10 ms·

Benefits of choosing email over messaging

183 points by iparaskev 1y ago

ejoso 1y ago
This makes my brain hurt. Few things I hate more than email. The single worst way to get in touch with me. As a user of it for more decades than I’d like to recall, I despise email. Sure, the infinite archive is mildly helpful. But search-ability is marginal in any tool I’m aware of. The folders, filters and other management suggestions mentioned make it a second job. Email is a life tax we’re all forced to pay. It is a problem that is yet to be solved, though many have tried.
- James_K 1y ago
  I think the problem with emaill is more the availability of it. Anyone can send you an email so they mostly wind up as junk that needs to be managed.
  - ejoso 1y ago
    One of the most significant problems, agreed. Also, email is free to the sender but costly (in time) to the recipient. This is reflected in the quantity of messages, but also in their verbosity. People rarely expend the effort to edit or be concise. Both are costly to readers.
- qwertytyyuu 1y ago
  For anything that will benefit from back and forth, and isn't that important. I hate email too. I check it like only once a day at work, and my person email, i check even less.
  - koakuma-chan 1y ago
    I have it the other way around. I have all messenger notifications silenced except email. This way when people message me I only see their messages whenever I feel like checking if I got any messages. All importart stuff goes into my email, and I can see the push notification immediately.
    - ejoso 1y ago
      If I did this, my notifications would never stop. I get tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of emails every day. Even heavily filtered, I can only afford to check work email a couple times a day. Most that make it past the filters are still ignored and immediately archived.
      - koakuma-chan 1y ago
        You mean from random people? Don't post your personal email publicly then. I have masked emails posted publicly and while I do get occasional spam, it's more like 2-3 emails a month.
      - LightBug1 1y ago
        A day? How on earth did you get in such a situation?
- trinix912 1y ago
  Sadly the searchability on IM platforms is even worse than that of email. Discord (among others) often can't find the very text that's right in front of you.
- cpncrunch 1y ago
  It really just depends on your email client. I use elm and my inbox, received and sent folders are stored in flat files, so i can just use vim or other linux tools to quickly search for any email from the past 25 years. In many chat apps you cant even search at all. I find email by far the most efficient method of communication.
gsliepen 1y ago
Nice. Note though that you don't necessarily have to limit everyone else to email; some messaging platforms allow one user to post something using a webpage for example, and cause that to send email to another user, and vice versa. One data point: GitHub's issue tracker can forward issues as email, and you can reply to those back via email, and your response will end up as a new comment on the issue.
elliotto 1y ago
I've often thought about building a messaging platform aggregator that takes conversations from Whatsapp/messenger/discord/Instagram DMs/etc and provides a unified interface for them. I suspect there's a bunch of legal and annoying auth things that make this impossible. But at its core these things are just arrays of strings
- ejoso 1y ago
  Many have tried and hit the very same obstacles you mention. Quite the quagmire.
- tazjin 1y ago
  This used to be fairly common, back in the old days. Programs like Pidgin unified many messengers into a single app. For a while, many messengers actually shared underlying protocols (e.g. Google Talk & Facebook were both using XMPP at some point, and you could even cross-message). Nowadays this is much harder. There's some exceptions (Telegram) with open client protocols, but I wouldn't wanna try and implement something like Discord, it'll be a never-ending tarpit.
  - koakuma-chan 1y ago
    Discord is (or at least was) easy to "implement" because their bot and user API is mostly the same.
    - dijit 1y ago
      until they ban you under the ToS that says “no third party clients”. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28435490 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28435490
      - theshrike79 1y ago
        A bot or a bridge isn't a "client". They just don't want to fight people trying to build a full alternative client for Discord as a bunch of their paid-for stuff is just clien side javascript.
black3r 1y ago
What emails suck at is communication between multiple people in a work setting. That's why Slack, Teams, and others emerged and got popular. For example: - When multiple people respond to the same email, the email "thread" branches out into a tree. If the tree branches out multiple times, keeping track of all the replies gets messy. - While most clients can show you the thread/tree structure of an email chain, it only works if you've been on every email in the chain. If you get CC'd later, you'll just see a single email and navigating that is messy. - Also if you get CC'd later, you can't access any attachments from the chain. - You can link to a Slack/Teams conversation and as long as it's in a public channel, anyone with the link can get in on it (for example you have a conversation about a proposed feature which then turns into a task -> you describe the task simply and link "more info in this slack convo"), you can't do that with Emails (well I guess you could export a .eml file, but it has the same issue as getting CC'd later) - When a thread no longer interests you, you can mute it in Slack/Teams. You can't realistically do that with emails, as most people will just hit "reply all" - But also sometimes people will hit "reply" instead of "reply all" by a mistake and a message doesn't get delivered to everyone in the thread.
- wisidisi 1y ago
  I oppose. Mails are superior in announcing to multiple people. If people want to participate they can in many ways. It is well structured, well documented and offers coherent discourse. Slack/Teams are for just-in-time dynamic, collaborative conversation that are quickly fading and missing out on all the strengths mails have in terms of permanence, archival, search and general quality. Something that totally gets lost in instant messaging like Discord, Teams and such where context is basically non-existant and may be gone completely in minutes. Remember Google+ ? What lasted was Gmail and barebone simple Mail.
  - portaouflop 1y ago
    Google+ dies not because it was a bad product but because google changed strategy and killed it. Ultimately it’s all subjective - some people prefer email some chat some calls some no comms at all. If you can communicate well, articulate what you say and want well, and actually read and understand what I write then I will communicate over any medium with you. If not then I’ll have a bad time regardless of medium
ljlolel 1y ago
A bit off topic but deltachat is an amazing secure messenger over smtp https://delta.chat/pt/ https://delta.chat/pt/
- haunter 1y ago
  This is what I wanted to post as well! Best of both worlds
- em-bee 1y ago
  non localized link: https://delta.chat/ https://delta.chat/
- layer8 1y ago
  The strengths of email is exactly that is isn’t chat. Implementing chat over email isn’t the solution.
crummy 1y ago
At my current job (1000+ employee tech company), I pretty much never receive emails from humans. Plenty of automated notifications and the odd marketing mail, but everything else is Slack and Zoom. I think it's way better. Email has so many limitations, especially as soon as you're in a group discussion.
- throwzasdf 1y ago
  [dead]
- theshrike79 1y ago
  Same here, 300+ people-ish, 3 countries. Some Very Official things come via the mail, like event invites etc. Everything else is on Slack or integrated to Slack. Makes spotting phising mails really easy :D
jasode 1y ago
>My colleagues and friends know that I prefer to communicate with them via email rather than chat messaging. For some co-workers and especially for friends & family, the chat UI is much more ergonomic than email. Email usage has extra friction: - compose new email UI has extra SUBJECT: field you have to fill with junk (like "hey" or "question...") or skip over - email client UI for multiple messages from the same person in a listview repeats the same metadata headers which is visually redundant pollution. UI settings such as "organize by thread" or "organize by conversation" help but don't fully solve it. With chat apps, the back & forth conversation is visually cleaner without all the metadata clutter.
- dijit 1y ago
  But that “subject” header makes it paletable. I would argue if you really can’t come up with a subject then you probably shouldn’t be asking at all. I got used to Zulip at my previous job and people made the same argument about “Topics” (which are basically subjects); but they forget that the messages are read more often than they are written. A little friction in writing for an easier time reading and skimming is absolutely worth it.
  - johannes1234321 1y ago
    > But that “subject” header makes it paletable. That's true for some forms of communication, but for social chitchat in an ongoing conversation there isn't much relevance. Subject becomes especially ridiculous when Mail clients are localized and you get some "Re: AW: RE: Re: AW: fun stuff" as subject. At work subject tis key. Allows me to ignore 90% of the mails immediately.
TrackerFF 1y ago
I had a colleague that would come back from vacation, see 1000+ emails, and just mark all unread emails and hit delete. And say "If it's any important, they'll just mail me again". Not saying that it's a good way to do things, absolutely not, but it did open my eyes to the fact that some people will just indiscriminately delete emails, no mater how important they could be.
