23 ms·

Just Use Email – How to Use Email for Everything

300 points by srpeck 5y ago

kitkat_new 5y ago
There is a more modern alternative* to Email: Matrix It improves significantly in security (easy E2EE) and usability (and of course functionality) while still keeping advantages like decentralization. How the protocol is used is up to you and the Matrix client (which atm is mostly chat, but I am sure one could give you a more email-like client). *ignoring the ubiquitous presence of email, which is kind of the main selling point - Matrix is still in the tens of millions
- ashton314 5y ago
  Is Matrix really that widely used? I'm a fan—I want to set up my own server one of these days when I get the time—but I get the feeling that it's still kinda niche. Who's using it? This is exciting!
  - chagaif 5y ago
    Lots of governments, Mozilla and many universities especially in Europe
paxys 5y ago
I'm on the exact opposite end of the spectrum. I haven't used email outside of work for many years now, and don't miss it one bit. And even at work most communication now happens on Slack. The digital world has evolved since 1997, and email simply hasn't kept up. I skimmed a couple articles on the blog and my biggest problem with it is that the author is making a social rather than technological argument (which are all anyways nonsensical). "Liked a movie? Don't call or IM your friend about it, email them a long form review instead." "Leave all your group texts and instead send your friends a weekly email summary of your life." Do you just hate having friends in general?
- daveslash 5y ago
  I'll give you an up-vote because I think a variety of different viewpoints is important, but I'm very much in the e-mail camp. My biggest reason is simply: it's the only ubiquitous, decentralized, open protocol that I can think of. I can run my own server if I want, an I can interact with anybody with an e-mail address. Sure, there was XMPP for IM, but that doesn't have wide adoption; same with other protocols.
  - peterpost2 5y ago
    You really can't run your on email server nowadays though, you need to have been running one for several decades otherwise the email common email providers(gmail, outlook) will automatically just assume its spam. Also due to the way extensions added to the email protocol configuring and learning how to properly configure it so it gets accepted will be a dayjob.
    - edmundsauto 5y ago
      This isn’t universally true, although your broader point (it could change at any time!) is a risk. As a data point, I have run my own email servers for years. Both professionally (couple million transactional emails per year) and for my personal. If you follow best practices (which is a pain to setup!), deliver ability is generally on par with other providers, unless you got unlucky and got a bad IP.
      - dqv 5y ago
        Mailinabox is a great package that makes the best practices very easy. I always recommend it or similar packages.
        mcbishop 5y ago
        This looks awesome, thanks.
      - fiddlerwoaroof 5y ago
Snitch-Thursday 5y ago
I'm not one for using emails for everything. Sometimes the UI / UX just doesn't go great with things like synced up messaging and besides, email leaks metadata all over. Having said that, for extremely casual messages where I'm not worried about metadata (talking to my parents, a relationship that is already apparent), I would not mind chatting over something like DeltaChat (which is on-and-off working on trying to do XMPP Conversations-style multiple account sign on in one single app) over the alternative of a group text or FB Messenger message. Metadata exists either way, might as well be on an email system I will retain long-term-access to it. The likes of Signal force you to either manually screenshot messages or copy/paste them message by message, there is no bulk unencrypted backup for mundane things like serendipitous conversations about dinner plans for funny family stories. But since DeltaChat is still somewhat locked in to a single account (preventing me from using say work and personal), I'm doing the no-change-choice and continuing to tolerate Signal.
dvt 5y ago
I don't think this kind of Luddism is useful. It's purported by the same kinds of people that, upon seeing a new SaaS, quickly retort: "couldn't you just do that with Google Docs/Word/pen and paper?" Not to mention that email absolutely sucks. The confusing threads, the forwarding, the constant CC'ing, someone making it or not making it into a list, the spam. It's absolute garbage. In fact, people have been seeking alternatives since the late 80s. IRC was a precursor to Instant Messaging/Slack that many techies favored. Not that async is some perfect communication strategy (it has its own baggage), but it definitely fills some of email's gaps. Personally, I think Google Wave was ~15 years ahead of its time, and we'll see something akin to it soon. Will the author's next big revelation be "How to use a hammer for everything?"
- sneak 5y ago
  > Not to mention that email absolutely sucks. The confusing threads, the forwarding, the constant CC'ing, someone making it or not making it into a list, the spam. It's absolute garbage. This says to me that you have bad tools for email, not that the protocol or concept sucks. If you use email like a rube, it is expected to be absolute garbage. The same goes for Facebook or Twitter or Reddit, though: you have to change a lot of settings to get a decent experience.
  - anomaloustho 5y ago
    I’d be interested to hear what good email tools look like if you have a chance to post some examples.
    - sneak 5y ago
      The good ones are fairly technical, but there are services that make them easier. Sieve or procmail filters and clients like macOS Mail.app and mutt are good ones. My main email client is macOS Mail.app and it's pretty great when configured properly in conjunction with serverside preprocessing/filtering.
      - williamtwild 5y ago
floss_silicate 5y ago
Appreciated the gigantic RSS subscription button at the bottom of the page.
adamretter 5y ago
I love this idea - I am so totally uninterested when yet another forum/IM solution is suggested to me. email works and (most) everyone has it. The last thing I want to do is install yet another client app or sign-up to some online website app. Enough already!
- saimiam 5y ago
  > (most) everyone Email is hardly a thing in India for general use. One of my interns hates email so much that he built a bot which IMs him the contents of his email to Telegram.
  - sneak 5y ago
    The fact that email is interoperable is what makes this possible. Try building a bot to forward your Facebook Messenger messages to $OTHER_PLATFORM. (Aside: if they are okay getting a push notification per email, I suggest that they are Doing It Wrong. Email serves a different purpose entirely.)
thaumaturgy 5y ago
Gmail alone currently handles over 50% of US email traffic, with Microsoft and a handful of other service providers taking up a good chunk of the other half. These large providers all use internal blacklists and filtering rules, which cannot be queried, and no support is available if you get blackholed. Worst of all, Gmail especially isn't great about tagging messages as spam; a good chunk of messages sent from outside the Gmail network simply disappear. As a Gmail user, there is nothing you can do to verify that you're getting all of the legitimate mail traffic that is being sent to you. Further, if you're trying to send any kind of business correspondence over email, you have to contend with a massive industry of scammers that are also targeting people with lookalike messages. I love the email protocol, but from a broader service standpoint, email is terribly broken right now.
- PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
  > Worst of all, Gmail especially isn't great about tagging messages as spam My experience is the exact opposite of yours - I find Gmail's spam detection absolutely amazing. I get essentially zero spam in my inbox, and perhaps 4-6 false positives in the spam folder a month. >As a Gmail user, there is nothing you can do to verify that you're getting all of the legitimate mail traffic that is being sent to you. What other communication service/protocol would allow you to do this?
  - ihattendorf 5y ago
    > perhaps 4-6 false positives in the spam folder a month That's 4-6 valid messages a month the average user will never see.
    - tkzed49 5y ago
      I disagree, I think "check your spam" is fairly widely understood.
      - anamexis 5y ago
        GGP's point is that in some circumstances, Gmail will simply disappear emails, with no trace, instead of quarantining them.
weeboid 5y ago
To put this into context and understand where the puck even is, my daughter (18 y old, freshman in college), last sent me an email in 2017. Before that, one in 2016, and one in 2015
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
arbuge 5y ago
Well, you can certainly blog using just email: https://PublicEmails.com https://PublicEmails.com. Disclaimer: it's one of my side projects.
- cameronbrown 5y ago
  I also built http://feedsub.com http://feedsub.com for RSS to inbox. There's better tools out there nowadays but I find it useful.
- ronsor 5y ago
  The site seems to be mostly full of advertising spam.
- mattowen_uk 5y ago
  I've had this idea on a back burner for a while, however having looked at your site, it's clearly being used by people for landing pages that get linked to from spam emails. If that's how these services get abused, I'm glad now I didn't waste any time on my version :(
chki 5y ago
