The Triumph of Email | Hacker News Reader

The Triumph of Email

theatlantic.com

41 pointsForHackernews26 comments

Email works reasonably well for exactly what it should be used for. If you're having a problem with it, you're either using the wrong collaboration tool or you're using the tool incorrectly.

Email is still the most lucrative marketing channel you can devise. I've yet to find a better intra-office communication tool. If I'm having trouble doing it with email, I immediately switch gears and either get up and go talk to somebody or to go do some fact-finding.

Email allowed me to maintain long-distance friendships where otherwise we would have drifted off. Email is easily categorizable and sortable. My workflow takes close to a minute to clear everything out to where only open loops are in my inbox.

I look at everyone who wants to replace email with someone else like I would a 25 year old bro who thinks he's going to 'disrupt' something ridiculous like politics. Harmlessly stupid at best, dangerously power-hungry at worst. Look somewhere else to build your empire, buffoon.

> I've yet to find a better intra-office communication tool. > If I'm having trouble doing it with email, I immediately > switch gears and either get up and go talk to somebody or > to go do some fact-finding.

...

> ... everyone who wants to replace email ...

I like email too. In the office, though, I've found it best used as one tool among many. In my last job we used email, IRC, a bug tracker, etherpad, pastebin, mediawiki, git+gitlab, and another "fulltext search most of the above" service.

I don't know if that's too many things -- are there good usability wins from combining a few of these things into one? Maybe not -- so long as everything we want to "point to" and share has a URL, maybe we were served just fine with that many separate things.

Still, it's easy to see why someone might say "Look how limited email is, it's not suitable for all of these extra tasks. I'm going to make something much more versatile."

> so long as everything we want to "point to" and share has a URL

This is something I wish was a standard part of email, actually. There are times when I want to refer to an email thread (say, in a ticket in our issue tracker) and I have to resort to either quoting all the relevant parts verbatim or saying something like "for context, search for the email sent on 2015-11-20 by foo@bar with the subject line 'widget is broken'". I'd love something like `mailref:[identifier]` to be widely understood by browsers and email clients.

Mailing lists that are readable on the web partially solve this, but it's still not great UX to be sent away from my email client just to read another email.

> Email is still the most lucrative marketing channel you can devise. I've yet to find a better intra-office communication tool.

I would say that having a private intranet only NNTP server with discussion groups would be far better than just using email.

For one thing, you already have grouping of general topics on a server level rather than having to take the time to create rules/filters and IMAP folders in using the email client. Second, it's much easier to access previous messages by just subscribing to the group (rather than having someone forward you an email which you have to read from bottom to top to get a summary of what was discussed). Lastly, it separates discussions from personal communication (emails sent directly to you).

I'm shuddering at the thought of training our customer service team on using a news reader. There's more to a good tool than features.

Many email clients already support interacting with NNTP servers. IIRC, Windows (Live) Mail, Outlook Express, and Thunderbird all support reading email as well as newsgroups.

IME, it's no different than using email other than the fact that you'll have a Newsgroups field instead of a To field. Composing and replying are pretty much the same as email. And each subscribed newsgroup could just as well be thought of as an email folder.

I work a cubicle job in the financial services industry, a large back-office for one of the largest independent broker/dealer networks in the country. Attending to email is essentially the crux of my job. The entire corporation is held together by email. My eye is constantly on not just my personal inbox, but several shared inboxes. A certain type of email hits a certain inbox and the clock starts ticking, I have a specific time frame in which to process a series of actions. I am just one cog. Once I'm done with my part, I fire off an email that hits a number of other shared inboxes and people in other departments pick up the baton and do their processes. If I fall out of my prescribed time frame, I become a bottleneck, the issue gets escalated to higher-ups and it can impact my performance review. If I get too many at once, I'm S-O-L. And, oh yeah, there are also faxes.

That sounds so much like Gilliam's Brazil. Good luck.

Slightly curious, this exact linked-to article had a different headline less than a week ago, specifically "What Comes After Email"[1]. Furthermore, there were a number of minor edits made which removed any of the "Email is dead!" thesis. So somehow, in that small amount of time, email was resurrected at the hands of The Atlantic editors.

[1] http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/01/what-c...

Email's greatest advantage is that it is a distributed system. No silos involved. If I want to run my own system, I can. The current hipster tech crowd seems to forget the very definition of the term Internet (network of networks). As such, the systems designed at its origin were design to work in a distributed fashion.