- marcosdumay 1y ago
  Well, odds are none of them is important. And they are probably right in that if it's important, the sender will look for them again. This person just got 1000 emails in the time of a vacation. How viably is it not to completely ignore that? It's even surprising that they bothered to look and cleaned up in a way that implies they aren't ignoring them on the daily work.
j1elo 1y ago
That sounds like basically right (I agree with it all, I'm too the kind of person that enjoys all those advantages of email). So here I'm thinking from putting myself in the skin of the others: All this seems so much "me, me, me, me". People sending you a quick Whatsapp to let you know "tomorrow in Town sq. at 12h" don't want to have to use a clunky interface (sadly email apps are not up to par with instant messaging apps, not even close); they don't care either about your desire to have a unified inbox, and a long term archive. Agreed if it's for "important" things, but mostly instant messaging replaced email for day to day things that in an analog world would have been just said by landline phone. Relatedly, having a long term archival might come as a bit creepy, even. In apps this happens too, but at least I can say something extremely controversial and delete it for both people a couple minutes later. Or send a "view once" mesage. Regarding confidentiality, coincidentally not even 2 weeks ago a friend was telling me about a case of hos company sending an invoice, and being man-in-the-middle'd so the attacker just changed the bank account number and the customer thus paid to the wrong account. Nobody uses GPG, sadly. So at this point, for very important stuff I'd consider Whatsapp less confidential but more secure than email, ironically. Back to being me; I see a problem of usabilily. Even I admit that sending a whatsapp is much more convenient and practical than opening up K-9 Mail to _compose_ an email. You don't _compose_ a IM, you just hit a contact, jot it down, hit send, and there's extra social convention tools such as a blue tick indicating that maybe you can even stay put there because probably the other person may reply immediately.
- bonoboTP 1y ago
  > Relatedly, having a long term archival might come as a bit creepy, even. In apps this happens too, but at least I can say something extremely controversial and delete it for both people a couple minutes later. Or send a "view once" mesage. I agree but in practice Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp etc are quite long term already. I can easily look up my chats from 15+ years ago on Fb. But there is indeed a cultural unease, and it relates to the other top h post about social cooling. As you said, people want an online equivalent of phone calls and in person discussion. It's creepy and in some places even illegal to record phone calls or live conversations. On the other hand, written letters used to be private but meant for archival. Many people inherit a big box of neatly organized letters received from friends and family when grandma etc die. Email is a bit more letter-like in this. But these norms are in flux and especially for different generations the intuition can be different.
bborud 1y ago
I have come to hate email so much there are weeks where I will check my email perhaps just once or twice in a week. Every 2-3 months I try to clean up my inbox by going through it and unsubscribing to all the rubbish I am opted into without my say-so. But since we use Gmail, this is a really, really, really slow process. Gmail is a terrible product that has no evolved meaningfully over the 20 or so years it has existed. And it doesn't get any better when idiot product managers feel it is more important to add more AI nonsense than try to fix a product that is very poor at doing the thing it is supposed to do. (If anyone knows of a tool that helps me rapidly clean up my gmail, please let me know). But the worst thing about email is that nobody knows how to write emails anymore. Everyone just quotes the while thing and adds their comments on top. People no longer trim down the email and intersperse their comments throughout the response. Mail reading software no longer aids you in doing this - cleaning up the quoting for you (not that many mail readers did this before). And when you don't want to quote the email you are responding to, people include the whole mess anyway and just pop their response at the top. Rather than understanding that a threaded mail reader (as most mail readers are today) will provide the reader with the context they need just fine. There's no need to repeat dozens of older responses. I miss email from 25-30 years ago. When 90% of what landed in my inbox was actually for me, written by other human beings. Most of which knew how to produce a response to an email without it just being a sloppy mess. I wish people who wrote mail clients were more intelligent product designers and more thoughtful people. That they would understand that catering to people's poor habits was, and is, a bad idea and that a better idea would have been to make proper email quoting at least a path of considerably less resistance.
- komali2 1y ago
  Huh I never thought about the quoting thing. I'm definitely gonna clear out the auto quoted bits in my replies from now one.
  - bonoboTP 1y ago
    Dissecting their email and interspersing your response, especially if expressing some disagreement, can come across as passive aggressive nitpicking, instead of taking in the whole message and charitable interpreting the entire intended message. Not saying that it is meant that way, but I know many take it that way.
NoboruWataya 1y ago
It's quite rare I communicate via email anymore, (outside of work where it is still the main medium). I like the (relatively) open/decentralised nature of it, but I can't deny that chat apps like WhatsApp have a good UX for casual group discussions. Not to mention that all of my friends use WhatsApp, so I would struggle to use email as my primary communication method even if I wanted to. It means I kind of wonder what my personal email is for, other than a means to sign up to third party websites. There have been a few threads about RSS lately and it seems a lot of HNers hate email newsletters. I don't have a problem with them and if I'm receiving content on a fixed schedule, like once a week or even once a day, I think it's a good medium. I even get my RSS feed updates by email. Other than that, the top of my personal inbox right now is mostly marketing emails, notifications (like "we have changed our T&Cs", "you have a new message on LinkedIn" etc) and "what's on" emails from local theatres, cinema, etc (which of course is also marketing, but it's marketing I've specifically asked to receive).
SvenL 1y ago
Something messengers made easy is photo/video sharing. This might be also a little bit tricky with email. Also most messages I write would be just the subject line (“on my way home”). Bigger topics I would rather have a call than writing them. But generally the points made in the post are valid and it’s nice to see that it is working for the author.
zahirbmirza 1y ago
Whatapp and other chatapps are popular because they are instant and have overcome the initial adaption issues that arrise with new messaging platforms. The interface of email its backend is too dated for instant chat messaging. Why were the MSN and yahoo messenger apps so popular in the early days of the internet? They were an evolution of written communication methods. Unfortunately, email is just a legacy product that no one wants to improve. So we all have to end up working around its limitations. As much as I want to create a non-meta alternative to Whatsapp or a better email infrastructure, there is no compelling enough differentiator for most users. Just look at the privacy benefits of Signal, yet, people don't care. Just look at the aesthetic benefits of iMessage, yet people don't care. They just want an easy to use and responsive cross platform method of communication. A good solution is a unified messaging app, able to combine all platform's messaging, but these often become defunct because of API issues or T&C breeched.
tkgally 1y ago
The main reason I prefer email over messaging is that it allows me to correspond with the widest range of people. I work in academia and publishing and have various personal interests, and I want to be able to interact with people in many countries and walks of life. There is no single messaging service that would make that possible. Also, I want people to be able to contact me unsolicited. Many interesting jobs and opportunities have come my way over the years because someone I didn’t know reached out to me by email. I do wish that email was standardized with better formatting conventions, though.
- tcfhgj 1y ago
  > There is no single messaging service that would make that possible. messaging protocols can make it possible
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
aftergibson 1y ago
I think this is more an argument for protocols over products. I wish XMPP had remained as popular as it has. The standard has now only slowly evolved, but it probably could have continued to meet the needs of our society as a compliment to email.
johtso 1y ago
I've been having a bad time with email of late. It's been the method of communication between us and another company (a pretty creaky old product). I thought they were replying strangely and ignoring my questions "did they even read what I said!?". It turns out for whatever reason they hadn't been getting some of my emails. Now I can't trust that anything has been received unless I get an acknowledgement, so I have to keep pestering for replies. Basically lost trust in the protocol because it's dependent on the the other person's mailserver behaving they way you expect it to.