I want to point out something from one of the articles which is so far from the truth that it somewhat undercuts the authors credibility: > For instance, if WhatsApp goes down, not only can you not send/receive messages, you won’t be able to see your old ones, and no one else on your network will be able to either. You could argue that a single email provider has the same effect, but you’d be wrong. If Gmail goes down, I can still send emails to Gmail recipients and I can still see past messages from Gmail users. Obviously you will be able to see all your WhatsApp messages when WhatsApp goes down. The same is true for Facebook Messenger and many other applications, because everything is saved locally. It's even possible to send WhatsApp messages while being offline which will then be delivered later on.
- u801e 5y ago
  > Obviously you will be able to see all your WhatsApp messages when WhatsApp goes down. The same is true for Facebook Messenger and many other applications, because everything is saved locally. It's even possible to send WhatsApp messages while being offline which will then be delivered later on. I wonder how long this has been the case. My experience in the past is that these applications are not usable without a stable internet connection. That said, email clients have a concept of an outbox where messages that were sent are placed until an internet connecton is established. At that point, those messages are actually sent to their recipients.
  - perryizgr8 5y ago
    > I wonder how long this has been the case. In the case of whatsapp, this has been true since its inception. Not sure about Messenger.
  - chki 5y ago
    >That said, email clients have a concept of an outbox where messages that were sent are placed until an internet connecton is established. At that point, those messages are actually sent to their recipients This is also possible with WhatsApp. Messages can be sent while not being online and will be delivered as soon as you go online.
ApolloVonZ 5y ago
I'd disagree. E-Mail is useful for invoices, customer contact, first point of contact or 2nd point of contact if someone tried to reach out per Facebook etc. and a serious business relation needs to be formed. However at work we switched to Slack a while back and it was such a relieve! Trying to organize projects per mail was just horrible. Especially when you got non technical staff involved that doesn't correctly forward or answer email and uses reply-all and reply interchangeably, or switches between personal and shared accounts without noticing it. Slack is not perfect but for us it did the job and still does.
- chrisandchris 5y ago
  One aspect I miss with Slack/Teams/IM is a good ability to postpone stuff. For example, I receive an e-mail I know I need to do something in 1-4 months. So I keep that mail in my inbox and as long as something is in the inbox, there is some work pending/due. I have not yet found a good way to do that in Slack (reliably) and not relying on another tool. E-Mail in that way is just great as a message is just a text file. You can put it wherever you want and reorganize it the way you want. Try to attach a slack conversation to an issue tracking system. Won‘t work. Do it with e-mail: it‘s just a text file. Try to post-pone stuff or organize information in folders. Won‘t work. Do it with e-mail, hell I can even move messages from one account to another. My point is: Slack will never replace e-mail, it is just an extension of ways we communicate. And that‘s is biggest advantage and disadvantage: it‘s a tool that makes communication sometimes easier, but is‘s also another tool I need to regularly check besides all other communication tools I already have.
  - ApolloVonZ 5y ago
    It really depends on the personal and companies workflow though. My personal email account also only has messages that I still need to deal with. However our shared accounts can get quite messy at times. Slack does have the option to set different reminders though, you can even ask Slack to remind you to go back to a specific message in let's say four months. ;) But to be honest, if there is something that needs to be done at a certain point I'd always use an actual reminder/task or calendar app. Otherwise the risk of it being overlooked, maybe because someone is sick, or there is a flood of mails from another project that day and I don't get too look at the one email I wanted to deal with today. So I guess it really depends on the workflow and the people you work with. I think flexibility is the key in adapting your workflow to everyone's abilities and the companies needs but the same time if something has been working for a specific use case, then why change it. : )
gsich 5y ago
Email is the only protocol that has widespread adoption in probably every programming language. Clients are ubiquitous. Filtering allows you to receive many mails without getting out of hand.
kulix425 5y ago
no
asciimov 5y ago
Before you go using Email for everything, check to make sure your audience can actually get your email and that it's not going to spam. --- 10 years ago, I briefly worked for an for a small business that built wordpress plugins. They had an internal message board for communication and, unknown to me, they also used email. It took me six weeks to find out that I had missed hundreds of internal emails, many of which were directed at me. This was due in part to lack of on boarding and mismanagement by my boss (who was also managed the email system). Now you may ask, why weren't you reading your email, did you not check it? You see, I checked my email religiously, couple of times an hour. But here is what happened. This company used gmail for domains. And one thing that gmail does is it hides the spam label (or doesn't put a number next to spam). I had assumed, that since I had a brand new email address and that label was either missing or didn't have a counter next to it. I wasn't getting any spam. I was getting some internal email, so I didn't think much of it. What I didn't know at the time was the internal email addresses were on the same domain as the marketing emails. They did a lot of unsolicited marketing, as such gmail automatically marked their domain as spam. Nearly every single email from the company was going into my spam folder. Worse nobody said said anything about me missing these emails (including those from the owner/CEO and the CFO). Maybe they said something to my boss, but as he wasn't happy I had been assigned to his group he probably "forgot" to mention it to me. Anyway, I am sure missing several hundred emails was one of the reasons I wasn't retained passed my probationary period. The big takeaways: 1. Don't do marketing from the same domain as internal email 2. Use a different domain for internal email 3. Always check the spam folder. 4. If you consistently don't hear from someone through email, ask them if they are receiving your email.
- leephillips 5y ago
  After reading your story the obvious takeaway for me was 0. Don’t use Gmail. Use a real email client.
ocdtrekkie 5y ago
I get really peeved when social networks don't support email notifications for posts/updates, as opposed to just replies: I'd rather manage people's posts in an inbox, where I can pick through at my leisure than in an algorithmic feed. I used to stress about seeing all the updates since the last time I was on a given site.
zelly 5y ago
Website looks entirely as one would expect
alex_young 5y ago
Just use email - except to make your point about just using email. For that, you need a blog.
a3n 5y ago
Email isn't owned by anyone. It will always be there as a refuge for people when the owners of the current platform turn the frog kettle up too fast.
Barrin92 5y ago
I went to the post about answers to common objections but I was surprised that I did not find one of the bigger ones. Email is a pretty big disaster for communication that needs to stay secret, even encrypted mail. (https://latacora.micro.blog/2020/02/19/stop-using-encrypted.html https://latacora.micro.blog/2020/02/19/stop-using-encrypted....)
chagaif 5y ago
Why not link directly to his article? His website is beautiful
macintux 5y ago
The first blog linked from there is astonishing. https://explained-from-first-principles.com/email/ https://explained-from-first-principles.com/email/
- fouc 5y ago
  Wow yes. I hope they add more articles.. only email & internet so far
zmmmmm 5y ago
Sadly email is starting to die as the universal protocol for communication it used to be. My organisation has now implemented so many filters and blocks that a huge range of simple things are just broken now. It's pretty hard to send an attachment through other than a few predefined doc types that wont get physically removed by the spam filter. Every link gets re-written in some horribly mangled way and virtually clicked that often causes undesirable side effects. Giant warnings and labels get inserted into the body text telling me this or that is suspicious, and subject lines are frequently rewritten, breaking the feeble semblance of threading that my poor email client attempts. And meanwhile people are flocking to walled garden proprietary systems like Slack etc and saying how great they are. But half of it is to escape the monstrous mutilations that have been applied to email. Email might be like the venerable cockroach that will survive nuclear war, but it's not a healthy cockroach.
jollybean 5y ago
Email for Async/external, some kind of chat for close team Sync. Same thing for 20 years. I do appreciate a Slack channel in the right conditions.
andybp85 5y ago
dear god, why???
brongondwana 5y ago
I'd like to pop in a plug for a blog post I wrote a few years ago on this topic: https://fastmail.blog/company/email-is-your-electronic-memory/ https://fastmail.blog/company/email-is-your-electronic-memor... It was in response to Google promoting AMP for email (aka: you don't get a permanent copy of the content) - but more generally, the advantages of email aren't so much in the right now, they're in the long term searchable and immutable archive. See also the nice immediate triage features of heyhey - there's some nice stuff in there, but long term their users are going to find that they're living in the moment and not building the value that's stored in the data to the same extent that users of more traditional mailboxes do. (at least if you have decent search)
miguelrochefort 5y ago
