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Just Use Email – How to Use Email for Everything

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Re: Just Use Email – How to Use Email for Everything

#181

Post by slacktide »

thisCtx wrote: post #140
paxys wrote: post #3

I'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…

The problem is just a presentation one. Email is thought of as grandpas business tool. Look at Spike for IOS. Messengers are just whitelisted users. Email providers or clients simply provide a shit interface for managing that list. To me it’s like that story about NASA spending millions on a zero gravity pen when Russian astronauts just used pencil. Someone was looking to impress people with their spam filtering code…

NASA didn’t spend a single dime developing the Fisher space pen. It was developed by the Fisher company at their own expense, in the hopes that it could be profitable. Yay, capitalism. Lead pencil tips frequently break during use. Carbon pencil lead is electrically conductive. You really do not want random pieces of electrically conductive debris floating around in your spacecraft.

I’m still waiting for my TSO’d pencil to arrive. http://www.rstengineering.com/rst/articles/tsodpencil.pdf

Re: Just Use Email – How to Use Email for Everything

#182

Post by asmosoinio »

nine_k wrote: post #122
paxys wrote: post #3

I'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…

Slack is fine for transient communication. That is, it's fine unless you might need to dig up a particular conversation a year after, or five years. Actually, finding stuff as old as one week can be problematic already. Maybe for you this is not important. For me it has proved to be key many times. Also, filtering. You cannot withstand the same stream of info and notifications from Slack as you can from email, becaus…

I can find Slack conversations from years ago just fine, also link a lot to Slack in our ticketing system which is very useful.

So for me Slack has become a second memory for technical and other details.

Re: Just Use Email – How to Use Email for Everything

#183

Post by e3bc54b2 »

cutler wrote: post #156

If it were not for Google and Microsoft effectively gatekeeping SMTP I'd support the OP's proposition but it's been years since I gave-up running Postfix + Dovecot on Linux VM's simply due to the mindless thuggery of Outlook/Hotmail and Gmail. Google has effectively become the unelected dictator of the internet.

Oh the majority elected Gmail alright. They just weren't aware they were electing a dictator, and that the term was for life.

Re: Just Use Email – How to Use Email for Everything

#184

Post by sedachv »

anomaloustho wrote: post #36
sneak wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Not to mention that email absolutely sucks. The confusing threads, the forwarding, the constant CC'ing, someone making it or not making it into a list, the spam. It's absolute garbage. This says to me that you have bad tools for email, not that the protocol or concept sucks. If you use email like a rube, it is expected to be absolute garbage. The same goes for Facebook or Twitter or Reddit, though: you have to chan…

I’d be interested to hear what good email tools look like if you have a chance to post some examples.

https://notmuchmail.org/

https://www.djcbsoftware.nl/code/mu/mu4e.html

https://www.gnus.org/

Re: Just Use Email – How to Use Email for Everything

#185

Post by zelphirkalt »

asmosoinio wrote: post #182
nine_k wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Slack is fine for transient communication. That is, it's fine unless you might need to dig up a particular conversation a year after, or five years. Actually, finding stuff as old as one week can be problematic already. Maybe for you this is not important. For me it has proved to be key many times. Also, filtering. You cannot withstand the same stream of info and notifications from Slack as you can from email, becaus…

I can find Slack conversations from years ago just fine, also link a lot to Slack in our ticketing system which is very useful. So for me Slack has become a second memory for technical and other details.

No useful threading in Slack, which is still one of its silliest issues. You must be using a paid version of Slack to see messages from a long time ago, as they have a limit on the no-cost version. This probably makes you dependent on your employer. When one switches between channels in Slack, oh boy is that think laggy! Sometimes I can wait for 5s, before the thing has switched, on a fairly modern CPU and up to date browser. In Thunderbird I can switch to saved searches and folders seemingly no matter how many e-mails I have in there in what seems to be perhaps 100 milliseconds. Lets face it: Slack is hopelessly bloated slow and laggy to no end. E-mail does not have these issues, if you use the right tools, as in not using anything like MS Office 265 Outlook to access e-mails, because that is broken in similar ways.

Re: Just Use Email – How to Use Email for Everything

#186

Post by johnchristopher »

paxys wrote: post #3

I'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…

> Do you just hate having friends in general?

Isn't that a social counter-argument ?

Re: Just Use Email – How to Use Email for Everything

#188

Post by bccdee »

johnchristopher wrote: post #186
paxys wrote: post #3

I'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…

> Do you just hate having friends in general? Isn't that a social counter-argument ?

I think it's fair to respond that way to someone who said group chats are "distracting and of little value."

Re: Just Use Email – How to Use Email for Everything

#189

Post by cgrealy »

or.... use the appropriate medium/channel/whatever for what ever it is you're doing.

My family has a group whatsapp chat. It's mostly for sending pics of my nieces and nephews and random conversations. Email would be terrible for that.

Ditto, the literally decade old skype chat I've with friends.

You can cook a meal with a campfire. If you put enough effort into it, you might even get a better result than cooking in a kitchen. But I am not going to light a campfire every night.

Re: Just Use Email – How to Use Email for Everything

#190

Post by u801e »

Qwertious wrote: post #141
matvore wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> edit their messages days later to gasslight you That is a good point. I like to say `s/foo/bar/` to correct myself rather than edit the message. This is also important if people are receiving e-mail notifications for new messages but not for message edits.

Honestly, invisible edits are a UI problem that people really ought to solve - highlight (or in some way indicate with a color change or such) that something has been edited (and specifically, what has changed vs what is unedited in the comment). Or perhaps restrict editing, e.g. instead of being able to delete text, you can only strike through+slightly shrink+grey out text.

Not that I really like Facebook, but that's one thing they handled well with their comments. You can click on the edited link associated with a particular comment that was edited and see all versions of the comment.

So if someone edited their comment three times, you would be able to read all four versions of it.

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