- skydhash 1y ago
  > Basically lost trust in the protocol because it's dependent on the the other person's mailserver behaving they way you expect it to. That’s the case of any protocol, digital or not. Email is pretty simple. Simpler than the current web, at least.
  - johannes1234321 1y ago
    > That’s the case of any protocol Well, E-Mail is inherently async and allows a sequence of relays with no back channel to confirm delivery. With other protocols (except snail mail) I get a confirmation that recipient was valid and the message for delivered. With some I even get a marker it was read. With e-mail, with luck, I get a cryptic not standardized response mail, if something went wrong. Sometimes even only a lot later as delivery is retried for a few days in some cases.
    - throwzasdf 1y ago
      [dead]
  - this_user 1y ago
    The core technologies may be simple, but email really is an entire stack of protocols, mechanisms, and conventions. And therein lies the problem. It's not one well designed solution but one workaround layered on top of each other to make it work reasonably well.
OCTAGRAM 1y ago
Mbox is not that easy to process, especially if 1986 time span is taken into account. There is base64 encoding. There is "=" encoding, don't recall whats its name. "Equals" encoding. There are several character encodings if 1986 time span is taken into account, and each character encoding will be encrypted by equals signs. There was KOI8-R. KOI8-R was on BSD and Linux servers, but desktops had cp1251, so 1251 entered e-mail eventually, via e-mail clients autoconfigured to desktop encoding, or via webmail interfaces autoconfigured to web encoding which could likely be cp1251 and not likely koi8-r. Then utf-8 came in.
TheChaplain 1y ago
Being in the IT business for a few decades, email is superior to anything else for record keeping. Especially with Thunderbird I find it almost too easy to find information I need, and addendums neatly threaded. And, it is quite difficult for the other part to hide/delete stupidness they send, which thankfully saved my behind twice. Chats are good for now-communication, but energy- and time consuming when you need to look up something that happened months ago.
- mitchell209 1y ago
  I can't even look up chats on my work PC older than a couple days ago because it's automatically deleted. Emails last for at least a few years.
- zachrip 1y ago
  Gmail is dogsh*t at search. It's so bad. I can search the EXACT word I want and not a single email will come up, or it will bring up the most irrelevant emails.
  - alchemist1e9 1y ago
    Same experience and it’s so bad I sometimes question my sanity. At least I have a notmuch index setup on a server I can fall back on but it’s just so bizarre a “search” company can’t produce an app which can search properly emails!
    - zachrip 1y ago
      The worst part is that I pay for the privilege!
zby 1y ago
It is quite frustrating that we have these discussions over and over again. Asynchronous communication is great - but it is not better than synchronous communication in some universal way. It depends. Personally I am very sensitive to interruptions - so I lean towards asynchronous. But when you are doing something and you really need to get some information from someone to proceed - then getting his response immediately means that your work is not interrupted. The other person is - but it is a trade off. In a team you have to make these trade-offs. It can be hard - because it takes from one side and gives to the other - people would like to be able to interrupt others and not be interrupted themselves. And it is even more complicated by the fact that some jobs and some people are more sensitive to interruptions and others are less - so it is hard to make fair rules about it. But it is a real trade-off to be made. UPDATE: Or take interactivity - a conversation is really powerful way of communicating. How a computer geek could even claim that asynchronous communication is always better - is he still using batch processors to run his jobs typing everything upfront and they waiting for the full run before he can fix his syntax errors?
- nottorp 1y ago
  Umm both email and instant messaging are as asynchronous or synchronous as you want to make them...
  - n4r9 1y ago
    For some reason, IM encourages people to send superficial quickfire messages, which is very inefficient if one party is busy. The classic example is Colleague: "Hi". One hour passes You: "Hey - what's up, can I help you with something?" 10 minutes pass Colleague: "Yeah I was wondering if I could ask you about Foo" One hour passes You: "Sure, what do you need to know?" Next day Colleague: "I'm trying to export but it's not working." One hour passes You: "Okay... Is it giving you any error messages? Please give me as much info as you can in one go!" etc...
    - vel0city 1y ago
      I've pressed people who chat this way with me to change, and usually it seems people get it once they get shown how unproductive this kind of conversation is. Just ask me your question. Feel free to start with pleasantries if that's your style, but get to your point or the ask on the first message. https://nohello.net/en/ https://nohello.net/en/
GlibMonkeyDeath 1y ago
Email still has its use cases in the modern workplace. Sometimes you need a slower, more detailed communication channel, especially when inter-company communications are involved. But most of the things the OP likes about email make it a nightmare from a legal perspective. Once a company gets sued over labor/trade secret/IP related things, one result is a strict email (and other electronic communication) retention policy. Some retention periods can be as short as 6 months. Apps are deployed that scour your local storage to make sure you aren't archiving emails off-line. This removes many (most) of the archival advantages of email. Emails are often front-line evidence in lawsuits. A good example: https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-google-recruitment-emails-lawsuit-2014-1 https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-google-recruitment-ema...
- dctoedt 1y ago
  > most of the things the OP likes about email make it a nightmare from a legal perspective Former litigator here: The late Dr. Randy Pausch mentioned this in his Last Lecture; IIRC, he urged people to keep all their emails. [0] That can be a really good idea — keeping emails: • will help your lawyer reconstruct a timeline of events, build a narrative to tell the jury that's supported by the documentary evidence, and avoid spinning a tale that's undermined by emails that you didn't keep but someone else did; • will help make sure your people don't have private stashes of emails that have been deleted from your server but that resurface in response to subpoenas — or search warrants. • will help corroborate the stories told by your witnesses: Judges and jurors tend to be skeptical of hindsight testimony because of faulty memory and the temptation to shade the truth or even lie — recall how the House's January 6 committee hearings made such extensive use of emails, and also texts. If you didn't keep copies of emails, you won't have that evidence available; • will refresh your witnesses' memories so they don't testify incorrectly about something (whether in deposition or at trial) and have to correct their testimony — which hurts their credibility. Moreover: Your opponent's lawyer will likely send you a "litigation hold" letter, meaning you have to suspend all document-deletion programs — and if you don't, "spoliation of evidence" is low-hanging fruit for the opposing counsel to attack you and maybe cause you to lose the case. Back in the day of limited server storage capability, email "retention" policies (spelled: purging policies) had at least some business justification. That's far less the case now. To be sure: Footgun emails documenting bad behavior can lead to problems. But the root cause is the bad behavior, not the emails — it's far better to face the facts than to delete the evidence . [0] https://etc.cmu.edu/about/last-lecture https://etc.cmu.edu/about/last-lecture
theasisa 1y ago
> Rather than having flow and concentration interrupted by incoming message notifications, with email I can easily decide when to fetch and process messages. But emails also notify and therefore interrupt. If you want to turn notifications off in your email or only poll new mails when you choose you can also mute notifications (or turn on dnd) or close the chat app. Email sucks for chat like communication. It is great for long detailed messages. Having both is the best of both worlds. I have work email and personal email. I have work chat (Slack) and personal chat (WhatsApp with friends, Keybase with my partner). Choosing which chat app is also a great tool for making sure I am dealing with the right audience. I don't want to accidentally message my boss about stuff I send to my partner.
palata 1y ago
"Unified Inbox" (and therefore "Unified Archive") only works if you are the annoying person who forces everybody else to contact them on their system of choice. Of course it's convenient when everybody accomodates for you.
birdalbrocum 1y ago
> Asynchronous communication > Rather than having flow and concentration interrupted by incoming message notifications, with email I can easily decide when to fetch and process messages. Asynchronous communication describes the client-server-client model, and both chat and email fall into this category, especially since there are peer-to-peer chat programs. What the author states sounds to me like a problem with the notification model and fetching beyond the user's control. Chat is not inherently in "flow."
- layer8 1y ago