Email makes a great universal inbox. Instead of installing and/or visiting 100 different apps and services daily, I just redirect all notifications to my email (Reddit, HN, Discord, Matrix, Zulip, Mattermost, Slack, Discourse, Matrix, YouTube, StackExchange, VoIP.ms, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, bank, forums, etc). For news websites I refresh all the time, I set up weekly digests. For important keywords and mentions, I set up instant alerts. It’s easy to setup rules and filters for emails. Except for specific emails that trigger a notification on my phone (confirm registration, verification codes, security alerts, IM messages, important people), I only check my email once a day, and make sure to process it down to inbox zero (with the occasional email snooze). Having a single inbox to worry about has improved my quality of life a lot. Feel free to share or ask about specific tools for email digests, mention/reply notifications, and keyword alerts.
magwa101 5y ago
Email, yes. It involves reading and writing. It takes time, like anything. It can have threads. It's searchable. SMS/instant messaging is great for "there in 2 minutes", even then, why not email? In the end the internet wants to sell you the next big thing to cure your overload woes. But you can't replace the need for thought.
cuddlybacon 5y ago
It's funny this came up today, since I have a 1 hour section of my workday blocked of for my bi-annual email filter refactoring. Email is by far the most broken software experience of my life. I've been thinking that for a while. Now by broken, I don't mean the software doesn't work as intended. I mean that the software can't let me manage things the way I want. The alternatives (eg MS Teams) by very much not perfect, but at least get me closer than I can with an email client. Here are some specific things I find suck: 1. There isn't any that indicates why I'm receiving this email. Sometimes that's not obvious. Could it be I'm BCCed? Or maybe I'm on a mailing list, that's on a mailing list, that's on a mailing list? Or maybe it's both! 1a. If I receive an email due to being BCCed, my email filters won't work at all. 1b. In the case of a mailing list containing a mailing list, I have to manually create separate rules for both the parent and child lists and keep them in sync. 2. Email filters scale poorly. Hence why I end up needing to refactor them twice a year. This analogy is a bit of a stretch but: email filters are like programming where everything must be in a giant switch statement, but you are also allowed if statements and goto for extra control flow. It's not a perfect analogy, it breaks as you look more closely at the details, but I think both result in similar problems cropping up. 3. You are stuck choosing between highly limited server rules that affect all clients, or client only rules that only change things for the current client. I want to be able to look at my email from my desktop client, my phone, or a web browser and see the same thing in all 3 places. So I am stuck with the crippled server rules. 4. Smart folders come close to being able to replace the majority of my email rules, but not quite. The implementations I've played with are all missing something. I do think they'd be an improvement in the cases they are applicable. 5. Emails don't contain any hints at what kind of email they are. I believe they could, via headers, but they don't. An email is an email is an email. Well, every client I've used has special handling for meeting invites. I think this should be expanded. I find in practical use there are a few "types" or "kinds" of emails. Things like a broadcast vs a question vs a meeting invite vs a request for volunteers vs etc. Having a bunch of different types of messages baked in with different defaults for each, would likely remove half the email rules I have. 6. Marked as read and notifications are too simple. But here I at least understand that addressing the issue gets complex very quickly[0]. Maybe being able to snooze an email would help me here, but I've never used a client with snooze. Do these clients with snooze generally let you see the queue of snoozed items and process them early if you'd like to? 7. I can't block people. Creating a rule that auto-deletes emails is not quite the same as blocking. Besides these technical ones, there are a few cultural ones as well. 1. Email has a culture of BCCing people "to be polite". As mentioned in 1a above, my rules don't work on these emails, so they end up being less polite in practice. 2. Email has a culture of including everyone who might be relevant just in case. Mostly this just drives the signal to noise ratio down. It is end of business hours for me now, and I've received 175 emails so far today. I maybe needed to read 15 of those. 3. Since email rules exist, people will default to blaming the receiver for not having a rule. If I spam @everyone or @here in MS Teams or Slack people blame me for spamming. In email land, I find people will first get mad at the receivers for not liking the spam I am sending them. Bizarre! 4. A portion of the email world takes a hardline stance on email by asynchronous communication. Sometimes you need a synchronous conversation. Sometimes you have something that is urgent. Yes, I'm aware flow exists and can be quite brittle for some people. It is sometimes worth breaking it. That was quite cathartic to write. Email has been the least pleasant piece of my software life for years now. With work, I just have to deal with it as best as I can (you'll notice most complaints above are work centric). But outside of work I definitely try to minimize my usage. [0] - Slack's notification flowchart. As complex as it seems, I don't consider this over-engineered. https://d34u8crftukxnk.cloudfront.net/slackpress/prod/sites/7/0_PV_09olld6K1l8jQ.png https://d34u8crftukxnk.cloudfront.net/slackpress/prod/sites/...
paulpauper 5y ago
email is almsot useless for social networks. they now req. phone
izgzhen 5y ago
I don’t want to dismiss the author’s point. But here is a related point: Choosing what tool to communicate is a social decision, not a personal one. You can’t prove the tool X is more effective way to communicate by just using it yourself.
- jesterson 5y ago
  Agree with your point, and email does succeed here just because it's ubiquitous. You don't need to check do you what whatsapp? Telegram? Oh I don't use this or that because of privacy, etc. Email give you a FREEDOM to use anything you want with it because it was developed at times when data farming wasn't the main goal for big tech. That's why in most cases we just ask for email address.
alfiedotwtf 5y ago
Today was the first time I asked my son (10yo) to email me something. His response was "yuk". I think that's the new generation's attitude towards email - old and dated, and that unless they need it for work, would prefer other means of communication.
bgroat 5y ago
I frequently tell coworkers and clients that *nothing* is more urgent than an email, but less urgent than a phone call.
- nikisweeting 5y ago
  Not sure I follow? I feel like most IM apps get more urgent/timely responses from most people than email, but are still less urgent than phone calls.
bharani_m 5y ago
I'd like to plug in a small tool that I run. It's called EmailThis and it brings bookmarking/read-later functionality(similar to Pocket and Instapaper) to your email inbox. [0] https://www.emailthis.me https://www.emailthis.me
cutler 5y ago
If it were not for Google and Microsoft effectively gatekeeping SMTP I'd support the OP's proposition but it's been years since I gave-up running Postfix + Dovecot on Linux VM's simply due to the mindless thuggery of Outlook/Hotmail and Gmail. Google has effectively become the unelected dictator of the internet.
- e3bc54b2 5y ago
  Oh the majority elected Gmail alright. They just weren't aware they were electing a dictator, and that the term was for life.
hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
Ok, emotional me really hated this site, so rational me will try to calm down a bit and explain why. I started with the "Dislikes about email are Questionable" post, which was perhaps my mistake, but every point in that post had a dripping "I'm sorry peasant, you're doing it wrong" vibe to it. I can fully understand why someone may choose to use email over other forms of communication, but to be incredibly dismissive of problems other people have with the medium, while furthermore often not even addressing some of the root frustrations people have, is incredibly condescending. Take the "email is unreliable" point. You can write all the missives you want about how email is the most reliable form of communication known to man, at the end of the day a huge number of messages can get "sent" which never make it to the intended recipient for a myriad of reasons. And furthermore, pretty much everyone has had an experience where this has happened.
- nikisweeting 5y ago
  I started with that post as well, and had a similar reaction. Also I find it misses most of the real points against email and focuses on the relatively minor ones. - email enforces much higher latency communication, which maybe good sometimes, but most of the time is not helpful - much more difficult to actually keep track of a threaded conversation with multiple concurrent subtrees, it's a stack when instead you want a tree like Zulip / Slack threads. quote replying a subthread in an email tree without disrupting convos in the rest is a painful experience even in the nicest clients. - file attachment and embed preview experience is worse than most modern IM apps - no emoji reactions, these are huge for efficient async communication without spamming everyone with notifications
a012 5y ago