Email is not dead. Email is just plumbing. Want a different experience with it, use better software layered on top.

"White-collar workers check their inboxes an average of 77 times a day, according to research by Gloria Mark, an informatics professor at the University of California, Irvine. (If that sounds low to you, she found some workers check email far more frequently, up to 343 times a day or more.) The more time people spend focused on email, Mark has found, the less happy and productive they are."

This seems odd to me. I check my email half a dozen times a day. Can't see the point of checking it 10 times an hour....

Despite checking email what appears to be abnormally infrequently, I wonder how prevalent setups like freehunter's are:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10736086

I'm curious to know the definition of "checking" here.

Maybe through notifications … many users probably don't turn the default notifications off and get distracted all the times. And on OS X at least, it is tricky (or maybe even impossible) to proactively disable unwanted notifications for your users.

OK, instant messaging and social media networks are even worse … in the end, most human beings get easily distracted and it takes some energy to avoid distractions, especially due to messages and related notifications of all kind.

I was a little hesitant to write this reply because I might not fully understand your comment. In particular, I do not understand why you added the 3 words "for your users" to this next sentence:

>And on OS X at least, it is tricky (or maybe even impossible) to proactively disable unwanted notifications for your users.

It was possible for me to turn off all notifications on OS X. This next command line got rid of most of them, leaving only the occasional notification from Firefox and maybe some other app asking for permission to upgrade the app. Then installing and using Growl from the Mac app store got rid of the rest.

launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchAgents/com.apple.notificationcenterui.plist; killall NotificationCenter

The only disadvantage I am aware of of turning off all notifications in this way is that when there is a new security update for OS X available, it remains uninstalled (because I remain unaware of its existence) until I manually open the app store.

A running app can still get my attention by bouncing its dock tile, but they do not do that often enough to be bothersome, and in the case of my IM client, the bouncing is welcome (because it is how I find out someone sent me an IM and because my IM client can be configured to refrain from bouncing its dock tile for events other than new IMs).

I am amazed that people don't have email open all the time!

I thought this was an interesting history of email, though the end does read like a submarine ad[0] for Slack.

[0] http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html

The article seems to suggest the fact that "email" is so old is significant. IRC is quite old too. And that's what Slack is, with some enhancements. Email has also undergone many "enhancements". Yet the article never mentions IRC. What is old is new again. Keep those articles coming.

Surprised to see this expression popping up yet again, "to check one's email".

We checked our email in the nineties. These days our email checks us. Or am I the the only one left on a decent IMAP server?

It depends on your use-case. I very deliberately put myself in the position of checking my email, despite having all of the technical pieces in place to have email pushed to me.

My work email polls every 30 minutes, with notifications disabled, and I check it as and when it suits my workflow. My (personal) phone is always in Low Power mode, so doesn't poll for email unless I open the Mail app; I use offlineimap in combination with mutt for my home email (the same account which is on my phone), and it automatically synchronises with the IMAP server every 15 minutes, but again get no notifications and I check it whenever it suits me.

On top of that, all of my computers and devices are always muted unless I'm actively doing something that requires sound, like listening to music or watching a video, so even if there was an errant notification, I certainly wouldn't hear it. I also don't have my phone set to vibrate.

I didn't deliberately aim to operate in this mode, and gradually ended up here after a lot of single changes made over a long time, but I find that it's the best way for me to work.

1/2 OT:

This evening, I always get '404 Not Found – nginx/1.8.0' from theatlantic.com if I use Chrome. Firefox and Safari on the other hand work … Google Cache via Chrome works too.

If I send an anonymous note from a disposable box, it will probably slam into a spam filter.

I don't think email is as flat as it used to be. If that's what we will eulogize about email, then maybe it's already dead.

It was probably too flat back then to be workable, but there were some perks.

I expect that email will phase out slowly in the same way Craigslist is. Craigslist used to be a place to get tickets to sporting events, find used stuff you need, find employees, personals etc. But startups have found much better ways to solve individual niches. I now prefer slack to email for in-office communication, I prefer live chat to email for customer service, certain social media marketing replaces some email blasts.

> It was completely ephemeral

Doesn't sound much like email to me.

I see these posts all the time and wonder what i missing. Email works perfectly well, and fits many of my needs to a high level. I have no issues with it, and it's not like i don't get much email, given the number of mailing lists i subscribe to, i probably get significantly more than most 'normal' people do.

Nobody would waste their incredibly restrict and valuable disks storing old email at the time.

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