  Chat is inherently in flow because you can’t manage the read/unread status per message, and you can’t move messages to different folders. When I check for email, I might have a dozen new messages, clearly listed one per line, and I can pick which to read now and which to read later. I have a clean overview with the mailbox listing and the read/unread status. I can easily overview 50 or so messages without having to to scroll. I can archive the messages I’m done with, while keeping those around I still want to handle. In a chat, the read/unread status is not per-message. It’s much harder to discern separate exchanges within the same channel, and to handle them out-of-order when some are more urgent or relevant than others. They also take up substantially more visual space than a mailbox listing, so you have a much smaller “peephole”, making it more difficult to get an overview of what is going on in a channel. All this has the effect that people treat chat channels as a single continuous flow of messages that you catch up with in the order they come in; and the messages that scroll out of view, which happens fast, tend to go out of mind as well.
  - birdalbrocum 1y ago
    Ok, good points and I agree with messages as atomic unit of communication in mail vs message history per contact as atomic unit of communication in mail. This creates a mental state of communication flow (like a conversation) and inherently a different form than mail (more like receiving a mail in your postbox and can able to stack them singular).
snowfield 1y ago
Mail is great, but messaging has its purpose.
aboardRat4 1y ago
Deltachat
donatj 1y ago
> If you ever exchanged messages on ICQ, AIM, MSN Messenger, Skype, Yahoo! Messenger, Google Hangouts, GChat The death of Google Chat is all greatly exaggerated. They've largely just rebranded it a bunch of times.
arcade79 1y ago
We had the right technologies in the past, but we mismanaged them. Email, Usenet and IRC was great. Email, however, went dogshit due to spam. From simply having the office mail-server, everyone went to Gmail and Office, who didn't always want to accept legitimate email. Thus, encouraging more folks to move to it. Now we're in a situation where everyone is "forced" to use crappy interfaces, email is htmlified shit, and more and more companies require you to use the official client. Which in the case of Office365 means a very, very crappy web solution if you're on for example Linux. IMAP is often simply turned off due to whomever decides security has decided that's a bad idea. Mailing lists used to be great. But got broken in a variety of ways due to spam filtering among other things. Usenet was great once upon a time, with internal newsgroups etc. That died too. IRC was, and is, an excellent way of having instant messaging. Unfortunately it wasn't business friendly enough so only the geeks used it. It was a great way to coordinate, though.
- AJ007 1y ago
  Each had a unique set of pitfalls. Out of the 3 Usenet seems to be functionally dead for it's original purpose. Perhaps there was no possible outcome where usenet would scale along with the internet. The email spam issue is trivially solvable with a contact whitelist, which is a UI issue. Email as it is right now is definitely very usable, but keep me the hell away from anything from Microsoft. IRC is alive and small. On the optimistic side it outlived Skype. Maybe 25 years from now IRC will still be working and Discord will be dead. There has been a lot of buy in on Matrix, but I'm unconvinced the protocol is going to thrive long term due to design choices made. Reddit is doing what Usenet did. In my ideal world, reddit would be part of the fediverse along with Usenet & Twitter and the UI would close to hn.
  - Arathorn 1y ago
    I’m obviously biased (as proj lead for Matrix) but I genuinely think Matrix is in a good place going forwards. There’s a lot of legitimate complaints about the transition to Matrix 2.0, and trust & safety still needs a tonne of work - but the core protocol and featureset feels pretty good. Critically, we just showed we can successfully land pretty major changes to the core federation protocol to improve it (https://matrix.org/blog/2025/08/project-hydra-improving-state-res/ https://matrix.org/blog/2025/08/project-hydra-improving-stat...), which feels pretty liberating in terms of having carte blanche to fix the other remaining warts. What design choices are you worried about? (To confirm that they are on the radar).
stared 1y ago
I love emails. For all mentioned in the post an one more: to write an email, people have to think before writing and email, even if it is just a few paragraphs. I takes focus, it takes asking oneself questions, what makes (in my experience) the quality of conversation way higher than talking with the same people over chat interface. Moreover, there is time for focus on email (both reading and writing) and time to actually work. (Vs chats that put some pressure on being always available which is something that literally makes deep focus impossible.) Of course, some people treat emails like there were chats, and some people treat chats as if they were emails - yet, what's crucial is what's the reference level. And yeah, in my experience and opinion, chats make us dumper. Just the same way as clickbaits and memes catch attention easier than in-depth analyzis, they are unlikely to go.
asa400 1y ago
I’ve often wondered why forums never took off at any of the companies I’ve worked at. Has anyone else worked at companies that had forums? All I worked at had email and chat, and some had wikis, but never forums, despite having crucial advantages over email (anyone who joins later can search them) and wikis (they’re conversations rather than mutable, outdated documents) and chat (they can’t interrupt you).
- bojan 1y ago
  We used Stack Overflow for Teams, but when the first batch of questions got asked and reacted to, the activity subdued quickly. Some time after that we somehow got locked out of our account and it was deemed not worth the hassle to try to get it back.
- skydhash 1y ago
  Forums is fundamentally community based, where everyone is expected to pitch in. While companies are socials, there's not a lot of community going around. There are projects, but the deciders form a very small subset of the involved people. By the way, for email, the etiquette would be to include the context of the discussion in the invitation for the new person coming in. Or send the archive of the discussion to the person. But for the latter to happen would require a much better email client than what most people are using.
WhyNotHugo 1y ago
A decade or two ago it wasn’t uncommon to use a single messaging program for multiple networks. I have fond memories of using Pidgin for a long long time. This was a single program which spoke to all the networks, not a set of tabs rendering disparate web views. A single contact list, and the same UI for all conversations. You’d basically forget who used MSN, who used Yahoo Messenger, who used XMPP, etc… I’m not sure why we don’t have the same for the current set of trending proprietary networks. Sure, they make it harder for third parties to connect, but proprietary networks never really collaborated on making it easier. Maybe there’s just less folk willing to invest free time in making desktop messaging apps? In theory, XMPP (or similar protocols) would simplify this nowadays: just have a single client and protocol and connect to proprietary networks via gateways. We have gateways for some networks, but desktop messaging clients have really stagnated.
- mixmastamyk 1y ago
  Apparently pidgin is still maintained and has plugins for recent chat systems. Just looked a few days at the version 3 announcement.
gehsty 1y ago
I don’t like the friction of forcing a specific messaging app or protocol on people so just default to what everyone is using (WhatsApp) TBH I don’t really get the moral outcry over using it (or any other messaging app).
- B1FF_PSUVM 1y ago
  > I don’t really get the moral outcry "Dumb fucks trust me".
freetinker 1y ago
Emails are optimized for COA record-keeping, not efficient communication.
pabs3 1y ago
The mbox format is pretty terrible, Maildir would have been a better choice.
pbrum 1y ago
Got a little something to say here because my startup is all about this. Worked at 2 $100b market cap enterprises and saw a lot of friction specifically in B2B. For internal collaboration Slack/Teams is pretty much consolidated, but for critical B2B interactions everybody falls back to email (and only secondarily to things like LinkedIn DMs or WhatsApp messages). And here's where the problems with email pile up: No read receipts Need to know exact address to write to Trees/branches problem discussed by others (CCd late in the game? Good luck making sense of things and no chance to grab attachments) Highly vulnerable to phishing and social engineering (anyone can email you) Grab bag: important messages and unimportant newsletters or notifications are all mixed together Emails with precious/sensitive data can be forwarded to anyone (and everyone) in the planet with two clicks I could continue but you get the picture. As an early Internet user I still have a soft spot for email but specifically for B2B work I think there's a lot of work to be done, similar to what Slack did for internal collab. My startup is genevabm.com for those who are interested, go check us out!
khedoros1 1y ago
> If you ever exchanged messages on ICQ, AIM, MSN Messenger, Skype, Yahoo! Messenger, Google Hangouts, GChat, BlackBerry Messenger, or Campfire your messages are now gone. I've got archives of transcripts, from when I was using Gaim/Pidgin. I said some cringe things 20 years ago. I see E-mail as the way to broadcast information to a bunch of people. I see messaging as a way to have conversations. There's maybe some overlap at the edges, but I see most kinds of communication as being much better-suited to one or the other.

