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Comment by ForHackernews | Hacker News Reader

Am I the only person in the world who thinks email works pretty well? Maybe I just get less mail than many people, but I just delete (or mark "read" and ignore) most of the marketing ham mails I get. I read and respond to the actually-important messages I get for work or from personal contacts. Actual spam is pretty well filtered.

I vastly prefer email to Facebook messages, or Slack notifications, or any of the other purported "solutions" to communication.

Why do people hate email so much?

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As the author explains in the first few paragraphs, he was basically fine with email until he was thrust into a job with a much higher email volume. That's been the story I've heard from most people who hate email.

Exactly, the problem isn't email, it's the level of communications you believe you are expected to maintain. Maybe you are expected to maintain this level, in which case you have a problem that no level of email-client fixes will solve.

> For example: I often find myself completely losing track of something that urgently requires my response, or struggling for several minutes to find a single email from a few weeks ago. That’s because email was not designed with the assumption that anyone would get hundreds of messages a day. To a computer, a direct email from your boss looks the same as your water bill. It's on you to put it where it needs to be. IMAP provides only two tools for this: mailboxes and flags. You're expected to sort your messages into mailboxes as if you're sorting paperwork into folders, and/or flag them with a limited set of colors. Do this long enough, however, and you'll soon end up like I did, rifling through an elaborate hierarchy to find the proper folder. The more complex your system of organization, the longer it takes you to organize or find each individual email, and the less useful the system becomes. Eventually, the time you spend maintaining the system outweighs the time it saves you.

It's not so much email-the-communications-system, but "email" as a collective noun for all the different communications demands from other people and system he faces.

I have no problems with it either. It is highly customizable and you can do pretty much what you want to do with so many email clients.

I'm guessing these are just people that don't know about filters and how to unsubscribe from unwanted mail.

it's a mixture of:

conversations: conversations I need to monitor but not necessarily do anything about; conversations I need to respond to; conversations I was added to for some stupid reason and will be unable to remove myself from so they just need to be muted; conversations not yet sorted into any of the aforementioned categories

alerts: some very urgent, some just background noise

anti-alerts: sometimes I'd like to be notified if eg my daily company revenue report doesn't show up!

action items: things I need to follow up with on a variety of dates in the future; unfortunately, most email clients don't have a "remind me of this on a calendar date" easily integrated to their messages

spam, shopping email, mailing lists, requests from people I don't know and haven't emailed before, shopping confirmations, notices from my credit cards, skiing discussions from my ski house, invitations to a friend's birthday party, etc.

most email clients basically don't give any tools to support the above workflows so I have to hold all that state in my head and stuff falls through the cracks.

The ~10 or so messages each day that I feel I should really answer, but not now. They always pile up.

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