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Why can't email do this? Serious question, I've never understood why people refuse to use email for chat. Everybody has email, we don't need to convince people

Why can't email do this? Serious question, I've never understood why people refuse to use email for chat. Everybody has email, we don't need to convince people to adopt it or agree on a provider. It should be perfect, and yet for some reason we don't use it for this. Does anybody have any thoughts on this?

bradbatt 8y ago
Because so many other things come into email – marketing emails, notifications, work-related emails, etc. that people don't check it as often. Texting and other chat applications are instant. Email used to be a more instantaneous thing, but it has evolved into something that many people want to take a break from, so sending an email might mean that the recipient doesn't see it for hours or days.
- clusmore 8y ago
  This isn't a fault of email but the way we use it. I think what you're really saying is that we like to keep personal chat separate from impersonal spam, and I agree with this 100%. Couldn't we do this by keeping two separate email accounts? I just feel like we have spent thousands of man-years trying to come up with the one chat application to rule them all that everybody will adopt, that has no privacy concerns, that doesn't rely on a single service provider, meanwhile email is right under our noses.
- tonyarkles 8y ago
  Texting and chat applications being instant is a downside sometimes, in that people have questions that they want an answer to, but won’t send an email because of the reasons you listed. Instead they send you an instant message, and the expectation is generally an instant response. I’m trying really hard to get people to use email again for questions that they need answered but not immediately. But I seem to be losing that battle.
  - stjohnswarts 8y ago
    This is why I treat IM at work the same as email. I show up as unavailable and check a few times a day. If someone really needs me instantly they can come to my cube.
TylerE 8y ago
Because multiparty email sucks (CC/BCC hell), and the delivery is not particularly real time.
Erlich_Bachman 8y ago
Emails are just "bigger" entities, in the minds of people than chat messages. They are more massive to use, and for some communications something smaller, simpler is just a better fit. The "bigness" of an email come from the most usual workflows in mail programs: to respond you have to go through 2-3 clicks first, you usually have to wait some small time for sending them, the contents are usually bigger, there are quotations automatically added, there are signatures, there are more buttons and fields and options in the window - the whole thing is just more massive.
rahoulb 8y ago
Because you end up with emails that are 24 pages long as the entire history is included in there, because it doesn’t thread properly and 90% of the email I receive is meaningless crap that I just delete or spam (which in turn means that my daughters generation only use it to sign up for services which send them crap so they use it even less)
- ktosobcy 8y ago
  this is more a problem with misuse and not email itself. * actual threading is better as you always see to which mail the reply belong (except for the retarded Gmail conversation view...) * quoting - if you are doing 'char like then turn it off / remove), for more in-depth discussions it's very handy. * keep your address private and sane - I rarely receive spam and if some website sends me crap I unsubscribe (or cancel account). there is a' delta chat app that uses email as 'backend' and it works quite well)
  - u801e 8y ago
    > this is more a problem with misuse and not email itself. That's true, but the vast majority of users misuse email and the vast majority of clients do not bother with properly threading it. So conversations become very cumbersome. On usenet, it was easy to have threads that were hundreds of posts long with multiple conversations going on, and pretty easy to jump into one of the subthreads to post a response. Email could be the same way, but not with the way things are today.
    - ktosobcy 8y ago
      But usenet and email use the same technique for threading (message-ids and refs). It works like a charm in Thunderbird and Outlook for example. The problem is that this seems to complex for "regular Joe" so more and more providers are ending up with "conversation view" where they group all mails in single thread and then display it in linear way, which is "odd" to say the least…
  - rahoulb 8y ago
    If you want it to become common place then it has to be easier to use it "correctly" than "wrongly".
deleted 8y ago
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bradbatt 8y ago

Because so many other things come into email – marketing emails, notifications, work-related emails, etc. that people don't check it as often. Texting and other chat applications are instant. Email used to be a more instantaneous thing, but it has evolved into something that many people want to take a break from, so sending an email might mean that the recipient doesn't see it for hours or days.

clusmore 8y ago
This isn't a fault of email but the way we use it. I think what you're really saying is that we like to keep personal chat separate from impersonal spam, and I agree with this 100%. Couldn't we do this by keeping two separate email accounts? I just feel like we have spent thousands of man-years trying to come up with the one chat application to rule them all that everybody will adopt, that has no privacy concerns, that doesn't rely on a single service provider, meanwhile email is right under our noses.
tonyarkles 8y ago
Texting and chat applications being instant is a downside sometimes, in that people have questions that they want an answer to, but won’t send an email because of the reasons you listed. Instead they send you an instant message, and the expectation is generally an instant response. I’m trying really hard to get people to use email again for questions that they need answered but not immediately. But I seem to be losing that battle.
- stjohnswarts 8y ago
  This is why I treat IM at work the same as email. I show up as unavailable and check a few times a day. If someone really needs me instantly they can come to my cube.

TylerE 8y ago

Because multiparty email sucks (CC/BCC hell), and the delivery is not particularly real time.

Erlich_Bachman 8y ago

Emails are just "bigger" entities, in the minds of people than chat messages. They are more massive to use, and for some communications something smaller, simpler is just a better fit. The "bigness" of an email come from the most usual workflows in mail programs: to respond you have to go through 2-3 clicks first, you usually have to wait some small time for sending them, the contents are usually bigger, there are quotations automatically added, there are signatures, there are more buttons and fields and options in the window - the whole thing is just more massive.

rahoulb 8y ago

Because you end up with emails that are 24 pages long as the entire history is included in there, because it doesn’t thread properly and 90% of the email I receive is meaningless crap that I just delete or spam (which in turn means that my daughters generation only use it to sign up for services which send them crap so they use it even less)

ktosobcy 8y ago
this is more a problem with misuse and not email itself. * actual threading is better as you always see to which mail the reply belong (except for the retarded Gmail conversation view...) * quoting - if you are doing 'char like then turn it off / remove), for more in-depth discussions it's very handy. * keep your address private and sane - I rarely receive spam and if some website sends me crap I unsubscribe (or cancel account). there is a' delta chat app that uses email as 'backend' and it works quite well)
- u801e 8y ago
  > this is more a problem with misuse and not email itself. That's true, but the vast majority of users misuse email and the vast majority of clients do not bother with properly threading it. So conversations become very cumbersome. On usenet, it was easy to have threads that were hundreds of posts long with multiple conversations going on, and pretty easy to jump into one of the subthreads to post a response. Email could be the same way, but not with the way things are today.
  - ktosobcy 8y ago
    But usenet and email use the same technique for threading (message-ids and refs). It works like a charm in Thunderbird and Outlook for example. The problem is that this seems to complex for "regular Joe" so more and more providers are ending up with "conversation view" where they group all mails in single thread and then display it in linear way, which is "odd" to say the least…
- rahoulb 8y ago
  If you want it to become common place then it has to be easier to use it "correctly" than "wrongly".

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]