This ticks me in the right place. Where I work we're already using Gsuite like the rest of the world, and then for some reasons the director board decided to move _everything_ company communication to FB's Workplace. And when pandemic hits, everybody have to actively watch for announcements/notices on Workplace, because it's the only place that they send out messages. So why not just send notices to all@company.com email address and everybody got it instantly if the message is too important? They post it on Workplace and mark it Important, then FB sends a brief emails to everybody teasing half of the post. Again, why not just use email?
PostThisTooFast 5y ago
E-mail.
jesterson 5y ago
Absolutely agree with the author. There is simply no alternative for information exchange which is so ubiquitous, not locking you to specific vendor who loves to do data farming on you. Extremely reliable and flexible. For years there have been different projects claiming to be "email kiilers", however email is still there and most of those projects have been long forgotten.
sedachv 5y ago
With the proper gateways you can literally use e-mail for everything: http://www.faqs.org/faqs/internet-services/access-via-email/ http://www.faqs.org/faqs/internet-services/access-via-email/ https://archive.org/details/internetbyemail00shir https://archive.org/details/internetbyemail00shir https://web.archive.org/web/20001109163400/http://www.expita.com:80/ https://web.archive.org/web/20001109163400/http://www.expita...
cgrealy 5y ago
or.... use the appropriate medium/channel/whatever for what ever it is you're doing. My family has a group whatsapp chat. It's mostly for sending pics of my nieces and nephews and random conversations. Email would be terrible for that. Ditto, the literally decade old skype chat I've with friends. You can cook a meal with a campfire. If you put enough effort into it, you might even get a better result than cooking in a kitchen. But I am not going to light a campfire every night.
- twobitshifter 5y ago
  what about email is terrible for that? Email can do everything WhatsApp can, look at these 2 email clients: https://www.spikenow.com/ https://www.spikenow.com/ https://delta.chat/en/ https://delta.chat/en/
  - cgrealy 5y ago
    It can, but it generally doesn't. Compared to whatsapp, for this use case, it's a crap user experience. I am not going to convince my elderly mother to use a new email client. She literally does not even know what an email client is.
approxim8ion 5y ago
I love email, it's great for long letters and so. That said, I have trouble (further) adopting and especially recommending a fundamentally insecure and flawed medium like email in 2021 when clearly technically superior channels of communication exist. Signal, Matrix etc are not 1:1 replacements for email at all, but when it comes down to it, they are simpler and more secure.
- twobitshifter 5y ago
  If you go back to the beginning of email you’ll see it was the simplest invention possible. you@domain.com was just your user account on an actual Unix computer. Mail messages were appended to a text file in a folder for each user. Somebody could get your IP address/email if they had your machine in their host file, but at that time you didn’t have to worry about spam, viruses, or eavesdropping. You didn’t even need POP or IMAP, since messages were sent directly to the machine that you had access to. This is still possible, but nobody has a static IP or hosts their own mail server.
  - approxim8ion 5y ago
    Yes. Even beyond that, my understanding is that the fundamental issues with email are that: a. It is used as the basis for setting up a lot of accounts, but there is no clear way to establish identity with an email account. b. SMTP is very dated, and the large amounts of metadata (if not the entire body of every mail as well) that goes through it is doomed to be in plaintext forever c. Encryption is far from standard, PGP is very clunky and has problems of its own, and just doesn't have adoption. It works, somewhat, but it's not really good enough.
jonnydubowsky 5y ago
Evernote uses a custom email address to route whatever media, link or text you want to send, to the specific notebook you select in your email subject. This is one of my favorite uses of email. You are given a unique email address that is linked to your account and defaults to your default notebook. The formatting of the email subject lets you choose any notebook as the destination for your email. You can also create a new notebook by simply adding a new notebook name after the "@" symbol. You can add in hashtags to the email subject, after @notebook. These tags are included in the note and immediately searchable. Simply add #planning or whatever existing tag you find useful. You can also create a brand new tag straight from email. Using “!” then the full date and you can activate reminders. Does anyone have any other apps or workflows that use this type of content-addressing? Is that an accurate description for what this is? a content addressable macro? I'd love it if Roam had a similar feature for emailing content into a specific block. I found this short blog post that outlines this email feature if anyone is interested in checking it out : https://link.medium.com/kiGPjqWSbgb https://link.medium.com/kiGPjqWSbgb
- twobitshifter 5y ago
  Remember the milk is similar for scheduling tasks and reminders called “smart add” Evernote may have got the idea there. https://www.rememberthemilk.com/services/email/ https://www.rememberthemilk.com/services/email/
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
aulin 5y ago
My biggest gripe with email today is that it's become normal, at least in my current line of work, to leave emails unreplied. You write detailed and thoughtful messages, with direct questions and point of discussions, and you get an ack on IM or passing by the corridors
jasonkester 5y ago
If Instant Messaging were a Thing, I'd be happy to use it. But it's not. IM is twelve things. And they're a different 12 things at different times. And you need to have clients for all of them installed and check all 12 of those clients regularly for messages. Email, on the other hand, really is a Thing. I can check my mail and be done. Fix that for IM and I'm there. Or rather, fix that again for IM and convince all the major players not to drop support for the common protocol again and you'll get me back.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
shoto_io 5y ago
We decided to start shoto as newsletter instead doing an app because of some of the reason mentioned on the site. Everyone has an email account to begin with and they check their emails daily. I personally love email.
rikkipitt 5y ago
I've been hacking on a project to make email a little more asynchronous as I took use it for everything. I love email, but the constant inbound pings make it a direct line to me/my time. In that sense, email is broken and I'm hoping to help change that and allow people to focus more effectively. Paced Email * is a service that buffers emails and send them to you in one go at a time of your choosing either daily, weekly or monthly. The aliases can be created on the fly too e.g. johndoe.hackernews@daily.paced.email. * https://www.paced.email https://www.paced.email
wink 5y ago
I wonder why no one ever mentions my big problem with solutions other than email: archiving and backup. Let's play dumb here, back with POP3 if you configured it to leave the messages the server already had a copy. If you use IMAP you can still have a local copy. (I'm not saying these are valid backup strategies, but if all else fails it's still a decentral copy). But more importantly, importing and exporting to different email clients and hosts (and even different IMAP server) is varying degrees of work, but it is doable EASILY by default. I can't be the only one keeping 15-18 years of email history and regularly referring back and searching for stuff there? (could be 5 more years but I was careless and didn't properly backup and maybe it's still on some medium...) Even with matrix, the completely open new hip thing I don't see a good archival strategy by anyone except "somehow keeping logs" like on IRC. Maybe DB backups if it's your own instance. Not cool, but at least possible. And don't even get me started on all the other messengers here. Sometimes the backup works (via Android and maybe iOS) but not always and it's surely not open or accessible. I'm actually not using email for a lot of private communication these days, but mostly because most of my communication to friends isn't really worth saving (except for logs in matrix/irc channels), I've never been a fan of formal emails between friends. But it's perfect to ask a random question to a semi-stranger. Surely beats Twitter DMs by a mile.
- leephillips 5y ago
  “I can't be the only one keeping 15-18 years of email history and regularly referring back and searching for stuff there?” You are not alone.
magwa101 5y ago
"Instant" messaging promotes the illusion that others are doing nothing but waiting to respond to us.
MaxBarraclough 5y ago
I'm reminded of Drew DeVault's case for making SourceHut so email-driven, and less web-driven than, say, GitHub. https://sourcehut.org/blog/2020-10-29-how-mailing-lists-prevent-censorship/ https://sourcehut.org/blog/2020-10-29-how-mailing-lists-prev...
Balgair 5y ago
Aside: I'm reminded of this law: Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can. - jwz's Law of Software Envelopment How true it is even years later
gcells 5y ago
Like most people, I use both. Email however has better tooling IMO around high volumes. IM starts becoming a problem once you reach volumes of ~2K messages per day. As soon as you have few hundred channels or groups in non business oriented messengers like whatsapp, missing critical/important messages cannot be avoided. Skipping certain lists/groups, training your spam filter etc is at least available when you use email.
blaydator 5y ago
> Using email as a reminder and productivity task list I am using emails as a reminder tool for a long time and it’s very efficient as the first thing I do in the morning is to check my inbox. I have even built an app to email myself in one tap or with Siri : https://boomerang-app.io https://boomerang-app.io

