Also people have been been trained to misuse email. My coworkers, who are all in IT, can't quote correctly. I am bewildered by the level of ignorance of what email has to offered shown by some comments here. How to stop receiving messages? Well, just make a filter if you don't want to hurt the sender's feelings.
I blame it on the webmail wave that offered to the newbie Internet users of the nineties poor interfaces to email. People used it and said: "email sucks". No, that's just webmail that sucked. And stills sucks compared to native clients (except for Outlook that equally sucks in a different way).
When you take a good look at email it is the ideal medium for social micro-networks:
- no registration, no opt-in. All you need to start a conversation is an email address.
- no vendor lock-in: thousands of email clients exist, on all platforms.
- with a decent client, you manage your messages the way you want, not the way some company wants.
Let's put it differently: how to create a social micro-network in three easy steps:
1. Get the email addresses of the people you want to talk with
2. Send them an email when you want to say something
3. (optional) write a blog post about how to use group email well and put it in your signature.
Also, although I dislike it for it is often misused and abused, HTML-mail covers 99% of fancy formatting needs.
> What people have come to expect of social media, of forums, etc. does not translate particularly well to email.
Agreed. Email is for communication. Social media are for fun, distraction and procrastination. Social media are MMORPGs.