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Such a clickbaity title. E-mail was meant as a replacement for the paper letter, and in this it succeeded tremendously well. It is quick, distributed, open, che

Such a clickbaity title. E-mail was meant as a replacement for the paper letter, and in this it succeeded tremendously well. It is quick, distributed, open, cheap and efficient (almost to a fault). It has been with us for decades and will still be with us after the current behemoths of the internet have sunk into their tarpits. Trouble arises when you start using e-mail for different purposes. E-mail is not chat. E-mail is not a todo-list. E-mail is not a tool for massive collaboration. Running a business using just e-mail is as absurd a proposition as running a business using only paper correspondence.

dsr_ 7y ago
Yet, in the same way that a spreadsheet is not a database, is not a data-acquisition tool, is not an application programming language: people have used email for all these purposes and not been completely unsuccessful. That's why general tools are awesome: you can do things with them that the originators didn't dream would be possible -- or desirable.
lioeters 7y ago
I agree that it's clickbaity to question whether e-mail was a mistake, when it has clearly succeeded in being adopted around the world. After decades, nothing better has replaced it - and indeed, it will continue to be a fundamental part of the Internet. That said, I've recently had to migrate a bunch of email addresses and what a pain it's been. The architecture is kind of a Rube Goldberg machine, seemingly overcomplicated. Add to that the incredible difficulty of hosting your own email server, I wish there would be some innovation to overhaul/redesign it with simplicity and ease of use in mind. > E-mail is not chat. E-mail is not a todo-list. E-mail is not a tool for massive collaboration. That sounds like a challenge: why can't we use e-mail for all those activities? I guess it would be too difficult to "bolt on" such functionality on the existing infrastructure.. The fact that people are (trying to) to use it in all these different ways suggests there are architectural limitations - not necessarily a mistake, but room for improvement or an opportunity to rethink it from the ground up. --- Edit: After having read the article, I think that the limitation of e-mail may actually be an advantange. I love asynchronous communication because there's not an expectation to "be on call" and answer immediately. If e-mail was redesigned to support activities like chatting and real-time collaboration, it would lose the "async" nature of it, and people would just expect instant replies. I can't stand using chat during work, it's an invitation for anyone to interrupt my thinking process. So, stay clunky e-mail, please take your time!

dsr_ 7y ago

Yet, in the same way that a spreadsheet is not a database, is not a data-acquisition tool, is not an application programming language: people have used email for all these purposes and not been completely unsuccessful. That's why general tools are awesome: you can do things with them that the originators didn't dream would be possible -- or desirable.

lioeters 7y ago

I agree that it's clickbaity to question whether e-mail was a mistake, when it has clearly succeeded in being adopted around the world. After decades, nothing better has replaced it - and indeed, it will continue to be a fundamental part of the Internet. That said, I've recently had to migrate a bunch of email addresses and what a pain it's been. The architecture is kind of a Rube Goldberg machine, seemingly overcomplicated. Add to that the incredible difficulty of hosting your own email server, I wish there would be some innovation to overhaul/redesign it with simplicity and ease of use in mind. > E-mail is not chat. E-mail is not a todo-list. E-mail is not a tool for massive collaboration. That sounds like a challenge: why can't we use e-mail for all those activities? I guess it would be too difficult to "bolt on" such functionality on the existing infrastructure.. The fact that people are (trying to) to use it in all these different ways suggests there are architectural limitations - not necessarily a mistake, but room for improvement or an opportunity to rethink it from the ground up. --- Edit: After having read the article, I think that the limitation of e-mail may actually be an advantange. I love asynchronous communication because there's not an expectation to "be on call" and answer immediately. If e-mail was redesigned to support activities like chatting and real-time collaboration, it would lose the "async" nature of it, and people would just expect instant replies. I can't stand using chat during work, it's an invitation for anyone to interrupt my thinking process. So, stay clunky e-mail, please take your time!