions.
Just Use Email – How to Use Email for Everything
101–110 of 310 posts
Re: Just Use Email – How to Use Email for Everything
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Old-school snail mail and voice telephony are just as open, distributed, and ubiquitous. The delivery channel providers are centralized, but that is just as true of email. Hosting your own server means nothing without an ISP. That said, I think all three methods of communication feel obsolete and useless to me for the same reason, they're drowned out by marketing chatter. The one nice effect of the recent real estate…
I really want a way to take an old eve online thing of charging people who aren't a contact for the ability to ensure delivery.
If I have a business relationship with someone I'll add them to my contact list. I assume they can do the same. Otherwise gimme see BAT or something for the spam
Re: Just Use Email – How to Use Email for Everything
#103dear god, why???
Re: Just Use Email – How to Use Email for Everything
#104I'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 a…
Ditto.
My email account is basically a searchable archive of confirmations and receipts.
Re: Just Use Email – How to Use Email for Everything
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
This isn’t universally true, although your broader point (it could change at any time!) is a risk. As a data point, I have run my own email servers for years. Both professionally (couple million transactional emails per year) and for my personal. If you follow best practices (which is a pain to setup!), deliver ability is generally on par with other providers, unless you got unlucky and got a bad IP.
This is my experience too: there are a couple providers that are more difficult (Verizon, iirc), but I’ve never found a personal email server much of a hassle to maintain.
I run my own email server, and have for many years. More recently, Verizon/Aol/Yahoo have been a pain in the butt for our larger email lists, even though we run a very clean operation. Still, our deliverability is, on the whole, better than through the much more expensive providers, such as Mailchimp.
Re: Just Use Email – How to Use Email for Everything
#106I'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 a…
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.
Re: Just Use Email – How to Use Email for Everything
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm with you, I absolutely cannot stand using email unless I absolutely have to, which is mostly just at work. 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
I remember using email in an IM-like fashion, having a real-time back and forth conversation. The only difference is that most email clients quote the entire conversation on every reply. A lightweight client could have an IM-like interface that does not quote the original message on replies. Who cares if it's SMTP under the covers, the whole experience could feel quite IM-like and it would have all the other benefits…
That's the basic idea behind "Chat over IMAP", which for various reasons hasn't seen as much effort put into it as many of us would like (not that I can talk, I haven't done anything).
HN discussion from when it was launched is here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19216077
Re: Just Use Email – How to Use Email for Everything
#108I'd like to pop in a plug for a blog post I wrote a few years ago on this topic:
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)
Re: Just Use Email – How to Use Email for Everything
#109Email makes a great universal inbox.
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.
Re: Just Use Email – How to Use Email for Everything
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
Email has very real limitations, imposed both by the protocol itself and by lack of consensus among all the major and minor clients.
Can you give some examples? I've never seen any mentioned.
Sending private information is the first thing I think of--from a bunch of aspects. Secure in transit has had a bunch of different, awkward implementations. My biggest concern is sending tax documents and it sitting in someone's archive folder (or sent folder) for years until their account is compromised.
So I often have organizations that send email pointing to their proprietary webmail. The alternative is sneakernet, hard copies, or even faxing.