300 points by srpeck 5y ago

There is a more modern alternative* to Email: Matrix It improves significantly in security (easy E2EE) and usability (and of course functionality) while still keeping advantages like decentralization. How the protocol is used is up to you and the Matrix client (which atm is mostly chat, but I am sure one could give you a more email-like client). *ignoring the ubiquitous presence of email, which is kind of the main selling point - Matrix is still in the tens of millions

ashton314 5y ago
Is Matrix really that widely used? I'm a fan—I want to set up my own server one of these days when I get the time—but I get the feeling that it's still kinda niche. Who's using it? This is exciting!
- chagaif 5y ago
  Lots of governments, Mozilla and many universities especially in Europe

paxys 5y ago

I'm on the exact opposite end of the spectrum. I haven't used email outside of work for many years now, and don't miss it one bit. And even at work most communication now happens on Slack. The digital world has evolved since 1997, and email simply hasn't kept up. I skimmed a couple articles on the blog and my biggest problem with it is that the author is making a social rather than technological argument (which are all anyways nonsensical). "Liked a movie? Don't call or IM your friend about it, email them a long form review instead." "Leave all your group texts and instead send your friends a weekly email summary of your life." Do you just hate having friends in general?

daveslash 5y ago
I'll give you an up-vote because I think a variety of different viewpoints is important, but I'm very much in the e-mail camp. My biggest reason is simply: it's the only ubiquitous, decentralized, open protocol that I can think of. I can run my own server if I want, an I can interact with anybody with an e-mail address. Sure, there was XMPP for IM, but that doesn't have wide adoption; same with other protocols.
- peterpost2 5y ago
  You really can't run your on email server nowadays though, you need to have been running one for several decades otherwise the email common email providers(gmail, outlook) will automatically just assume its spam. Also due to the way extensions added to the email protocol configuring and learning how to properly configure it so it gets accepted will be a dayjob.
  - edmundsauto 5y ago
    This isn’t universally true, although your broader point (it could change at any time!) is a risk. As a data point, I have run my own email servers for years. Both professionally (couple million transactional emails per year) and for my personal. If you follow best practices (which is a pain to setup!), deliver ability is generally on par with other providers, unless you got unlucky and got a bad IP.
    - dqv 5y ago
      Mailinabox is a great package that makes the best practices very easy. I always recommend it or similar packages.
      - mcbishop 5y ago
        This looks awesome, thanks.
    - fiddlerwoaroof 5y ago

Snitch-Thursday 5y ago

I'm not one for using emails for everything. Sometimes the UI / UX just doesn't go great with things like synced up messaging and besides, email leaks metadata all over. Having said that, for extremely casual messages where I'm not worried about metadata (talking to my parents, a relationship that is already apparent), I would not mind chatting over something like DeltaChat (which is on-and-off working on trying to do XMPP Conversations-style multiple account sign on in one single app) over the alternative of a group text or FB Messenger message. Metadata exists either way, might as well be on an email system I will retain long-term-access to it. The likes of Signal force you to either manually screenshot messages or copy/paste them message by message, there is no bulk unencrypted backup for mundane things like serendipitous conversations about dinner plans for funny family stories. But since DeltaChat is still somewhat locked in to a single account (preventing me from using say work and personal), I'm doing the no-change-choice and continuing to tolerate Signal.

dvt 5y ago

I don't think this kind of Luddism is useful. It's purported by the same kinds of people that, upon seeing a new SaaS, quickly retort: "couldn't you just do that with Google Docs/Word/pen and paper?" Not to mention that email absolutely sucks. The confusing threads, the forwarding, the constant CC'ing, someone making it or not making it into a list, the spam. It's absolute garbage. In fact, people have been seeking alternatives since the late 80s. IRC was a precursor to Instant Messaging/Slack that many techies favored. Not that async is some perfect communication strategy (it has its own baggage), but it definitely fills some of email's gaps. Personally, I think Google Wave was ~15 years ahead of its time, and we'll see something akin to it soon. Will the author's next big revelation be "How to use a hammer for everything?"

sneak 5y ago
> Not to mention that email absolutely sucks. The confusing threads, the forwarding, the constant CC'ing, someone making it or not making it into a list, the spam. It's absolute garbage. This says to me that you have bad tools for email, not that the protocol or concept sucks. If you use email like a rube, it is expected to be absolute garbage. The same goes for Facebook or Twitter or Reddit, though: you have to change a lot of settings to get a decent experience.
- anomaloustho 5y ago
  I’d be interested to hear what good email tools look like if you have a chance to post some examples.
  - sneak 5y ago
    The good ones are fairly technical, but there are services that make them easier. Sieve or procmail filters and clients like macOS Mail.app and mutt are good ones. My main email client is macOS Mail.app and it's pretty great when configured properly in conjunction with serverside preprocessing/filtering.
    - williamtwild 5y ago

floss_silicate 5y ago

Appreciated the gigantic RSS subscription button at the bottom of the page.

adamretter 5y ago

I love this idea - I am so totally uninterested when yet another forum/IM solution is suggested to me. email works and (most) everyone has it. The last thing I want to do is install yet another client app or sign-up to some online website app. Enough already!

saimiam 5y ago
> (most) everyone Email is hardly a thing in India for general use. One of my interns hates email so much that he built a bot which IMs him the contents of his email to Telegram.
- sneak 5y ago
  The fact that email is interoperable is what makes this possible. Try building a bot to forward your Facebook Messenger messages to $OTHER_PLATFORM. (Aside: if they are okay getting a push notification per email, I suggest that they are Doing It Wrong. Email serves a different purpose entirely.)

thaumaturgy 5y ago

Gmail alone currently handles over 50% of US email traffic, with Microsoft and a handful of other service providers taking up a good chunk of the other half. These large providers all use internal blacklists and filtering rules, which cannot be queried, and no support is available if you get blackholed. Worst of all, Gmail especially isn't great about tagging messages as spam; a good chunk of messages sent from outside the Gmail network simply disappear. As a Gmail user, there is nothing you can do to verify that you're getting all of the legitimate mail traffic that is being sent to you. Further, if you're trying to send any kind of business correspondence over email, you have to contend with a massive industry of scammers that are also targeting people with lookalike messages. I love the email protocol, but from a broader service standpoint, email is terribly broken right now.

PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
> Worst of all, Gmail especially isn't great about tagging messages as spam My experience is the exact opposite of yours - I find Gmail's spam detection absolutely amazing. I get essentially zero spam in my inbox, and perhaps 4-6 false positives in the spam folder a month. >As a Gmail user, there is nothing you can do to verify that you're getting all of the legitimate mail traffic that is being sent to you. What other communication service/protocol would allow you to do this?
- ihattendorf 5y ago
  > perhaps 4-6 false positives in the spam folder a month That's 4-6 valid messages a month the average user will never see.
  - tkzed49 5y ago
    I disagree, I think "check your spam" is fairly widely understood.
    - anamexis 5y ago
      GGP's point is that in some circumstances, Gmail will simply disappear emails, with no trace, instead of quarantining them.

weeboid 5y ago

To put this into context and understand where the puck even is, my daughter (18 y old, freshman in college), last sent me an email in 2017. Before that, one in 2016, and one in 2015

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

arbuge 5y ago

Well, you can certainly blog using just email: https://PublicEmails.com https://PublicEmails.com. Disclaimer: it's one of my side projects.

cameronbrown 5y ago
I also built http://feedsub.com http://feedsub.com for RSS to inbox. There's better tools out there nowadays but I find it useful.
ronsor 5y ago
The site seems to be mostly full of advertising spam.
mattowen_uk 5y ago
I've had this idea on a back burner for a while, however having looked at your site, it's clearly being used by people for landing pages that get linked to from spam emails. If that's how these services get abused, I'm glad now I didn't waste any time on my version :(

chki 5y ago

I want to point out something from one of the articles which is so far from the truth that it somewhat undercuts the authors credibility: > For instance, if WhatsApp goes down, not only can you not send/receive messages, you won’t be able to see your old ones, and no one else on your network will be able to either. You could argue that a single email provider has the same effect, but you’d be wrong. If Gmail goes down, I can still send emails to Gmail recipients and I can still see past messages from Gmail users. Obviously you will be able to see all your WhatsApp messages when WhatsApp goes down. The same is true for Facebook Messenger and many other applications, because everything is saved locally. It's even possible to send WhatsApp messages while being offline which will then be delivered later on.

