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There is really only one fundamental problem with email: its mechanism for managing who takes part in the conversation is all wrong for team communication. The
by mumblemumble 6y ago
There is really only one fundamental problem with email: its mechanism for managing who takes part in the conversation is all wrong for team communication. The symptoms of this problem are myriad: reply-all storms, cya-by-cc, replying to a 5 month old email rather than starting a new thread, fyi forwards, etc.
Which isn't to say that all the advantages you list for email are not true. They are. It's just that most people will shy away from an otherwise-decent solution if it has terrible UX.
- throw14082020 6y agoThere are many problems with email, not just one. Sure, we have SPF, DKIM, DMARC and S/MIME, but they're not used by most people. Especially the most important one, S/MIME (to encrypt your messages/ keep them private).
- fractionalhare 6y agoI'm surprised if that's actually true. I would guess that most peoples' personal and work email accounts are managed through providers like Google or Microsoft, which do enforce all of those security protocols.
- GekkePrutser 6y agoTheir business products definitely don't enforce S/MIME by default (which is prohibitively difficult with external contacts anyway), and they recommend to set up the things like SPF and DKIM. They usually don't host your DNS so they can't do it for you (though they do tell you exactly what to set and provide a checker to see if you did it right!)
- franga2000 6y agoAll but the last are used by everyone as it is basically impossible for mail to be accepted reliably from an email server that doesn't have those set up correctly. As for S/MIME, certificates are a pain to deal with for most people and all they really care about is transport-level, not E2E encryption.
- swiley 6y agoMost things I've seen require/enforce S/MIME.
- selfhoster11 6y agoSPF, DKIM and DMARC are mandatory if you want to interact with the big email providers. In practice, you really want to set these up.
- fiddlerwoaroof 6y agoSome of these are solved by things like a corporate NNTP server or mailing lists, right?
- mumblemumble 6y agoNot really, because it still doesn't give people sufficiently fine-grained control over demands on their attention. I think the ideal is the approach you get with discussion forums: Create a set of boards organized around topics, and place named, threaded conversations within those boards. People can join a board, in which case they will be able to get a list of new conversations related to that board's topic. They can then subscribe to just the conversations that interest them, and unsubscribe from ones that cease to be of interest.
- fiddlerwoaroof 6y agoWhat’s the difference between that sort of topics and news groups or mailing lists (with archives)? If I want information on something, subscribe; if I don’t want information, unsubscribe: I can always follow/search the archive (or read digests)
- fennecfoxen 6y agoThe archive on NNTP is a first-class artifact that you can interact with in your newsreader via NNTP. You can do things like reply to old threads. The archive on a mailing list is a second-class artifact, typically hosted via HTTP, and usually people don't care about the quality of the archive's UX. The structural organization on NNTP is also a first-class artifact that everyone can refer to. A mailing list will go straight into everyone's inbox, with all their other mail, until they filter it away.
- pseudalopex 6y agoIMAP and Exchange support archives and subscriptions.
- 6y ago
- hn_asker 6y agoI hate it when I'm emailing someone with a deliberately long response and by the time I send, the thread has already gone on and I have to re-merge it.
- thesuitonym 6y agoThe obvious solution here is to not merge the whole thread into your email, instead including only the parts of the message that are directly relevant.
- ryandrake 6y agoI’d like to see email clients offer a nice one-click “rebase on top of latest” button.
- tehjoker 6y agoDang. I never thought of email like that, but I wonder if email+git+UI would help for complex conversations.
- vinw 6y agoSounds a little bit like Google Wave.
- zikzak 6y agoNow I'm sad.
- qwantim1 6y agoWave seemed to me to be an unimaginative copy of other threaded comment implementations. The indentations seemed to waste valuable space on each page. Allowing anyone to edit anyone’s post seemed insecure. If I hadn’t known it was Google, I would’ve thought it to be a bad college project.
- swiley 6y agoIdk about the company you work at or projects you watch but most people know how to use mailing lists.
- brodie 6y agoI can't speak to how good or effective it is, but the issues you mentioned are, I think, why the rust-lang community communicates through Zulip (instead of email, IRC, etc).
- extrememota 6y agoWhat's wrong with mailing lists?