161–170 of 329 posts
If you're into Cal Newport, he's got a new book coming out that seems related: https://bookshop.org/books/a-world-without-email-reimagining...
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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 c…
The 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 --…
Talk to your lawyer on this too. Our lawyer said emails with the lawyer in the conversation will have client attorney privilege, is not court admissible. I dont know about IM.
That's too-sweeping a statement [0]:
1. Privilege attaches only to communications in the course of seeking legal advice.
2. Privilege is waived — and thus the emails are discoverable by adversaries and admissible in court — if people outside the decision-making group are in the conversation.
3. Privilege doesn't attach if the lawyer is functioning as a business executive or -advisor.
4. Privilege won't apply if the conversation is determined to be part of a crime or fraud.
All that said: If a lawyer is involved in the conversation, then the company's litigation counsel will almost-automatically withhold the emails from being produced to an adversary and will list them on a "privilege log." That will often set up an ancillary court fight over whether the emails should be produced to the adversary. In that ancillary fight, the judge might end up reviewing the emails "in camera," i.e., without the adversary seeing them, to decide whether the privilege applies — and depending on the content of the withheld emails, having the judge read the emails could do as much damage to the company's case as anything.
[0] https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/attorney-client-priv...
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> After a archive-worthy discussion in email, you forward the thread to "archivebot@my-company-domain.com". The script will parse the email chain and generate a static web page hosted on a local server. Unfortunately there isn't any such thing as "forwarding an email thread", at least not currently. If you hit the forward button in your email client it will only forward the last email in the thread, which sometimes c…
> Unfortunately there isn't any such thing as "forwarding an email thread" Mailing lists have for years offered mailing list archives that you can read directly in your client, exactly as if the messages had been hitting your inbox from the beginning. The bigger problem with email is that messages are not as easily addressable , unlike links on the Web.
You can format email messages for display on the web and generate permalinks for each message. E.g. look at what we do for https://www.prettyfwd.com. I haven't yet added a JS snippet to autoscroll to a specific message if you pass it in the UUID for that message as a URL parameter, but it's been on my TODO list for a while.
Example thread, where each message is formatted for the web and has a UUID: https://www.prettyfwd.com/t/5XVkc401RiCTO9hwsSRziQ
The other problem with most mailing list archives is that they look terrible and have poor readability, poor SEO, and generally terrible lighthouse scores. Whereas I think we score perfect 100s across the board, albeit only 99 on mobile perf because we don't prerender.
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.
The 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 --…
Slack and all its clones are based on the chat room model, which structurally has the problem described in this article (and many others for productivity, such as wasting attention). Fundamentally, the chatroom model pioneered by IRC is poor for asynchronous communication because you can't sustain temporally overlapping conversations in a channel. However, you can't "just use email" -- Email's threading model is grea…
I have been recommending it right and left to people who don't need federation in their chat system. If there was a clear gateway to federation -- enabling a Matrix room as a Zulip Stream, for instance -- I would enthusiastically recommend it for everyone.
"Cold" channels (e.g. documents, tickets) are where important information should go. A single piece of information can be developed and solidified over time. Cold channels are easier to search, easier to catch up on, and easier to onboard.
The problem is not with any one channel, but that we expect one channel to handle all types of information.
There's a great rule of thumb for workplace communication mediums I saw long ago. It was something like this: - Email: Not urgent. Expected response: ~1 day. - Chat: Somewhat urgent. Expected response: Building on the points OP makes re the problems thinking one line at a time in chat, in this little mental model there's a whole lot of daylight between email and chat. And there's lots of problems with email that make…
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What’s the difference between that sort of topics and news groups or mailing lists (with archives)? If I want information on something, subscribe; if I don’t want information, unsubscribe: I can always follow/search the archive (or read digests)
It's a second level of organization/subscription so that you can have more fine-grained control over how much you get spammed. News groups and mailing lists don't scale super well, in that, when you subscribe, you then get sent everything . Maybe not terrible for the 5-10 emails a day from my kid's playgroup's email list, but absolutely awful for trying to keep up with a team of 100 people.
https://superuser.com/questions/458136/thunderbird-watch-or-...
The 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 --…
So, you're worried about this > 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? Yet you suggest using email where it basically goes (or can be coerced to go) across the internet in plain-text where anyone can read it?