u801e 5y ago
> Obviously you will be able to see all your WhatsApp messages when WhatsApp goes down. The same is true for Facebook Messenger and many other applications, because everything is saved locally. It's even possible to send WhatsApp messages while being offline which will then be delivered later on. I wonder how long this has been the case. My experience in the past is that these applications are not usable without a stable internet connection. That said, email clients have a concept of an outbox where messages that were sent are placed until an internet connecton is established. At that point, those messages are actually sent to their recipients.
- perryizgr8 5y ago
  > I wonder how long this has been the case. In the case of whatsapp, this has been true since its inception. Not sure about Messenger.
- chki 5y ago
  >That said, email clients have a concept of an outbox where messages that were sent are placed until an internet connecton is established. At that point, those messages are actually sent to their recipients This is also possible with WhatsApp. Messages can be sent while not being online and will be delivered as soon as you go online.

ApolloVonZ 5y ago

I'd disagree. E-Mail is useful for invoices, customer contact, first point of contact or 2nd point of contact if someone tried to reach out per Facebook etc. and a serious business relation needs to be formed. However at work we switched to Slack a while back and it was such a relieve! Trying to organize projects per mail was just horrible. Especially when you got non technical staff involved that doesn't correctly forward or answer email and uses reply-all and reply interchangeably, or switches between personal and shared accounts without noticing it. Slack is not perfect but for us it did the job and still does.

chrisandchris 5y ago
One aspect I miss with Slack/Teams/IM is a good ability to postpone stuff. For example, I receive an e-mail I know I need to do something in 1-4 months. So I keep that mail in my inbox and as long as something is in the inbox, there is some work pending/due. I have not yet found a good way to do that in Slack (reliably) and not relying on another tool. E-Mail in that way is just great as a message is just a text file. You can put it wherever you want and reorganize it the way you want. Try to attach a slack conversation to an issue tracking system. Won‘t work. Do it with e-mail: it‘s just a text file. Try to post-pone stuff or organize information in folders. Won‘t work. Do it with e-mail, hell I can even move messages from one account to another. My point is: Slack will never replace e-mail, it is just an extension of ways we communicate. And that‘s is biggest advantage and disadvantage: it‘s a tool that makes communication sometimes easier, but is‘s also another tool I need to regularly check besides all other communication tools I already have.
- ApolloVonZ 5y ago
  It really depends on the personal and companies workflow though. My personal email account also only has messages that I still need to deal with. However our shared accounts can get quite messy at times. Slack does have the option to set different reminders though, you can even ask Slack to remind you to go back to a specific message in let's say four months. ;) But to be honest, if there is something that needs to be done at a certain point I'd always use an actual reminder/task or calendar app. Otherwise the risk of it being overlooked, maybe because someone is sick, or there is a flood of mails from another project that day and I don't get too look at the one email I wanted to deal with today. So I guess it really depends on the workflow and the people you work with. I think flexibility is the key in adapting your workflow to everyone's abilities and the companies needs but the same time if something has been working for a specific use case, then why change it. : )

gsich 5y ago

Email is the only protocol that has widespread adoption in probably every programming language. Clients are ubiquitous. Filtering allows you to receive many mails without getting out of hand.

kulix425 5y ago

asciimov 5y ago

Before you go using Email for everything, check to make sure your audience can actually get your email and that it's not going to spam. --- 10 years ago, I briefly worked for an for a small business that built wordpress plugins. They had an internal message board for communication and, unknown to me, they also used email. It took me six weeks to find out that I had missed hundreds of internal emails, many of which were directed at me. This was due in part to lack of on boarding and mismanagement by my boss (who was also managed the email system). Now you may ask, why weren't you reading your email, did you not check it? You see, I checked my email religiously, couple of times an hour. But here is what happened. This company used gmail for domains. And one thing that gmail does is it hides the spam label (or doesn't put a number next to spam). I had assumed, that since I had a brand new email address and that label was either missing or didn't have a counter next to it. I wasn't getting any spam. I was getting some internal email, so I didn't think much of it. What I didn't know at the time was the internal email addresses were on the same domain as the marketing emails. They did a lot of unsolicited marketing, as such gmail automatically marked their domain as spam. Nearly every single email from the company was going into my spam folder. Worse nobody said said anything about me missing these emails (including those from the owner/CEO and the CFO). Maybe they said something to my boss, but as he wasn't happy I had been assigned to his group he probably "forgot" to mention it to me. Anyway, I am sure missing several hundred emails was one of the reasons I wasn't retained passed my probationary period. The big takeaways: 1. Don't do marketing from the same domain as internal email 2. Use a different domain for internal email 3. Always check the spam folder. 4. If you consistently don't hear from someone through email, ask them if they are receiving your email.

leephillips 5y ago
After reading your story the obvious takeaway for me was 0. Don’t use Gmail. Use a real email client.

ocdtrekkie 5y ago

I get really peeved when social networks don't support email notifications for posts/updates, as opposed to just replies: I'd rather manage people's posts in an inbox, where I can pick through at my leisure than in an algorithmic feed. I used to stress about seeing all the updates since the last time I was on a given site.

zelly 5y ago

Website looks entirely as one would expect

alex_young 5y ago

Just use email - except to make your point about just using email. For that, you need a blog.

a3n 5y ago

Email isn't owned by anyone. It will always be there as a refuge for people when the owners of the current platform turn the frog kettle up too fast.

Barrin92 5y ago

I went to the post about answers to common objections but I was surprised that I did not find one of the bigger ones. Email is a pretty big disaster for communication that needs to stay secret, even encrypted mail. (https://latacora.micro.blog/2020/02/19/stop-using-encrypted.html https://latacora.micro.blog/2020/02/19/stop-using-encrypted....)

chagaif 5y ago

Why not link directly to his article? His website is beautiful

macintux 5y ago

The first blog linked from there is astonishing. https://explained-from-first-principles.com/email/ https://explained-from-first-principles.com/email/

fouc 5y ago
Wow yes. I hope they add more articles.. only email & internet so far

zmmmmm 5y ago

Sadly email is starting to die as the universal protocol for communication it used to be. My organisation has now implemented so many filters and blocks that a huge range of simple things are just broken now. It's pretty hard to send an attachment through other than a few predefined doc types that wont get physically removed by the spam filter. Every link gets re-written in some horribly mangled way and virtually clicked that often causes undesirable side effects. Giant warnings and labels get inserted into the body text telling me this or that is suspicious, and subject lines are frequently rewritten, breaking the feeble semblance of threading that my poor email client attempts. And meanwhile people are flocking to walled garden proprietary systems like Slack etc and saying how great they are. But half of it is to escape the monstrous mutilations that have been applied to email. Email might be like the venerable cockroach that will survive nuclear war, but it's not a healthy cockroach.

jollybean 5y ago

Email for Async/external, some kind of chat for close team Sync. Same thing for 20 years. I do appreciate a Slack channel in the right conditions.

andybp85 5y ago

dear god, why???

