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.
Remember Google+ ? What lasted was Gmail and barebone simple Mail.
People who are known at time of sending. A slack message can be searched by those joining the team much (much) later, those who move teams, in-house search bots, etc. Mailing lists bridge this gap to some extent, but then you're really not just using email, you're using some kind of external collaboration service. Which undermines the point of "just email".
> It is well structured, well documented and offers coherent discourse.
You must have great coworkers who know how to communicate. I cannot say the same for everyone at my company. Email at many of the places I've worked can quickly devolve on more than 3-5 replies.
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
Slack is equally terrible, because the interface and threads is actually hard to navigate and I honestly cannot make search work in a rational manor. The more discusions you have in Slack, the worse it becomes.
At the same time, when I was a cofounder & CTO, I used Basecamp, which promoted email-like threads. (There is a chat-like functionality as well, but I made policed to use it only for impromptu things like setting Zoom meetings or so, nor for anything that may be important in the future (brainstorming, ideas, architecture choices, analyzis, etc).
It created a culture of clarity of thoughts I never had before, or after. And yes, they a year later is was easy to search for why we picked this way of optimizing quantum computing in Rust not another (which pros and cons, possible paths not yet explored, etc), go back to unused UI designs, retrieve research for publication, etc.
Like, email works for announcements yo. Naw, let's jeep messaging N other places.
The key point being that this is not a separate program, but a different way to view the data already inside emails.
I’m just brainstorming here so apologies if this doesn’t make much sense.
You can respond only to the subthread you want to, and not have the single thread become a mess of quoted and irrelevant replies that you have to scroll past to find the answer you want.
Additionally, shared folders fit well within a team environment and works much like usenet for messaging.
All of this depends on having a sane email client though, doing it via outlook or gmail is a nightmare and I suspect this is the root of many people’s aversion to email.
If someone gets CC'd later than typically because the discussion got to a point where the input is needed for the current question - and in a mail thread with proper quoting surprisingly often the quoted email is sufficient context for the added guy to jump in.
What makes a big mess out of things is the nested list of fully quoted emails with top answers at the bottom I now have to go through when getting added to figure out what the fuck they want from me.
I think this is mostly due to bad UIs in email clients. Usenet had similar, if not more extensive, branching many Usenet clients made this quite manageable. I don't see why similar clients could not be written for email.
So the issue is that you need a git pull or something like it to prevent branching. Chat etc... achieves this through real-time state management. In an async setting you need something else.
The bifurcations of communications is unmanageable.
Why is my own timeline is still manual, while presumably all the datacenters can combine, search and sort (merge) dated datapoints?
I want a Personal Palantir or something, and no, not vibe coded in a weekend.
My favourite is text forums - I guess shows when I was socialised online
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?
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...
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.
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.
What design choices are you worried about? (To confirm that they are on the radar).
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.
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.
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.
That sounds like a quite sophisticated attack. By far most Mail these days should be transport encrypted. The attacker thus must have control (legal or illegal, at least to fake a wrong MX DNS record) over either side and then manipulate the invoice and then need a bank account which can receive the payment, while hiding their traces. Seems quite sophisticated and targeted as an attack.
> Nobody uses GPG, sadly.
User experience there was never good. Signal/WhatsApp probably are the most userfiendly e2ee systems around: automatic key exchange with ability to verify. (While proprietary clients require trusting those, which is a big ask especially with Whatsapp/meta)
E-mails have exactly the same properties as any instant messaging. Receive notifications, ability to answer instantly from a pop-up. What exactly are you missing? Or have you deliberately made email clunky on your own devices?
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.
messaging protocols can make it possible
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.
Whatsapp API works on the basis of conversations, the conversation has to be initiated by another party and only exists for 24hours from the last message from the other party. Sending messages unprompted is not possible unless it’s a templated message.
I can believe this exists to counter spam, and let’s not ignore the fact that WhatsApp messages through the API costs more per message than SMS.
It allows me for example to avoid Instagram's crack app while still DMing with friends only available on there.
Except "Long term availability" ... I'd love to have my full chat archive under my own control but doesn't seem on the roadmap.
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.
That’s the case of any protocol, digital or not. Email is pretty simple. Simpler than the current web, at least.
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.
I think it's way better. Email has so many limitations, especially as soon as you're in a group discussion.
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
> 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."
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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-ema...
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 .
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"Dumb fucks trust me".
The death of Google Chat is all greatly exaggerated. They've largely just rebranded it a bunch of times.
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!
Of course it's convenient when everybody accomodates for you.
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.
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.
(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.
I think the problem is bigger than that, nobody knows how to write anymore. In the past, people wrote in handwriting ('cursive' in America) on plain paper (with no guide lines) and with a fountain pen. We didn't keep what they put in the bin, so there is some survivor bias, however, when I look at letters my ancestors wrote, I am amazed at how few corrections there are.
As I understand it, we have two thinking modes, there is the quick thinking by reaction and then there is the more convoluted 'slow' thinking where we use logic and reason. I am not convinced that too many of us have the skill of putting 'slow thinking' into written words, or the desire to put complicated ideas to paper.
So, what changed?
SMS and Twitter did have a text limit of 140 characters. This was not good if you need 140 characters just to introduce what you have to say, however, it didn't take long for people to adjust. Spelling was no longer important, neither was punctuation or sentence structure.
Soon this 'communication with grunts' replaced eloquence, and we degraded our collective literacy. Nowadays you can't write beautiful emails to people as it is a bit of an imposition, you have spent maybe hours crafting words, they only have seconds to respond due to the all-pervasive 'busy lives' excuse, and they definitely don't have the ten minutes it takes to read your carefully written words. Hence, writing in full just means you get ghosted at best.
Clearly there are more books being written than ever. School assignments also get done, same with work-related documents. However, the craft of writing has become even more professionalised, even though everyone can open some type of word processor, pick up a dictionary and write something awesome without having to get the old fountain pen out.
As for the post, what if I was the son of the author, and I had to tidy up his affairs after some tragic accident? All of those emails would be gone, lost to posterity and only the emails from the bank read (because money). All of that obsession on having every email organised for the last four decades would be for nothing, outside of the mind of the author.
Your impression is based on immense selection bias. Maybe your ancestors were in the top percentiles, nobles, aristocrats, or even just doctors, academics and priests. But up until the early 20th century the vast majority were farmers and then they were factory workers.
Great writing and abundant reading was always very niche.
I’ve used Leave Me Alone (leavemealone.com) for cleaning up my subscriptions. It scans your past messages for subscriptions, sorts them by most frequent messages, and allows to unsubscribe (and delete) with one click. It’s a nice tool for this purpose.
You can get back to the world you dream of. Every email I receive into my inbox is an email I want to receive :)
You might also like superhuman.com and similar.
Not saying that it is meant that way, but I know many take it that way.
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).