183 points by iparaskev 1y ago

This makes my brain hurt. Few things I hate more than email. The single worst way to get in touch with me. As a user of it for more decades than I’d like to recall, I despise email. Sure, the infinite archive is mildly helpful. But search-ability is marginal in any tool I’m aware of. The folders, filters and other management suggestions mentioned make it a second job. Email is a life tax we’re all forced to pay. It is a problem that is yet to be solved, though many have tried.

James_K 1y ago
I think the problem with emaill is more the availability of it. Anyone can send you an email so they mostly wind up as junk that needs to be managed.
- ejoso 1y ago
  One of the most significant problems, agreed. Also, email is free to the sender but costly (in time) to the recipient. This is reflected in the quantity of messages, but also in their verbosity. People rarely expend the effort to edit or be concise. Both are costly to readers.
qwertytyyuu 1y ago
For anything that will benefit from back and forth, and isn't that important. I hate email too. I check it like only once a day at work, and my person email, i check even less.
- koakuma-chan 1y ago
  I have it the other way around. I have all messenger notifications silenced except email. This way when people message me I only see their messages whenever I feel like checking if I got any messages. All importart stuff goes into my email, and I can see the push notification immediately.
  - ejoso 1y ago
    If I did this, my notifications would never stop. I get tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of emails every day. Even heavily filtered, I can only afford to check work email a couple times a day. Most that make it past the filters are still ignored and immediately archived.
    - koakuma-chan 1y ago
      You mean from random people? Don't post your personal email publicly then. I have masked emails posted publicly and while I do get occasional spam, it's more like 2-3 emails a month.
    - LightBug1 1y ago
      A day? How on earth did you get in such a situation?
trinix912 1y ago
Sadly the searchability on IM platforms is even worse than that of email. Discord (among others) often can't find the very text that's right in front of you.
cpncrunch 1y ago
It really just depends on your email client. I use elm and my inbox, received and sent folders are stored in flat files, so i can just use vim or other linux tools to quickly search for any email from the past 25 years. In many chat apps you cant even search at all. I find email by far the most efficient method of communication.

gsliepen 1y ago

Nice. Note though that you don't necessarily have to limit everyone else to email; some messaging platforms allow one user to post something using a webpage for example, and cause that to send email to another user, and vice versa. One data point: GitHub's issue tracker can forward issues as email, and you can reply to those back via email, and your response will end up as a new comment on the issue.

elliotto 1y ago

I've often thought about building a messaging platform aggregator that takes conversations from Whatsapp/messenger/discord/Instagram DMs/etc and provides a unified interface for them. I suspect there's a bunch of legal and annoying auth things that make this impossible. But at its core these things are just arrays of strings

ejoso 1y ago
Many have tried and hit the very same obstacles you mention. Quite the quagmire.
tazjin 1y ago
This used to be fairly common, back in the old days. Programs like Pidgin unified many messengers into a single app. For a while, many messengers actually shared underlying protocols (e.g. Google Talk & Facebook were both using XMPP at some point, and you could even cross-message). Nowadays this is much harder. There's some exceptions (Telegram) with open client protocols, but I wouldn't wanna try and implement something like Discord, it'll be a never-ending tarpit.
- koakuma-chan 1y ago
  Discord is (or at least was) easy to "implement" because their bot and user API is mostly the same.
  - dijit 1y ago
    until they ban you under the ToS that says “no third party clients”. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28435490 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28435490
    - theshrike79 1y ago
      A bot or a bridge isn't a "client". They just don't want to fight people trying to build a full alternative client for Discord as a bunch of their paid-for stuff is just clien side javascript.

black3r 1y ago

What emails suck at is communication between multiple people in a work setting. That's why Slack, Teams, and others emerged and got popular. For example: - When multiple people respond to the same email, the email "thread" branches out into a tree. If the tree branches out multiple times, keeping track of all the replies gets messy. - While most clients can show you the thread/tree structure of an email chain, it only works if you've been on every email in the chain. If you get CC'd later, you'll just see a single email and navigating that is messy. - Also if you get CC'd later, you can't access any attachments from the chain. - You can link to a Slack/Teams conversation and as long as it's in a public channel, anyone with the link can get in on it (for example you have a conversation about a proposed feature which then turns into a task -> you describe the task simply and link "more info in this slack convo"), you can't do that with Emails (well I guess you could export a .eml file, but it has the same issue as getting CC'd later) - When a thread no longer interests you, you can mute it in Slack/Teams. You can't realistically do that with emails, as most people will just hit "reply all" - But also sometimes people will hit "reply" instead of "reply all" by a mistake and a message doesn't get delivered to everyone in the thread.

wisidisi 1y ago
I oppose. Mails are superior in announcing to multiple people. If people want to participate they can in many ways. It is well structured, well documented and offers coherent discourse. Slack/Teams are for just-in-time dynamic, collaborative conversation that are quickly fading and missing out on all the strengths mails have in terms of permanence, archival, search and general quality. Something that totally gets lost in instant messaging like Discord, Teams and such where context is basically non-existant and may be gone completely in minutes. Remember Google+ ? What lasted was Gmail and barebone simple Mail.
- portaouflop 1y ago
  Google+ dies not because it was a bad product but because google changed strategy and killed it. Ultimately it’s all subjective - some people prefer email some chat some calls some no comms at all. If you can communicate well, articulate what you say and want well, and actually read and understand what I write then I will communicate over any medium with you. If not then I’ll have a bad time regardless of medium

ljlolel 1y ago

A bit off topic but deltachat is an amazing secure messenger over smtp https://delta.chat/pt/ https://delta.chat/pt/

haunter 1y ago
This is what I wanted to post as well! Best of both worlds
em-bee 1y ago
non localized link: https://delta.chat/ https://delta.chat/
layer8 1y ago
The strengths of email is exactly that is isn’t chat. Implementing chat over email isn’t the solution.

crummy 1y ago

At my current job (1000+ employee tech company), I pretty much never receive emails from humans. Plenty of automated notifications and the odd marketing mail, but everything else is Slack and Zoom. I think it's way better. Email has so many limitations, especially as soon as you're in a group discussion.

throwzasdf 1y ago
[dead]
theshrike79 1y ago
Same here, 300+ people-ish, 3 countries. Some Very Official things come via the mail, like event invites etc. Everything else is on Slack or integrated to Slack. Makes spotting phising mails really easy :D

jasode 1y ago

>My colleagues and friends know that I prefer to communicate with them via email rather than chat messaging. For some co-workers and especially for friends & family, the chat UI is much more ergonomic than email. Email usage has extra friction: - compose new email UI has extra SUBJECT: field you have to fill with junk (like "hey" or "question...") or skip over - email client UI for multiple messages from the same person in a listview repeats the same metadata headers which is visually redundant pollution. UI settings such as "organize by thread" or "organize by conversation" help but don't fully solve it. With chat apps, the back & forth conversation is visually cleaner without all the metadata clutter.

dijit 1y ago
But that “subject” header makes it paletable. I would argue if you really can’t come up with a subject then you probably shouldn’t be asking at all. I got used to Zulip at my previous job and people made the same argument about “Topics” (which are basically subjects); but they forget that the messages are read more often than they are written. A little friction in writing for an easier time reading and skimming is absolutely worth it.
- johannes1234321 1y ago
  > But that “subject” header makes it paletable. That's true for some forms of communication, but for social chitchat in an ongoing conversation there isn't much relevance. Subject becomes especially ridiculous when Mail clients are localized and you get some "Re: AW: RE: Re: AW: fun stuff" as subject. At work subject tis key. Allows me to ignore 90% of the mails immediately.