brongondwana 5y ago

I'd like to pop in a plug for a blog post I wrote a few years ago on this topic: https://fastmail.blog/company/email-is-your-electronic-memory/ https://fastmail.blog/company/email-is-your-electronic-memor... It was in response to Google promoting AMP for email (aka: you don't get a permanent copy of the content) - but more generally, the advantages of email aren't so much in the right now, they're in the long term searchable and immutable archive. See also the nice immediate triage features of heyhey - there's some nice stuff in there, but long term their users are going to find that they're living in the moment and not building the value that's stored in the data to the same extent that users of more traditional mailboxes do. (at least if you have decent search)

miguelrochefort 5y ago

Email makes a great universal inbox. Instead of installing and/or visiting 100 different apps and services daily, I just redirect all notifications to my email (Reddit, HN, Discord, Matrix, Zulip, Mattermost, Slack, Discourse, Matrix, YouTube, StackExchange, VoIP.ms, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, bank, forums, etc). For news websites I refresh all the time, I set up weekly digests. For important keywords and mentions, I set up instant alerts. It’s easy to setup rules and filters for emails. Except for specific emails that trigger a notification on my phone (confirm registration, verification codes, security alerts, IM messages, important people), I only check my email once a day, and make sure to process it down to inbox zero (with the occasional email snooze). Having a single inbox to worry about has improved my quality of life a lot. Feel free to share or ask about specific tools for email digests, mention/reply notifications, and keyword alerts.

magwa101 5y ago

Email, yes. It involves reading and writing. It takes time, like anything. It can have threads. It's searchable. SMS/instant messaging is great for "there in 2 minutes", even then, why not email? In the end the internet wants to sell you the next big thing to cure your overload woes. But you can't replace the need for thought.

cuddlybacon 5y ago

It's funny this came up today, since I have a 1 hour section of my workday blocked of for my bi-annual email filter refactoring. Email is by far the most broken software experience of my life. I've been thinking that for a while. Now by broken, I don't mean the software doesn't work as intended. I mean that the software can't let me manage things the way I want. The alternatives (eg MS Teams) by very much not perfect, but at least get me closer than I can with an email client. Here are some specific things I find suck: 1. There isn't any that indicates why I'm receiving this email. Sometimes that's not obvious. Could it be I'm BCCed? Or maybe I'm on a mailing list, that's on a mailing list, that's on a mailing list? Or maybe it's both! 1a. If I receive an email due to being BCCed, my email filters won't work at all. 1b. In the case of a mailing list containing a mailing list, I have to manually create separate rules for both the parent and child lists and keep them in sync. 2. Email filters scale poorly. Hence why I end up needing to refactor them twice a year. This analogy is a bit of a stretch but: email filters are like programming where everything must be in a giant switch statement, but you are also allowed if statements and goto for extra control flow. It's not a perfect analogy, it breaks as you look more closely at the details, but I think both result in similar problems cropping up. 3. You are stuck choosing between highly limited server rules that affect all clients, or client only rules that only change things for the current client. I want to be able to look at my email from my desktop client, my phone, or a web browser and see the same thing in all 3 places. So I am stuck with the crippled server rules. 4. Smart folders come close to being able to replace the majority of my email rules, but not quite. The implementations I've played with are all missing something. I do think they'd be an improvement in the cases they are applicable. 5. Emails don't contain any hints at what kind of email they are. I believe they could, via headers, but they don't. An email is an email is an email. Well, every client I've used has special handling for meeting invites. I think this should be expanded. I find in practical use there are a few "types" or "kinds" of emails. Things like a broadcast vs a question vs a meeting invite vs a request for volunteers vs etc. Having a bunch of different types of messages baked in with different defaults for each, would likely remove half the email rules I have. 6. Marked as read and notifications are too simple. But here I at least understand that addressing the issue gets complex very quickly[0]. Maybe being able to snooze an email would help me here, but I've never used a client with snooze. Do these clients with snooze generally let you see the queue of snoozed items and process them early if you'd like to? 7. I can't block people. Creating a rule that auto-deletes emails is not quite the same as blocking. Besides these technical ones, there are a few cultural ones as well. 1. Email has a culture of BCCing people "to be polite". As mentioned in 1a above, my rules don't work on these emails, so they end up being less polite in practice. 2. Email has a culture of including everyone who might be relevant just in case. Mostly this just drives the signal to noise ratio down. It is end of business hours for me now, and I've received 175 emails so far today. I maybe needed to read 15 of those. 3. Since email rules exist, people will default to blaming the receiver for not having a rule. If I spam @everyone or @here in MS Teams or Slack people blame me for spamming. In email land, I find people will first get mad at the receivers for not liking the spam I am sending them. Bizarre! 4. A portion of the email world takes a hardline stance on email by asynchronous communication. Sometimes you need a synchronous conversation. Sometimes you have something that is urgent. Yes, I'm aware flow exists and can be quite brittle for some people. It is sometimes worth breaking it. That was quite cathartic to write. Email has been the least pleasant piece of my software life for years now. With work, I just have to deal with it as best as I can (you'll notice most complaints above are work centric). But outside of work I definitely try to minimize my usage. [0] - Slack's notification flowchart. As complex as it seems, I don't consider this over-engineered. https://d34u8crftukxnk.cloudfront.net/slackpress/prod/sites/7/0_PV_09olld6K1l8jQ.png https://d34u8crftukxnk.cloudfront.net/slackpress/prod/sites/...

paulpauper 5y ago

email is almsot useless for social networks. they now req. phone

izgzhen 5y ago

I don’t want to dismiss the author’s point. But here is a related point: Choosing what tool to communicate is a social decision, not a personal one. You can’t prove the tool X is more effective way to communicate by just using it yourself.

jesterson 5y ago
Agree with your point, and email does succeed here just because it's ubiquitous. You don't need to check do you what whatsapp? Telegram? Oh I don't use this or that because of privacy, etc. Email give you a FREEDOM to use anything you want with it because it was developed at times when data farming wasn't the main goal for big tech. That's why in most cases we just ask for email address.

alfiedotwtf 5y ago

Today was the first time I asked my son (10yo) to email me something. His response was "yuk". I think that's the new generation's attitude towards email - old and dated, and that unless they need it for work, would prefer other means of communication.

bgroat 5y ago

I frequently tell coworkers and clients that *nothing* is more urgent than an email, but less urgent than a phone call.

nikisweeting 5y ago
Not sure I follow? I feel like most IM apps get more urgent/timely responses from most people than email, but are still less urgent than phone calls.

bharani_m 5y ago

I'd like to plug in a small tool that I run. It's called EmailThis and it brings bookmarking/read-later functionality(similar to Pocket and Instapaper) to your email inbox. [0] https://www.emailthis.me https://www.emailthis.me

cutler 5y ago

If it were not for Google and Microsoft effectively gatekeeping SMTP I'd support the OP's proposition but it's been years since I gave-up running Postfix + Dovecot on Linux VM's simply due to the mindless thuggery of Outlook/Hotmail and Gmail. Google has effectively become the unelected dictator of the internet.

e3bc54b2 5y ago
Oh the majority elected Gmail alright. They just weren't aware they were electing a dictator, and that the term was for life.

hn_throwaway_99 5y ago

Ok, emotional me really hated this site, so rational me will try to calm down a bit and explain why. I started with the "Dislikes about email are Questionable" post, which was perhaps my mistake, but every point in that post had a dripping "I'm sorry peasant, you're doing it wrong" vibe to it. I can fully understand why someone may choose to use email over other forms of communication, but to be incredibly dismissive of problems other people have with the medium, while furthermore often not even addressing some of the root frustrations people have, is incredibly condescending. Take the "email is unreliable" point. You can write all the missives you want about how email is the most reliable form of communication known to man, at the end of the day a huge number of messages can get "sent" which never make it to the intended recipient for a myriad of reasons. And furthermore, pretty much everyone has had an experience where this has happened.

nikisweeting 5y ago
I started with that post as well, and had a similar reaction. Also I find it misses most of the real points against email and focuses on the relatively minor ones. - email enforces much higher latency communication, which maybe good sometimes, but most of the time is not helpful - much more difficult to actually keep track of a threaded conversation with multiple concurrent subtrees, it's a stack when instead you want a tree like Zulip / Slack threads. quote replying a subthread in an email tree without disrupting convos in the rest is a painful experience even in the nicest clients. - file attachment and embed preview experience is worse than most modern IM apps - no emoji reactions, these are huge for efficient async communication without spamming everyone with notifications

a012 5y ago

This ticks me in the right place. Where I work we're already using Gsuite like the rest of the world, and then for some reasons the director board decided to move _everything_ company communication to FB's Workplace. And when pandemic hits, everybody have to actively watch for announcements/notices on Workplace, because it's the only place that they send out messages. So why not just send notices to all@company.com email address and everybody got it instantly if the message is too important? They post it on Workplace and mark it Important, then FB sends a brief emails to everybody teasing half of the post. Again, why not just use email?

