4 ms·

The technology exists for communicating anyone over the internet - its called email and we've done 20 years of work to prevent spam.

danaliv 6y ago
My email is useless. It's become so clogged with automated notifications that I legitimately can't sift out the useful stuff. I can barely even manage to reliably find all the messages sent by actual humans. I've tried everything I can think of, to no avail. No combination of configurations, rules, or filtering fixes this problem for longer than a week. Even if I do manage to turn the eighty gazillion auto-emailing systems down to a dull roar, somehow they manage to ramp themselves back up again. The problem with email isn't email, it's that we've tried to make it do double-duty as a communications medium and a push notification system. These are different things and they shouldn't be in the same stream. As much as I dislike Slack, et al. for being just another distraction I have to check and keep up with, they did manage to isolate communications from the noise for a little while. Of course, because we can't help ourselves, on day two everyone started writing Slack bots to channel notifications into the chat.
- anaerobicover 6y ago
  Perhaps having your own email domain and therefore many accounts would be a solution? A secondary problem with email is that businesses/web services (free greeting cards, etc.) encourage friends and family to sign you up for junk mail. But I have no idea how to fix that.
  - danaliv 6y ago
    Can’t send work email to my personal account, so that’s out.
freewilly1040 6y ago
The spammers have been at work for 20 years as well. Not exactly a success story.
- systemvoltage 6y ago
  It is exactly the opposite. It is a success story given how wide spread the use of Email is. Wait until spammers start a campaign on Slack open invites.
  - fragmede 6y ago
    It depends how you define success. I don’t get much, if any, email trying to sell me v1xagra anymore, but functionally email is where messages go to die. Inbox zero is laughably out of reach, with between 1,000 and 10,000 unread emails, depending on the last time I declared email bankruptcy. You can blame this situation on me, but I’m not alone here, so blaming me doesn’t solve anything, fixing email with better tools does. In my ideal world, Google would have doubled down on Inbox rather than the other way around.

danaliv 6y ago

My email is useless. It's become so clogged with automated notifications that I legitimately can't sift out the useful stuff. I can barely even manage to reliably find all the messages sent by actual humans. I've tried everything I can think of, to no avail. No combination of configurations, rules, or filtering fixes this problem for longer than a week. Even if I do manage to turn the eighty gazillion auto-emailing systems down to a dull roar, somehow they manage to ramp themselves back up again. The problem with email isn't email, it's that we've tried to make it do double-duty as a communications medium and a push notification system. These are different things and they shouldn't be in the same stream. As much as I dislike Slack, et al. for being just another distraction I have to check and keep up with, they did manage to isolate communications from the noise for a little while. Of course, because we can't help ourselves, on day two everyone started writing Slack bots to channel notifications into the chat.

anaerobicover 6y ago
Perhaps having your own email domain and therefore many accounts would be a solution? A secondary problem with email is that businesses/web services (free greeting cards, etc.) encourage friends and family to sign you up for junk mail. But I have no idea how to fix that.
- danaliv 6y ago
  Can’t send work email to my personal account, so that’s out.

freewilly1040 6y ago

The spammers have been at work for 20 years as well. Not exactly a success story.

systemvoltage 6y ago
It is exactly the opposite. It is a success story given how wide spread the use of Email is. Wait until spammers start a campaign on Slack open invites.
- fragmede 6y ago
  It depends how you define success. I don’t get much, if any, email trying to sell me v1xagra anymore, but functionally email is where messages go to die. Inbox zero is laughably out of reach, with between 1,000 and 10,000 unread emails, depending on the last time I declared email bankruptcy. You can blame this situation on me, but I’m not alone here, so blaming me doesn’t solve anything, fixing email with better tools does. In my ideal world, Google would have doubled down on Inbox rather than the other way around.