TrackerFF 1y ago

I had a colleague that would come back from vacation, see 1000+ emails, and just mark all unread emails and hit delete. And say "If it's any important, they'll just mail me again". Not saying that it's a good way to do things, absolutely not, but it did open my eyes to the fact that some people will just indiscriminately delete emails, no mater how important they could be.

marcosdumay 1y ago
Well, odds are none of them is important. And they are probably right in that if it's important, the sender will look for them again. This person just got 1000 emails in the time of a vacation. How viably is it not to completely ignore that? It's even surprising that they bothered to look and cleaned up in a way that implies they aren't ignoring them on the daily work.

j1elo 1y ago

That sounds like basically right (I agree with it all, I'm too the kind of person that enjoys all those advantages of email). So here I'm thinking from putting myself in the skin of the others: All this seems so much "me, me, me, me". People sending you a quick Whatsapp to let you know "tomorrow in Town sq. at 12h" don't want to have to use a clunky interface (sadly email apps are not up to par with instant messaging apps, not even close); they don't care either about your desire to have a unified inbox, and a long term archive. Agreed if it's for "important" things, but mostly instant messaging replaced email for day to day things that in an analog world would have been just said by landline phone. Relatedly, having a long term archival might come as a bit creepy, even. In apps this happens too, but at least I can say something extremely controversial and delete it for both people a couple minutes later. Or send a "view once" mesage. Regarding confidentiality, coincidentally not even 2 weeks ago a friend was telling me about a case of hos company sending an invoice, and being man-in-the-middle'd so the attacker just changed the bank account number and the customer thus paid to the wrong account. Nobody uses GPG, sadly. So at this point, for very important stuff I'd consider Whatsapp less confidential but more secure than email, ironically. Back to being me; I see a problem of usabilily. Even I admit that sending a whatsapp is much more convenient and practical than opening up K-9 Mail to _compose_ an email. You don't _compose_ a IM, you just hit a contact, jot it down, hit send, and there's extra social convention tools such as a blue tick indicating that maybe you can even stay put there because probably the other person may reply immediately.

bonoboTP 1y ago
> Relatedly, having a long term archival might come as a bit creepy, even. In apps this happens too, but at least I can say something extremely controversial and delete it for both people a couple minutes later. Or send a "view once" mesage. I agree but in practice Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp etc are quite long term already. I can easily look up my chats from 15+ years ago on Fb. But there is indeed a cultural unease, and it relates to the other top h post about social cooling. As you said, people want an online equivalent of phone calls and in person discussion. It's creepy and in some places even illegal to record phone calls or live conversations. On the other hand, written letters used to be private but meant for archival. Many people inherit a big box of neatly organized letters received from friends and family when grandma etc die. Email is a bit more letter-like in this. But these norms are in flux and especially for different generations the intuition can be different.

bborud 1y ago

I have come to hate email so much there are weeks where I will check my email perhaps just once or twice in a week. Every 2-3 months I try to clean up my inbox by going through it and unsubscribing to all the rubbish I am opted into without my say-so. But since we use Gmail, this is a really, really, really slow process. Gmail is a terrible product that has no evolved meaningfully over the 20 or so years it has existed. And it doesn't get any better when idiot product managers feel it is more important to add more AI nonsense than try to fix a product that is very poor at doing the thing it is supposed to do. (If anyone knows of a tool that helps me rapidly clean up my gmail, please let me know). But the worst thing about email is that nobody knows how to write emails anymore. Everyone just quotes the while thing and adds their comments on top. People no longer trim down the email and intersperse their comments throughout the response. Mail reading software no longer aids you in doing this - cleaning up the quoting for you (not that many mail readers did this before). And when you don't want to quote the email you are responding to, people include the whole mess anyway and just pop their response at the top. Rather than understanding that a threaded mail reader (as most mail readers are today) will provide the reader with the context they need just fine. There's no need to repeat dozens of older responses. I miss email from 25-30 years ago. When 90% of what landed in my inbox was actually for me, written by other human beings. Most of which knew how to produce a response to an email without it just being a sloppy mess. I wish people who wrote mail clients were more intelligent product designers and more thoughtful people. That they would understand that catering to people's poor habits was, and is, a bad idea and that a better idea would have been to make proper email quoting at least a path of considerably less resistance.

komali2 1y ago
Huh I never thought about the quoting thing. I'm definitely gonna clear out the auto quoted bits in my replies from now one.
- bonoboTP 1y ago
  Dissecting their email and interspersing your response, especially if expressing some disagreement, can come across as passive aggressive nitpicking, instead of taking in the whole message and charitable interpreting the entire intended message. Not saying that it is meant that way, but I know many take it that way.

NoboruWataya 1y ago

It's quite rare I communicate via email anymore, (outside of work where it is still the main medium). I like the (relatively) open/decentralised nature of it, but I can't deny that chat apps like WhatsApp have a good UX for casual group discussions. Not to mention that all of my friends use WhatsApp, so I would struggle to use email as my primary communication method even if I wanted to. It means I kind of wonder what my personal email is for, other than a means to sign up to third party websites. There have been a few threads about RSS lately and it seems a lot of HNers hate email newsletters. I don't have a problem with them and if I'm receiving content on a fixed schedule, like once a week or even once a day, I think it's a good medium. I even get my RSS feed updates by email. Other than that, the top of my personal inbox right now is mostly marketing emails, notifications (like "we have changed our T&Cs", "you have a new message on LinkedIn" etc) and "what's on" emails from local theatres, cinema, etc (which of course is also marketing, but it's marketing I've specifically asked to receive).

SvenL 1y ago

Something messengers made easy is photo/video sharing. This might be also a little bit tricky with email. Also most messages I write would be just the subject line (“on my way home”). Bigger topics I would rather have a call than writing them. But generally the points made in the post are valid and it’s nice to see that it is working for the author.

zahirbmirza 1y ago

Whatapp and other chatapps are popular because they are instant and have overcome the initial adaption issues that arrise with new messaging platforms. The interface of email its backend is too dated for instant chat messaging. Why were the MSN and yahoo messenger apps so popular in the early days of the internet? They were an evolution of written communication methods. Unfortunately, email is just a legacy product that no one wants to improve. So we all have to end up working around its limitations. As much as I want to create a non-meta alternative to Whatsapp or a better email infrastructure, there is no compelling enough differentiator for most users. Just look at the privacy benefits of Signal, yet, people don't care. Just look at the aesthetic benefits of iMessage, yet people don't care. They just want an easy to use and responsive cross platform method of communication. A good solution is a unified messaging app, able to combine all platform's messaging, but these often become defunct because of API issues or T&C breeched.

tkgally 1y ago

The main reason I prefer email over messaging is that it allows me to correspond with the widest range of people. I work in academia and publishing and have various personal interests, and I want to be able to interact with people in many countries and walks of life. There is no single messaging service that would make that possible. Also, I want people to be able to contact me unsolicited. Many interesting jobs and opportunities have come my way over the years because someone I didn’t know reached out to me by email. I do wish that email was standardized with better formatting conventions, though.

tcfhgj 1y ago
> There is no single messaging service that would make that possible. messaging protocols can make it possible

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

aftergibson 1y ago

I think this is more an argument for protocols over products. I wish XMPP had remained as popular as it has. The standard has now only slowly evolved, but it probably could have continued to meet the needs of our society as a compliment to email.

johtso 1y ago

I've been having a bad time with email of late. It's been the method of communication between us and another company (a pretty creaky old product). I thought they were replying strangely and ignoring my questions "did they even read what I said!?". It turns out for whatever reason they hadn't been getting some of my emails. Now I can't trust that anything has been received unless I get an acknowledgement, so I have to keep pestering for replies. Basically lost trust in the protocol because it's dependent on the the other person's mailserver behaving they way you expect it to.

skydhash 1y ago
> Basically lost trust in the protocol because it's dependent on the the other person's mailserver behaving they way you expect it to. That’s the case of any protocol, digital or not. Email is pretty simple. Simpler than the current web, at least.
- johannes1234321 1y ago
  > That’s the case of any protocol Well, E-Mail is inherently async and allows a sequence of relays with no back channel to confirm delivery. With other protocols (except snail mail) I get a confirmation that recipient was valid and the message for delivered. With some I even get a marker it was read. With e-mail, with luck, I get a cryptic not standardized response mail, if something went wrong. Sometimes even only a lot later as delivery is retried for a few days in some cases.
  - throwzasdf 1y ago
    [dead]
- this_user 1y ago
  The core technologies may be simple, but email really is an entire stack of protocols, mechanisms, and conventions. And therein lies the problem. It's not one well designed solution but one workaround layered on top of each other to make it work reasonably well.