PostThisTooFast 5y ago

E-mail.

jesterson 5y ago

Absolutely agree with the author. There is simply no alternative for information exchange which is so ubiquitous, not locking you to specific vendor who loves to do data farming on you. Extremely reliable and flexible. For years there have been different projects claiming to be "email kiilers", however email is still there and most of those projects have been long forgotten.

sedachv 5y ago

With the proper gateways you can literally use e-mail for everything: http://www.faqs.org/faqs/internet-services/access-via-email/ http://www.faqs.org/faqs/internet-services/access-via-email/ https://archive.org/details/internetbyemail00shir https://archive.org/details/internetbyemail00shir https://web.archive.org/web/20001109163400/http://www.expita.com:80/ https://web.archive.org/web/20001109163400/http://www.expita...

cgrealy 5y ago

or.... use the appropriate medium/channel/whatever for what ever it is you're doing. My family has a group whatsapp chat. It's mostly for sending pics of my nieces and nephews and random conversations. Email would be terrible for that. Ditto, the literally decade old skype chat I've with friends. You can cook a meal with a campfire. If you put enough effort into it, you might even get a better result than cooking in a kitchen. But I am not going to light a campfire every night.

twobitshifter 5y ago
what about email is terrible for that? Email can do everything WhatsApp can, look at these 2 email clients: https://www.spikenow.com/ https://www.spikenow.com/ https://delta.chat/en/ https://delta.chat/en/
- cgrealy 5y ago
  It can, but it generally doesn't. Compared to whatsapp, for this use case, it's a crap user experience. I am not going to convince my elderly mother to use a new email client. She literally does not even know what an email client is.

approxim8ion 5y ago

I love email, it's great for long letters and so. That said, I have trouble (further) adopting and especially recommending a fundamentally insecure and flawed medium like email in 2021 when clearly technically superior channels of communication exist. Signal, Matrix etc are not 1:1 replacements for email at all, but when it comes down to it, they are simpler and more secure.

twobitshifter 5y ago
If you go back to the beginning of email you’ll see it was the simplest invention possible. you@domain.com was just your user account on an actual Unix computer. Mail messages were appended to a text file in a folder for each user. Somebody could get your IP address/email if they had your machine in their host file, but at that time you didn’t have to worry about spam, viruses, or eavesdropping. You didn’t even need POP or IMAP, since messages were sent directly to the machine that you had access to. This is still possible, but nobody has a static IP or hosts their own mail server.
- approxim8ion 5y ago
  Yes. Even beyond that, my understanding is that the fundamental issues with email are that: a. It is used as the basis for setting up a lot of accounts, but there is no clear way to establish identity with an email account. b. SMTP is very dated, and the large amounts of metadata (if not the entire body of every mail as well) that goes through it is doomed to be in plaintext forever c. Encryption is far from standard, PGP is very clunky and has problems of its own, and just doesn't have adoption. It works, somewhat, but it's not really good enough.

jonnydubowsky 5y ago

Evernote uses a custom email address to route whatever media, link or text you want to send, to the specific notebook you select in your email subject. This is one of my favorite uses of email. You are given a unique email address that is linked to your account and defaults to your default notebook. The formatting of the email subject lets you choose any notebook as the destination for your email. You can also create a new notebook by simply adding a new notebook name after the "@" symbol. You can add in hashtags to the email subject, after @notebook. These tags are included in the note and immediately searchable. Simply add #planning or whatever existing tag you find useful. You can also create a brand new tag straight from email. Using “!” then the full date and you can activate reminders. Does anyone have any other apps or workflows that use this type of content-addressing? Is that an accurate description for what this is? a content addressable macro? I'd love it if Roam had a similar feature for emailing content into a specific block. I found this short blog post that outlines this email feature if anyone is interested in checking it out : https://link.medium.com/kiGPjqWSbgb https://link.medium.com/kiGPjqWSbgb

twobitshifter 5y ago
Remember the milk is similar for scheduling tasks and reminders called “smart add” Evernote may have got the idea there. https://www.rememberthemilk.com/services/email/ https://www.rememberthemilk.com/services/email/

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

aulin 5y ago

My biggest gripe with email today is that it's become normal, at least in my current line of work, to leave emails unreplied. You write detailed and thoughtful messages, with direct questions and point of discussions, and you get an ack on IM or passing by the corridors

jasonkester 5y ago

If Instant Messaging were a Thing, I'd be happy to use it. But it's not. IM is twelve things. And they're a different 12 things at different times. And you need to have clients for all of them installed and check all 12 of those clients regularly for messages. Email, on the other hand, really is a Thing. I can check my mail and be done. Fix that for IM and I'm there. Or rather, fix that again for IM and convince all the major players not to drop support for the common protocol again and you'll get me back.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

shoto_io 5y ago

We decided to start shoto as newsletter instead doing an app because of some of the reason mentioned on the site. Everyone has an email account to begin with and they check their emails daily. I personally love email.

rikkipitt 5y ago

I've been hacking on a project to make email a little more asynchronous as I took use it for everything. I love email, but the constant inbound pings make it a direct line to me/my time. In that sense, email is broken and I'm hoping to help change that and allow people to focus more effectively. Paced Email * is a service that buffers emails and send them to you in one go at a time of your choosing either daily, weekly or monthly. The aliases can be created on the fly too e.g. johndoe.hackernews@daily.paced.email. * https://www.paced.email https://www.paced.email

wink 5y ago

I wonder why no one ever mentions my big problem with solutions other than email: archiving and backup. Let's play dumb here, back with POP3 if you configured it to leave the messages the server already had a copy. If you use IMAP you can still have a local copy. (I'm not saying these are valid backup strategies, but if all else fails it's still a decentral copy). But more importantly, importing and exporting to different email clients and hosts (and even different IMAP server) is varying degrees of work, but it is doable EASILY by default. I can't be the only one keeping 15-18 years of email history and regularly referring back and searching for stuff there? (could be 5 more years but I was careless and didn't properly backup and maybe it's still on some medium...) Even with matrix, the completely open new hip thing I don't see a good archival strategy by anyone except "somehow keeping logs" like on IRC. Maybe DB backups if it's your own instance. Not cool, but at least possible. And don't even get me started on all the other messengers here. Sometimes the backup works (via Android and maybe iOS) but not always and it's surely not open or accessible. I'm actually not using email for a lot of private communication these days, but mostly because most of my communication to friends isn't really worth saving (except for logs in matrix/irc channels), I've never been a fan of formal emails between friends. But it's perfect to ask a random question to a semi-stranger. Surely beats Twitter DMs by a mile.

leephillips 5y ago
“I can't be the only one keeping 15-18 years of email history and regularly referring back and searching for stuff there?” You are not alone.

magwa101 5y ago

"Instant" messaging promotes the illusion that others are doing nothing but waiting to respond to us.

MaxBarraclough 5y ago

I'm reminded of Drew DeVault's case for making SourceHut so email-driven, and less web-driven than, say, GitHub. https://sourcehut.org/blog/2020-10-29-how-mailing-lists-prevent-censorship/ https://sourcehut.org/blog/2020-10-29-how-mailing-lists-prev...

Balgair 5y ago

Aside: I'm reminded of this law: Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can. - jwz's Law of Software Envelopment How true it is even years later

gcells 5y ago

Like most people, I use both. Email however has better tooling IMO around high volumes. IM starts becoming a problem once you reach volumes of ~2K messages per day. As soon as you have few hundred channels or groups in non business oriented messengers like whatsapp, missing critical/important messages cannot be avoided. Skipping certain lists/groups, training your spam filter etc is at least available when you use email.

blaydator 5y ago

> Using email as a reminder and productivity task list I am using emails as a reminder tool for a long time and it’s very efficient as the first thing I do in the morning is to check my inbox. I have even built an app to email myself in one tap or with Siri : https://boomerang-app.io https://boomerang-app.io