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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

#301

Post by bccdee »

zelphirkalt wrote: post #215
bccdee wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, this person's position is totally baffling to me. > group instant messaging is, largely, distracting and of little value (more on this later) and can best be dealt with in weekly ‘batches’, if it’s required at all. I mean, I dunno about this guy, but I like interacting with my friends. I'll leave a group chat open all day on my other monitor. It's like a break room where you can chat with whoever's around, or a…

It surely is nice to be able to chat with friends during working hours. However, it seems, that this is a big source of distraction, which is unwanted in an efficient working environment. Unless of course your friends are working on the same project or you are free to discuss work details with friends outside of the project or employer. Many people are not free to do so. Many people have come to realize, that they fo…

As far as distraction goes, you can just mute your notifications and be inactive for a while. Bring up a slack window from work, and keep up-to-date with work events while tabling discussions with your friends for the time being — move from sync to async.

Granted, I'm sure some people do have trouble shifting fluidly between sync and async. I don't really have a solution to that, but in practice it hasn't been a problem for me. Maybe if I had different coworkers it would be an issue.

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

#302

Post by benhurmarcel »

chriswarbo wrote: post #299
benhurmarcel wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For example, in Spain, people will not communicate in written form with you outside Whatsapp. You can try sending an SMS, they won't answer to not risk being charged. Your friends will communicate and organize events only on Whatsapp. Your colleagues will have social interactions on Whatsapp, even send you work messages when on the go. Your landlord will communicate via Whatsapp, including sending you utility bills t…

I'm not disagreeing with this, especially the social aspects, although I would point out: > Your colleagues... even send you work messages when on the go. > Your landlord will communicate via Whatsapp, including sending you utility bills to pay. > The person you want to buy second-hand stuff from communicates via Whatsapp. The real estate agent trying to find you a place to live will send proposals by Whatsapp. In ea…

Yes, it is possible, but being seen by your peers and acquaintances as a pain in the ass is going to make your life more difficult.

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

#303

Post by jameshart »

jjav wrote: post #293
jameshart wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t understand how your client can solve for someone else sending you top-quoted replies, or word-html-engine compatible HTML designed to work in outlook. Or eighty other people hitting reply all on the email chain you’re on. The clients other people use can behave completely differently, because the protocol leaves so many decisions up to clients.

You're adding things not in the OP list I was responding to so I didn't claim that. But let's try: Reformatting top-quoted replies. This is possible with email because you can pipe the messages through any preprocessing you want. Inserting custom processing into the delivery pipeline is generally impossible with all proprietary systems, but easy with an open standard like email. HTML formatting: Again, easy due to cu…

Client support for the features you’re talking about has everything to do with the protocol. How are you threading if not based on SMTP headers? What SMTP headers are meaningful for threading? What does SMTP have to say on the subject? Nothing - because it only talks about MTA behavior not clients.

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

#304

Post by chii »

lmm wrote: post #222
darau1 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you give some examples? I've never seen any mentioned.

Email has: no shared concept of a group/channel/... no shared history support no shared concept of a thread no consistency about how previous replies are referred to (e.g. different quoting styles) no real identity support ...

> no shared concept of a group/channel/...

mailing lists

> no shared history support

Your own client or provider can store history. you also don't own someone else's history - a good feature imo.

> no consistency about how previous replies are referred to (e.g. different quoting styles)

A preference for individuals to decide.

> no real identity support

What's a "real" identity? my email address is my identity.

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

#305

Post by chii »

paxys wrote: post #120
darau1 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But those are problems with /the client/. Not the protocol.

They are all problems with the protocol, considering that the protocol doesn't define how to do any of this.

The protocol doesn't need to define any of those things. Just like HTTP doesn't define what goes on inside the viewport of the browser.

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

#306

Post by lmm »

chii wrote: post #304
lmm wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Email has: no shared concept of a group/channel/... no shared history support no shared concept of a thread no consistency about how previous replies are referred to (e.g. different quoting styles) no real identity support ...

> no shared concept of a group/channel/... mailing lists > no shared history support Your own client or provider can store history. you also don't own someone else's history - a good feature imo. > no consistency about how previous replies are referred to (e.g. different quoting styles) A preference for individuals to decide. > no real identity support What's a "real" identity? my email address is my identity.

> mailing lists

Not understood at the protocol level, not visible as such in the client.

> Your own client or provider can store history. you also don't own someone else's history - a good feature imo.

It's a nightmare in practice. Catching someone up on a conversation ends up being a mess of forwarding multiple overlapping but partially distinct emails and then constantly having to resend messages as different people get dropped in different replies. Exiting such a conversation is even harder.

> A preference for individuals to decide.

The cost is much bigger than the benefit.

> What's a "real" identity? my email address is my identity.

There's no authentication. You can't associate yourself with multiple organisations except by using multiple addresses, and then there's no way to reflect that those are somehow the same.

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

#307

Post by ApolloVonZ »

chrisandchris wrote: post #200
ApolloVonZ wrote: post #25

I'd disagree. E-Mail is useful for invoices, customer contact, first point of contact or 2nd point of contact if someone tried to reach out per Facebook etc. and a serious business relation needs to be formed. However at work we switched to Slack a while back and it was such a relieve! Trying to organize projects per mail was just horrible. Especially when you got non technical staff involved that doesn't correctly f…

One aspect I miss with Slack/Teams/IM is a good ability to postpone stuff. For example, I receive an e-mail I know I need to do something in 1-4 months. So I keep that mail in my inbox and as long as something is in the inbox, there is some work pending/due. I have not yet found a good way to do that in Slack (reliably) and not relying on another tool. E-Mail in that way is just great as a message is just a text file…

It really depends on the personal and companies workflow though. My personal email account also only has messages that I still need to deal with. However our shared accounts can get quite messy at times. Slack does have the option to set different reminders though, you can even ask Slack to remind you to go back to a specific message in let's say four months. ;) But to be honest, if there is something that needs to be done at a certain point I'd always use an actual reminder/task or calendar app. Otherwise the risk of it being overlooked, maybe because someone is sick, or there is a flood of mails from another project that day and I don't get too look at the one email I wanted to deal with today. So I guess it really depends on the workflow and the people you work with. I think flexibility is the key in adapting your workflow to everyone's abilities and the companies needs but the same time if something has been working for a specific use case, then why change it. : )

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

#308

Post by babypuncher »

chii wrote: post #305
paxys wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are all problems with the protocol, considering that the protocol doesn't define how to do any of this.

The protocol doesn't need to define any of those things. Just like HTTP doesn't define what goes on inside the viewport of the browser.

That is the problem. The protocol doesn't dictate how prior messages in a thread should be included or referenced. So any given thread is a hodgepodge of different solutions, making for an ugly, unreadable mess. Some clients try to clean this up, but it's basically an impossible task when you have no way of knowing what other clients will do.

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

#309

Post by boplicity »

_blu wrote: post #207
boplicity wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I've recently given up on running my own email server and changed to postmark. The deliverability has gone up, but most importantly I spend less time managing it.

Postmark would cost us around $10k a year. I spend maybe 10 to 20 hours in a year dealing with the server and deliverability issues. It's not clear to me that Postmark could improve our deliverability much either, as it is already pretty good. How much did it improve for you?

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

#310

Post by asmosoinio »

zelphirkalt wrote: post #185
asmosoinio wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> This probably makes you dependent on your employer.

I did not understand this.

I use Slack at work. I would assume my employer owns all the work related discussions we have and keeps that as useful documentation around many issues? And if someone leaves the company, it is a feature and not a bug that they will not have access to those internal discussions.

What is bad about this?

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