OCTAGRAM 1y ago

Mbox is not that easy to process, especially if 1986 time span is taken into account. There is base64 encoding. There is "=" encoding, don't recall whats its name. "Equals" encoding. There are several character encodings if 1986 time span is taken into account, and each character encoding will be encrypted by equals signs. There was KOI8-R. KOI8-R was on BSD and Linux servers, but desktops had cp1251, so 1251 entered e-mail eventually, via e-mail clients autoconfigured to desktop encoding, or via webmail interfaces autoconfigured to web encoding which could likely be cp1251 and not likely koi8-r. Then utf-8 came in.

TheChaplain 1y ago

Being in the IT business for a few decades, email is superior to anything else for record keeping. Especially with Thunderbird I find it almost too easy to find information I need, and addendums neatly threaded. And, it is quite difficult for the other part to hide/delete stupidness they send, which thankfully saved my behind twice. Chats are good for now-communication, but energy- and time consuming when you need to look up something that happened months ago.

mitchell209 1y ago
I can't even look up chats on my work PC older than a couple days ago because it's automatically deleted. Emails last for at least a few years.
zachrip 1y ago
Gmail is dogsh*t at search. It's so bad. I can search the EXACT word I want and not a single email will come up, or it will bring up the most irrelevant emails.
- alchemist1e9 1y ago
  Same experience and it’s so bad I sometimes question my sanity. At least I have a notmuch index setup on a server I can fall back on but it’s just so bizarre a “search” company can’t produce an app which can search properly emails!
  - zachrip 1y ago
    The worst part is that I pay for the privilege!

zby 1y ago

It is quite frustrating that we have these discussions over and over again. Asynchronous communication is great - but it is not better than synchronous communication in some universal way. It depends. Personally I am very sensitive to interruptions - so I lean towards asynchronous. But when you are doing something and you really need to get some information from someone to proceed - then getting his response immediately means that your work is not interrupted. The other person is - but it is a trade off. In a team you have to make these trade-offs. It can be hard - because it takes from one side and gives to the other - people would like to be able to interrupt others and not be interrupted themselves. And it is even more complicated by the fact that some jobs and some people are more sensitive to interruptions and others are less - so it is hard to make fair rules about it. But it is a real trade-off to be made. UPDATE: Or take interactivity - a conversation is really powerful way of communicating. How a computer geek could even claim that asynchronous communication is always better - is he still using batch processors to run his jobs typing everything upfront and they waiting for the full run before he can fix his syntax errors?

nottorp 1y ago
Umm both email and instant messaging are as asynchronous or synchronous as you want to make them...
- n4r9 1y ago
  For some reason, IM encourages people to send superficial quickfire messages, which is very inefficient if one party is busy. The classic example is Colleague: "Hi". One hour passes You: "Hey - what's up, can I help you with something?" 10 minutes pass Colleague: "Yeah I was wondering if I could ask you about Foo" One hour passes You: "Sure, what do you need to know?" Next day Colleague: "I'm trying to export but it's not working." One hour passes You: "Okay... Is it giving you any error messages? Please give me as much info as you can in one go!" etc...
  - vel0city 1y ago
    I've pressed people who chat this way with me to change, and usually it seems people get it once they get shown how unproductive this kind of conversation is. Just ask me your question. Feel free to start with pleasantries if that's your style, but get to your point or the ask on the first message. https://nohello.net/en/ https://nohello.net/en/

GlibMonkeyDeath 1y ago

Email still has its use cases in the modern workplace. Sometimes you need a slower, more detailed communication channel, especially when inter-company communications are involved. But most of the things the OP likes about email make it a nightmare from a legal perspective. Once a company gets sued over labor/trade secret/IP related things, one result is a strict email (and other electronic communication) retention policy. Some retention periods can be as short as 6 months. Apps are deployed that scour your local storage to make sure you aren't archiving emails off-line. This removes many (most) of the archival advantages of email. Emails are often front-line evidence in lawsuits. A good example: https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-google-recruitment-emails-lawsuit-2014-1 https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-google-recruitment-ema...

dctoedt 1y ago
> most of the things the OP likes about email make it a nightmare from a legal perspective Former litigator here: The late Dr. Randy Pausch mentioned this in his Last Lecture; IIRC, he urged people to keep all their emails. [0] That can be a really good idea — keeping emails: • will help your lawyer reconstruct a timeline of events, build a narrative to tell the jury that's supported by the documentary evidence, and avoid spinning a tale that's undermined by emails that you didn't keep but someone else did; • will help make sure your people don't have private stashes of emails that have been deleted from your server but that resurface in response to subpoenas — or search warrants. • will help corroborate the stories told by your witnesses: Judges and jurors tend to be skeptical of hindsight testimony because of faulty memory and the temptation to shade the truth or even lie — recall how the House's January 6 committee hearings made such extensive use of emails, and also texts. If you didn't keep copies of emails, you won't have that evidence available; • will refresh your witnesses' memories so they don't testify incorrectly about something (whether in deposition or at trial) and have to correct their testimony — which hurts their credibility. Moreover: Your opponent's lawyer will likely send you a "litigation hold" letter, meaning you have to suspend all document-deletion programs — and if you don't, "spoliation of evidence" is low-hanging fruit for the opposing counsel to attack you and maybe cause you to lose the case. Back in the day of limited server storage capability, email "retention" policies (spelled: purging policies) had at least some business justification. That's far less the case now. To be sure: Footgun emails documenting bad behavior can lead to problems. But the root cause is the bad behavior, not the emails — it's far better to face the facts than to delete the evidence . [0] https://etc.cmu.edu/about/last-lecture https://etc.cmu.edu/about/last-lecture

theasisa 1y ago

> Rather than having flow and concentration interrupted by incoming message notifications, with email I can easily decide when to fetch and process messages. But emails also notify and therefore interrupt. If you want to turn notifications off in your email or only poll new mails when you choose you can also mute notifications (or turn on dnd) or close the chat app. Email sucks for chat like communication. It is great for long detailed messages. Having both is the best of both worlds. I have work email and personal email. I have work chat (Slack) and personal chat (WhatsApp with friends, Keybase with my partner). Choosing which chat app is also a great tool for making sure I am dealing with the right audience. I don't want to accidentally message my boss about stuff I send to my partner.

palata 1y ago

"Unified Inbox" (and therefore "Unified Archive") only works if you are the annoying person who forces everybody else to contact them on their system of choice. Of course it's convenient when everybody accomodates for you.

birdalbrocum 1y ago

> Asynchronous communication > Rather than having flow and concentration interrupted by incoming message notifications, with email I can easily decide when to fetch and process messages. Asynchronous communication describes the client-server-client model, and both chat and email fall into this category, especially since there are peer-to-peer chat programs. What the author states sounds to me like a problem with the notification model and fetching beyond the user's control. Chat is not inherently in "flow."

layer8 1y ago
Chat is inherently in flow because you can’t manage the read/unread status per message, and you can’t move messages to different folders. When I check for email, I might have a dozen new messages, clearly listed one per line, and I can pick which to read now and which to read later. I have a clean overview with the mailbox listing and the read/unread status. I can easily overview 50 or so messages without having to to scroll. I can archive the messages I’m done with, while keeping those around I still want to handle. In a chat, the read/unread status is not per-message. It’s much harder to discern separate exchanges within the same channel, and to handle them out-of-order when some are more urgent or relevant than others. They also take up substantially more visual space than a mailbox listing, so you have a much smaller “peephole”, making it more difficult to get an overview of what is going on in a channel. All this has the effect that people treat chat channels as a single continuous flow of messages that you catch up with in the order they come in; and the messages that scroll out of view, which happens fast, tend to go out of mind as well.
- birdalbrocum 1y ago
  Ok, good points and I agree with messages as atomic unit of communication in mail vs message history per contact as atomic unit of communication in mail. This creates a mental state of communication flow (like a conversation) and inherently a different form than mail (more like receiving a mail in your postbox and can able to stack them singular).

snowfield 1y ago

Mail is great, but messaging has its purpose.

aboardRat4 1y ago

Deltachat

donatj 1y ago

> If you ever exchanged messages on ICQ, AIM, MSN Messenger, Skype, Yahoo! Messenger, Google Hangouts, GChat The death of Google Chat is all greatly exaggerated. They've largely just rebranded it a bunch of times.

arcade79 1y ago

We had the right technologies in the past, but we mismanaged them. Email, Usenet and IRC was great. Email, however, went dogshit due to spam. From simply having the office mail-server, everyone went to Gmail and Office, who didn't always want to accept legitimate email. Thus, encouraging more folks to move to it. Now we're in a situation where everyone is "forced" to use crappy interfaces, email is htmlified shit, and more and more companies require you to use the official client. Which in the case of Office365 means a very, very crappy web solution if you're on for example Linux. IMAP is often simply turned off due to whomever decides security has decided that's a bad idea. Mailing lists used to be great. But got broken in a variety of ways due to spam filtering among other things. Usenet was great once upon a time, with internal newsgroups etc. That died too. IRC was, and is, an excellent way of having instant messaging. Unfortunately it wasn't business friendly enough so only the geeks used it. It was a great way to coordinate, though.

AJ007 1y ago
Each had a unique set of pitfalls. Out of the 3 Usenet seems to be functionally dead for it's original purpose. Perhaps there was no possible outcome where usenet would scale along with the internet. The email spam issue is trivially solvable with a contact whitelist, which is a UI issue. Email as it is right now is definitely very usable, but keep me the hell away from anything from Microsoft. IRC is alive and small. On the optimistic side it outlived Skype. Maybe 25 years from now IRC will still be working and Discord will be dead. There has been a lot of buy in on Matrix, but I'm unconvinced the protocol is going to thrive long term due to design choices made. Reddit is doing what Usenet did. In my ideal world, reddit would be part of the fediverse along with Usenet & Twitter and the UI would close to hn.
- Arathorn 1y ago
  I’m obviously biased (as proj lead for Matrix) but I genuinely think Matrix is in a good place going forwards. There’s a lot of legitimate complaints about the transition to Matrix 2.0, and trust & safety still needs a tonne of work - but the core protocol and featureset feels pretty good. Critically, we just showed we can successfully land pretty major changes to the core federation protocol to improve it (https://matrix.org/blog/2025/08/project-hydra-improving-state-res/ https://matrix.org/blog/2025/08/project-hydra-improving-stat...), which feels pretty liberating in terms of having carte blanche to fix the other remaining warts. What design choices are you worried about? (To confirm that they are on the radar).

stared 1y ago

I love emails. For all mentioned in the post an one more: to write an email, people have to think before writing and email, even if it is just a few paragraphs. I takes focus, it takes asking oneself questions, what makes (in my experience) the quality of conversation way higher than talking with the same people over chat interface. Moreover, there is time for focus on email (both reading and writing) and time to actually work. (Vs chats that put some pressure on being always available which is something that literally makes deep focus impossible.) Of course, some people treat emails like there were chats, and some people treat chats as if they were emails - yet, what's crucial is what's the reference level. And yeah, in my experience and opinion, chats make us dumper. Just the same way as clickbaits and memes catch attention easier than in-depth analyzis, they are unlikely to go.

asa400 1y ago

I’ve often wondered why forums never took off at any of the companies I’ve worked at. Has anyone else worked at companies that had forums? All I worked at had email and chat, and some had wikis, but never forums, despite having crucial advantages over email (anyone who joins later can search them) and wikis (they’re conversations rather than mutable, outdated documents) and chat (they can’t interrupt you).

bojan 1y ago
We used Stack Overflow for Teams, but when the first batch of questions got asked and reacted to, the activity subdued quickly. Some time after that we somehow got locked out of our account and it was deemed not worth the hassle to try to get it back.
skydhash 1y ago
Forums is fundamentally community based, where everyone is expected to pitch in. While companies are socials, there's not a lot of community going around. There are projects, but the deciders form a very small subset of the involved people. By the way, for email, the etiquette would be to include the context of the discussion in the invitation for the new person coming in. Or send the archive of the discussion to the person. But for the latter to happen would require a much better email client than what most people are using.

WhyNotHugo 1y ago

A decade or two ago it wasn’t uncommon to use a single messaging program for multiple networks. I have fond memories of using Pidgin for a long long time. This was a single program which spoke to all the networks, not a set of tabs rendering disparate web views. A single contact list, and the same UI for all conversations. You’d basically forget who used MSN, who used Yahoo Messenger, who used XMPP, etc… I’m not sure why we don’t have the same for the current set of trending proprietary networks. Sure, they make it harder for third parties to connect, but proprietary networks never really collaborated on making it easier. Maybe there’s just less folk willing to invest free time in making desktop messaging apps? In theory, XMPP (or similar protocols) would simplify this nowadays: just have a single client and protocol and connect to proprietary networks via gateways. We have gateways for some networks, but desktop messaging clients have really stagnated.

mixmastamyk 1y ago
Apparently pidgin is still maintained and has plugins for recent chat systems. Just looked a few days at the version 3 announcement.

gehsty 1y ago

I don’t like the friction of forcing a specific messaging app or protocol on people so just default to what everyone is using (WhatsApp) TBH I don’t really get the moral outcry over using it (or any other messaging app).

B1FF_PSUVM 1y ago
> I don’t really get the moral outcry "Dumb fucks trust me".

freetinker 1y ago

Emails are optimized for COA record-keeping, not efficient communication.

pabs3 1y ago

The mbox format is pretty terrible, Maildir would have been a better choice.

pbrum 1y ago

Got a little something to say here because my startup is all about this. Worked at 2 $100b market cap enterprises and saw a lot of friction specifically in B2B. For internal collaboration Slack/Teams is pretty much consolidated, but for critical B2B interactions everybody falls back to email (and only secondarily to things like LinkedIn DMs or WhatsApp messages). And here's where the problems with email pile up: No read receipts Need to know exact address to write to Trees/branches problem discussed by others (CCd late in the game? Good luck making sense of things and no chance to grab attachments) Highly vulnerable to phishing and social engineering (anyone can email you) Grab bag: important messages and unimportant newsletters or notifications are all mixed together Emails with precious/sensitive data can be forwarded to anyone (and everyone) in the planet with two clicks I could continue but you get the picture. As an early Internet user I still have a soft spot for email but specifically for B2B work I think there's a lot of work to be done, similar to what Slack did for internal collab. My startup is genevabm.com for those who are interested, go check us out!

khedoros1 1y ago

> If you ever exchanged messages on ICQ, AIM, MSN Messenger, Skype, Yahoo! Messenger, Google Hangouts, GChat, BlackBerry Messenger, or Campfire your messages are now gone. I've got archives of transcripts, from when I was using Gaim/Pidgin. I said some cringe things 20 years ago. I see E-mail as the way to broadcast information to a bunch of people. I see messaging as a way to have conversations. There's maybe some overlap at the edges, but I see most kinds of communication as being much better-suited to one or the other.